On Topic | Minneapolis College of Art and Design

On Topic is a podcast series hosted by MCAD President Sanjit Sethi, in which he engages with creative cultural leaders on pressing issues facing artists, designers, and the wider creative community.

Season Two explores creativity and equity. Each month, a new episode will feature a discussion on this theme and how it relates to work, leadership, teaching, and beyond.

These complex and lucid cultural conversations represent MCAD's guiding principles for imagining a more just and equitable world.

PODCAST

Episode One: This episode's guests also happen to be MCAD alumni—technical artist and animator Mike Medicine Horse '00 and print-based studio artist Jonathan Herrera Soto '17. The conversation explores creativity and equity, and how it relates to mentorship, collaboration, racial inheritance, and social responsibility.
Episode Two: In this episode, MCAD President Sanjit Sethi speaks with Sarah Bellamy of the St. Paul-based Penumbra Theatre, one of the nation’s oldest and largest African American theater companies. Sarah discusses Penumbra’s history and how the organization grapples with the social condition of Black Americans, while it also serves as a beacon for the community. Recently, Penumbra has transformed into a center for racial healing and developed a racial equity training program.
Episode Three: MCAD President Sanjit Sethi welcomes Ben Cameron, President of the Jerome Foundation, and Marianna Schaffer, Vice President of Programs at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, to discuss how the philanthropic field has changed and how foundations can equitably support the artists of today as well as long into the future.
Episode Four: This episode features highlights from the MCAD Presidential Lectures Series on Race & Design, held in October 2021. President Sethi speaks with Amanda Huynh, industrial design professor at Pratt Institute, whose research focuses on community building, race equity, and sustainable design; and Rosemary Ugboajah, founder and CEO of Neka Creative, a brand development agency committed to bringing the power of inclusion to organizations. Topics include: How can practitioners and company structures be more responsive to the communities it serves, and ultimately, more successful?

ESSAYS

The following essays by Liz Ogbu, Caroline Woolard, Angie Kim, and Joseph Kunkel detail a vision of leadership that is about approaching uncertain conditions with growth, care, and reflection. Cultural leadership allows us to see the opportunities of these conditions from a culture of making, and the support of making, regardless of what that making is. As reflected in these essays, cultural leadership is not bound, owned, or contained by institutions. Rather it is a form of leadership which embraces the wonderful asymmetry that exists in the world, privileges knowledge-building over information-sharing, and embraces qualities like vulnerability and contemplation as essential qualities.

Cultural leadership embraces creativity and innovation alongside empathy as a fundamental method for understanding the world and solving our most pressing problems. As we face seemingly insurmountable issues, cultural leadership celebrates the problem solvers among us who embody a methodology and approach that involves care, collaboration, listening, decisiveness, and an elevation of one’s own voice alongside the voice of others.

—Sanjit Sethi, President