ri150420 Social Purpose Corporation 

A hybrid approach to the Seattle Printmakers Center 

Somewhat by chance the author finds what may be the best approach to structuring the Seattle Printmakers Center. Not a nonprofit umbrella under which the nineteen units are sheltered, nor a C-corp, which could utilize his assets for financing, nor an LLC. 

Imagining the future of SPC, SPC

On Sunday, April 19, I started learning about Social Purpose Corporations (SPC), which is a new kind of corporation in Washington State. It is a hybrid of non-profit and for profit corporations. The SPC may sell shares. That goes along with my financing proposal which I outlined in my booklet, Ghost Investor.

Also, profits are shared with its members, or stakeholders. As I began studying how to start an SPC, the lessons I learned from REI, PSC locally (and the Mondragon Cooperatives globally) came back to me.

As I explained in my booklet, developing the Seattle Printmakers Center may be based on my family’s intellectual and tangible property as a “stock basis.” I remember the interest in “intellectual capital” in books by that title in the nineties.

The Seattle Printmakers Center (SPC) is to help individual artists, crafts people and designers survive and thrive. Specifically, the SPC is for people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers. Not only in Seattle, but worldwide; because, now, printmaking lives in the age of digital reproduction.

In a marketing sense, starting the Seattle Printmakers Center as an SPC does not change its goals and mission; however, setting up as an SPC and communicating what the social purpose is of the SPC is a good way to keep its founders and participants accountable to fulfilling a social purpose and drive the nineteen businesses to success and sustainability.

An alternative is to make the Ritchie family proprietorship, Emeralda Works, the SPC in name instead of making the Seattle Printmakers Center the SPC in name, and then continue pursuance of the Seattle Printmakers Center under the guidance of Emeralda Works; in other words, a project of Emeralda Works.

Emeralda Works has been a research and development business, and the SPC is one of the outcomes of the research and, now, may be taken forward. This alternative must be considered, as mentioned below in the second of the seven reasons to be an SPC.

Since I think that customers of Emeralda Works sometimes want our products and services for more reasons than just what our products and services do for them as individuals, then it follows that it will be easier to explain how, as an SPC, we stand for global good. Under an SPC structure, we can voice this better than as a proprietorship, LLC, or C-Corp.

I embedded my EarthSafe 2022 principle and Declaration of Interdependence in my business plans since 1992. Changing at this time to an SPC will help ensure that I achieve business goals and personal ones: Fulfillment of my life’s teaching, research, practice and services purpose.

Whether as Emeralda, SPC or Seattle Printmakers Center, SPC, this corporate structure has definable metrics (like sales from etching presses, publishing, and investors involved and jobs created). Creative artistic printmaking, the original basis that defines our mission, is based on the intangible joys of live printmaking; but I am determined to throw my net over a wide scope of other products and services that are both real and virtual, measurable, and sustainable over the long term.

If and when I say “we,” I refer to the hundreds of owners of Halfwood Presses, of owners of my artworks, and my associates who, since 2004, have participated in the many themes and variations of the Halfwood Press projects. The results so far are measurable because we exchange tangibles: money for products.

For the period 2014-2023, I will make the Seattle Printmakers Center my focus, and today I think that the business structure, Social Purpose Corporation is the best way to succeed.

Lucky that I live in Washington State, with is “Benefit Corporation” laws in place, concomitant with it Crowd Equity funding instruments—not to mention being a leader among the technology centers of the world.

Seven arguments favoring an SPC

One, as an SPC, Emeralda Works (or the Seattle Printmakers Center) can sell shares, as outlined in my book, Ghost Investor, and thus take advance of Washington State’s new crowd equity funding law.

Two, if it means keeping the name Emeralda Works, then it is not only good for easy transitioning (Websites, mailing addresses, etc.) from the proprietorship, but the name itself has value as intellectual property.

Three, financial benefits—profits—can be shared with stakeholders. In retrospect, for example, consider the years of support given by people since the year Emeralda was formed.

Four, an exit plan for myself is more readily validated.

Five, remuneration for my family is simplified under a SPC.

Six, I am personally uninterested in nonprofits because in my opinion there is an implicit suggestion that grants and donations would be forthcoming, which I doubt.

Seven, for-profit status, as a C-Corp or LLC, does not harmonize with the altruistic aspect of my philosophy, with respect to social, environmental, and educational aspects of my lifework.

ps150419 Emeralda Umbrella 

Nineteen beneficiaries  

A friend, and adviser, suggests that it is best to form a nonprofit for the Seattle Printmakers Center and in a flash the author conceives of his life-game, Emeralda, as the umbrella nonprofit under which the nineteen units of the Center can be developed. 

Good old Carl

I knew he would come through with good advice—Carl Chew is a friend of mine and plays the role of adviser whenever we get together. I have known him always to be the creative one who can, in an instant, conceive of innovations that surprise me. Like the creativity that he puts into his art, his solutions to my problems are novel to say the least.

While Carl may shy away from putting his name on a list of advisers, the suggestion he made this week seems, today, to be the kind of advice that I need to take. Not that he is the first to advise me that I should be going nonprofit with my plan. From the time I thought of a center for innovation based on printmaking—the Seattle Printmakers Center I call it—the suggestions have come from several people that the Center be a nonprofit organization. Carl’s recommendation needs to be taken up now, and I should start.

Emeralda Works to go nonprofit?

Since 1999, our family proprietorship has been Emeralda Works, the purpose of which is software development and design for printmaking education, practice, research and service. Now is the time to move toward making it a nonprofit. This would then allow the nineteen components of the Seattle Printmakers Center to start up—somewhat like Shunpike serves numerous startups that have the potential to be self-supporting.

The difference is that the nineteen components under the Seattle Printmakers Center are planned to be for-profit and self-sustaining, designed to create jobs for people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers, think globally and act locally in this the age of digital reproduction.

es150415 Martha Stewart of Printmaking:
Vision of printmaking TV

He has thought of doing a printmaking show on TV for four decades—ever since he introduced “how-to” videotapes in college teaching. Household names like Julia Childs, Martha Stewart and Bob Ross come to mind as he takes steps to make his vision a reality.

My email to KCTS “Viewer Services”

“We watch Create cooking, woodworking, gardening, travel and other lifestyle shows, and occasionally a special on art on KCTS-9. As I have been a printmaker for 50 years – 19 of those years as a professor at the UW art school – it is understandable that I think a printmaking show on TV is a good idea.

I tell people I want to be the Martha Stewart of printmaking. People tell me that, with over a hundred “how to” videos on YouTube, I should think Broadcast TV is dying, but I disagree – strongly!

Any good teacher should be pursuing broadcast TV if he or she wants to the world a good turn in arts and culture.

That’s why I am looking for production companies that would like to tackle the project of Printmaking TV.

Please connect me with a company, organization or individual whom you, who are reading this, is a possibility.”

I sent this email to Channel 9’s “View Services” after having stopped in at KCTS’ building to deliver a promotion for Arts and Culture in our neighborhood, Uptown. The receptionist gave me the email address after I explained I was also promoting Printmaking on TV, and needed to find contacts—people who could join with me in a search for funding.

Why Martha Stewart?

People ask me, “Why not Bob Ross?” He is famous for “Joy of Painting” and the comparison is a good one insofar he provided a line of painting supplies as well as the lessons for painting. Martha Stewart, however, is my preferred model because in addition to the entrepreneurial element of selling supplies for what she demonstrates on TV, she exploited a range of productions from magazines to lifestyle.

Julie Childs, too, is remarkable for the personality she brought to her shows, and the focus on French Cooking which gave her viewers very specific information. Stewart is all over the place, and Ross—albeit focused on painting—only showed his own style and art philosophy.

The comparison with these stars of the TV how-to genre with what I do—traditional printmaking—is valid because, one, I am a printmaking expert and, two, I have a product line of personal-sized etching presses. Add to that my commitment to a printmaking philosophy of a greater range than usually found in textbooks and YouTube videos, and you have a formula for certain success.

Back story

Add to the three factors above—the fourth factor is the context of the Seattle Printmakers Center concept I work on today. The TV show will be produced in the facilities of the Center, including training in videography that is related to other new technologies such as digital magazines.

It’s a huge idea and it is part of my goal to create jobs for people who love printmaking, prints, and printmakers, and who want to use the power of TV for education and entertainment.

vp150403 Considering a Charrette 

A fruitful meeting with a charrette leader 

After a get-acquainted meeting with a woman who is a charrette organizer and leader, the author notes the possibility that she is one who may help to shape the foundation of the Seattle Printmakers Center by looking into his family’s assets for valuation.

Mapping the future of Arts, Culture and Technology of Uptown

Left, Bill Ritchie in the Ritchie Family Art Gallery holds up a hacked Google map to show where he knows artists, designers and crafts people - the resources comprising the arts and culture asset of Uptown. He volunteered to help with the current assessment of these benefits, and he started by mapping out what he knows about the neighborhood creatives.

IP Developer meets RE Developer

This is to introduce to the reader a new kind of developer, one that develops intellectual properties that exist alongside real estate property development in the way that an MP3 download exists alongside a live performance—one who conducts charrettes in the urban planning, architecture and real property development sector may also conduct a charrette in blending IP with RE.

Her name is Debi, and she does charrettes

Charrette is not a common household word. In fact, when you type in Microsoft Word, it’s not in that app’s dictionary. Charrette is a French word associated with land use, architectural and property development. In English, we say workshop; but a charrette is specifically a design tool and the method is used by urban planners and real estate developers for project design.

In this Millennium, or the digital age, a new experience has opened up, thanks to the Internet and thousands of ways that real, physical things that once were the economic drivers are forced to bed with new technologies. For example, intellectual property (in the form of patents, copyrights, goodwill, etc.) has been liberated from the printed hard copy and, in digital communication, mobile computing and social networks, has become as valuable as physical property—and, sometimes, it is more valuable.

Those sometimes are occasions when an idea can be shaped by an individual working alone at a computer or linked with co-designers to produce a new video game without ever touching pencil to paper or posting a real letter. You can design, apply for a design patent entirely on your own and, along with an online payment of a few hundred dollars, get a design patent which can be worth millions. If properly marketed and an effective sales method be devised—all these also are processes that are entirely digital, secured by algorithms, and replicable worldwide.

Taking the example of a video game, for example, it is not far-fetched to think a new kind of charrette is reasonable—working to design a development with both intellectual and real properties at the core of its purpose. At the center of this shift in the property valuation paradigm is the charrette and the key person who designs the charrette.

IP Charrette

Intellectual Property (IP) can be turned into real property, as we know. Take Bill Gates and Paul Allen, for example, whose intellectual skills and adroit maneuvering can, today, be seen from my art gallery window, looking southward from Valley Street all the way down 5^th Avenue. I can see, on the east side of the avenue, the buildings of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; on the west, Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. What the past thirty years brought about is awesome, superseding what The Boeing Airplane Company brought about starting with the engineering work to build a little airplane factory decades ago where today we tall buildings housing amazon.com, Big Fish, and dozens of other technology companies, startups and incubators—not to mention the very appropriate MOHAI.

We, who live in Uptown Seattle, are lucky to be where we can see the result of innovative brain power taking shape as buildings full of workers. My personal goal is to help create jobs and fill another building with workers for the Seattle Printmakers Center—a multifaceted city asset like no other in the world. I have sketched out a meta-plan for a 19-part complex, http://www.vspc.xyz based on printmaking as the root of the new technologies which we enjoy. It was the invention of the template (a prehistoric handprint on the wall) that led to all the technologies of human invention and communication over time and space.

Ritchie’s property

After twenty years in higher education, I took what I learned in college and began to shape it for the 21^st Century. It has been like making a work of art, the shape, size, scope and monetary investment for which I could not conceive. Much like when I made my best artworks—I did not know what I was doing!

Someone who started RealNetworks quipped, “We succeeded because we started something that we didn’t know we couldn’t do.” It is like that in art, beginning with no end in mind and going over a wall without knowing what lay on the other side. I am certain that teaching is the main, viable industry for humans, and education is a prerequisite to sustain Earth’s human life sustainability. I knew not where art fits in this, but I was desperate that art, craft and design fit in my life plan.

Fifty years passed since I made my first artworks and taught my first classes in art and technology grown out of the root of printmaking. As I was a fully-tenured art professor for the first of those fifty years, I was able to hold on to most of my art. Not intentionally; I just wasn’t as interested in selling art as I was in creating new things which, unfortunately for my art dealers, didn’t always look like art to their customers—video art, conceptual art, computer art—that sort of thing in which Seattle’s museums had no interest.

Consequently, there are thousands of unsold pieces of art, craft objects, videos, data, applications, designs, and writings—my own and works by others—in the Ritchie Family Collection. These have value—and hundreds of my patrons agree. I plan to grow the Seattle Printmakers Center using these assets—these “magic seeds.”

We live in the digital age, and now a new experience has opened up, thanks to the Internet and the thousands of ways that real, physical things that used to drive the economy have been forced to bed with new technologies. What is needed now is a special charrette, led by a new professional, an IP Charretteur, using the tools that urban planners, architects and designers use toward innovation design, a fundraising project seeded with the Ritchie family’s property both the real and the intangible.

Screen shot of the author's desktop

150331 Vast Idea  

Concurrently Engineering the Seattle Printmakers Center  

Whether designing a passenger plane or a computer application, concurrency is key, writes this author, as he sits down to a keyboard and begins to define his multitude of projects and map ways that they interrelate. It is like multi-screening impressions.

Plan for success

Whether designing a passenger plane or a computer application, concurrency is key, and when I am fully engaged in my goals with all my physical and intellectual powers, it is like watching TV, using a handheld, and a desktop computer all at the same time—or multiscreening.

Example

As I make my plans for the day (today being the last day of March, 2015) I think about the splash screen on my desktop and I know that the same screen will appear on other peoples’ and also on mobile devices in handhelds, on tablets, and on surfaces. That is because it is designed for the Internet.

Conscious of this, I’m conscious also that the next person who comes into our family art gallery is a software engineer whose projects include some for Microsoft in association with the Ad Council. They promote teaching professions, reaching Millennials via the TEACH organization. This engineer, who is a neighbor in our district of Seattle called “Uptown,” is interested in buying an artwork to decorate a wall in his condo.

Millennials, according to the report on websites (which the visiting engineer helped to design) are distinguished from most older people because they are multi-screeners. For example, Millennials typically watch TV, text, or browse the web all at almost the same time, or their moment.

Uptown Alliance

The challenge I face is to engage people in a neighborhood in Seattle called “Uptown” (as compared to “Downtown Seattle” or “South of Downtown, or SODO”) in an identity, with the objective of sustaining a high quality of life for businesses, residents and visitors of Uptown. As property owners, my wife and I are invested in this neighborhood, and we will do what we can to ensure that we can enjoy a high quality of living here.

Impressions

If one participates in community activism, and to desires to achieve a sustainable level of performance toward the goal of a high quality of life, then impressions must be mastered. To understand impressions today, you must think outside your neighborhood—take a position outside your physical neighborhood and look in on it via multiple screens. This, according to Big Data, has a decisive impact on your local quality of life.

Art and technology

Reality is broken, said Jane McGonagall, and this applies to the approach to take regarding a neighborhood like Uptown. I suggest we identify ourselves as an “art and technology corridor” despite that the reality of life in Uptown does not show this. I suggest a virtual reality approach, because it is better to stake the quality of life here on the future, and not on the present state of affairs, nor on the way things used to be.

os150328  Go ask Media  Or a dolphin

A physical setback, a reminder of his physical limits, brings about a mood of deciding whether to go on with his ten-year plan to help build the Seattle Printmakers Center. Will age stop him? he wonders, and lyrics of many songs come to mind to guide him.

Music, the greatest art of all

Yesterday I missed what I thought would be the most important meeting of the quarter for me in my plan to help build the Seattle Printmakers Center because of a disabling pain in my leg. I couldn’t get to the meeting; I was stuck in an emergency room at our HMO and I watched the hour of the meeting come and go. I left the ward walking with a cane.

I thought, “This is not the image of a person starting the ambitious Seattle Printmakers Center, gateway to the Uptown Neighborhood of Queen Anne, the Art and Technology corridor of Seattle.” No, this is an image of an old man trying to do the job of someone in their ‘40s perhaps, or ‘60s at the most—someone who had a good decade of agile mobility ahead of him.

It was a letdown. I confess I got depressed. It isn’t supposed to be like this. As I try to restore my commitment, words from media arts come to me, such as the line from the original Planet of the Apes, a movie that informed my printmaking work in the ‘80s: "We weren’t supposed to land in the water!” one crew spaceship member shouted out to the character (played by Space Captain Charlton Heston) asking him what went wrong.

Next, lines from a song came to mind: I have my books and my poetry to protect me, from I am a Rock by Simon and Garfunkel. Yes, I have the books I wrote, and reading notes from hundreds of books and articles that I have read—such as Ask a dolphin, from an interview with John Lilly:

"...A good general rule for dealing with situations where you are overwhelmed with novelty is:  when you are in a new space where you can't account for what is happening on the basis of past assumptions, stay wide open and let your fair witness store all the information you receive.  Later on you can slow down and play it all back without editing and can evaluate what has happened to you." (my italics)

My fair witness

Many years ago, when my computer screen was that of an Apple II+ which had a black background and phosphorescent green characters and graphics, I found my fair witness lurking in the silicon-based virtual mind. She demonstrated that it was not my typing that was shaping the words on the screen, but rather that I was uncovering what she dictated what I ought to think about. She was, to use Lilly’s expression, my “fair witness.”

She’s still there, and when I construct this essay to help myself deal with the physical limitations that say, You are too old to start the Seattle Printmakers Center. . ., my screen on this newer computer is full of icons and a background photograph that suggest, Gamify your problem!

That suggestion comes from several resources, the most recent of which was a talk from Ignite Seattle #25, in which an engineer from Amazon described how he solved a problem by gamifying the Beta-testing of the company’s new smart phone. His fellow workers were too busy with their projects, so how could he get them to take time away from those to test the device and give feedback? He made up a casual video game and got the results he needed.

Another clue is, if it is a puzzle how to get the Seattle Printmakers Center to attract help in its development, then use puzzle software to show it. Earlier, guided by my “Fair Witness” I created nineteen new icons on a background image of the Dreambook building (my name for the new development at 5^th and Roy just outside my studio).

Play with that, she whispers in my ear, meaning, It’s there, you just have to uncover it.

Yes, I have my books and my poetry to protect me from depression, and a device to beta test when I get another chance to talk about the arts and technology corridor.

sp150312  What is Interval Suites?

A division of the Seattle Printmakers Center

It is “Short-term housing for visitors to the Seattle Printmakers Center, including guests and their families who come to the Center to perform or teach in programs of the Center.” This is based on the experiences of a teacher and highlights which follow. 

What is Interval Suites?

“Short-term housing for visitors to the Seattle Printmakers Center, including guests and their families who come to the Center to perform or teach in programs of the Center.”

Thus reads my brief description of Interval Suites. However, as I was in the process of designing the logo for Interval Suites, I was recounting a story—a story of some life experiences while serving as a teacher at the University of Washington. I may as well say, “While I was a student,” because I learned more than I taught.

Thanks to my students (both good students and bad students) the sum of my years of experiences was greater than what may be described in the words on my resume. In hindsight, nineteen years of teaching art classes amounted to less than meets the eye, now that I can look back at the total. This is especially true when viewed in the context of Interval Suites.

Somewhere in my collection of memorabilia from my days at the UW is a handmade book I put together for my last round of promotions. This was around 1978, and I was in the eleventh year of my stay and an associate professor. This meant that I had one more promotion to go and, if successful, I would be in the rank of full professor—the highest rank one can attain in the scheme of things academic.

This handmade book—a plastic ring binder, cheap thing—is a collection of photos and words which outline why I should be promoted. There are photos of my art, lists of accomplishments, snapshots documenting my research. What you don’t see is that it contained the seeds of Interval Suites. What I learned, mind you, and not what I taught; and I learned it from my students and my studies abroad.

Sato-Berry Hotel 

Interval Suites is a hospitality business and reflects what I learned from students like Norie Sato and Ralph Berry—a married couple who, after graduation, bought a craft home big enough for a spare bedroom. Over the next decade, their home became known as the “Sato-Berry Hotel” because, whenever an out-of-town guest came to speak, have an art show, or do a workshop, Norie and Ralph opened their home to them—free of charge.

Norie was the video curator at And/Or Gallery, which was an alternative art space and the only show in town for events that otherwise would not happen in Seattle. And/Or had a limited budgets; most of the money for And/Or came from gifts and grants. By providing out-of-town guests with a place to stay, the Sato-Barry Hotel helped make things happen for the Seattle art world.

Another influence for Interval Suites was my round-the-world trip in 1983, when I met people who opened their home to me and my family, like the first time (on another study abroad experience) when Rolf Nesch arranged for my wife and I to stay at the Munch Museum Scholar’s apartment in Oslo.

My list of inspirational and convivial experiences goes on. One has many opportunities when you are a college professor with tenure, and Interval Suites is my hope for repaying the worlds’ artists, teachers and students for the hospitality that was shown to me and my family.

I am not alone when I say that the artists, teachers and art students of Seattle will join me to help make Interval Suites another positive force in the Seattle Printmakers Center and add to its value as a city asset.