TBBCA’s Zora Carrier introduces businesses to the arts

The new executive director of Tampa Bay Businesses for Culture & the Arts (TBBCA) has a Ph.D. in pedagogy – that’s a fancy word for teaching – and an unbound passion for the arts. Zora Carrier, who was born (and educated) in Eastern Europe and arrived in the bay area in 2013, has combined these elements of her personality and made a successful career as a cultural strategist.

She joined TBBCA after eight years as executive director of the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa, where she was a key part of numerous profile-building initiatives. Before that, Carrier executive- directed the Gallery Art Factory in Prague, Czech Republic – and, after she and her husband came to the United States from their native Slovakia, executive director of the Open Concept Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

A member of the national Americans for the Arts pARTnership Movement, the nonprofit TBBCA’s job – as Carrier sees it – is to introduce business and the arts, and attempt to persuade each that one simply can’t function properly without the other.

They accomplish this through a series of imaginative programs (read all about it here) and events. Coming Thursday, Oct. 20, to Armature Works: The 2022 TBCCA Impact Awards celebration, honoring Judith Lisi, the recently retired CEO of the Straz Center for the Performing Arts, with its Lifetime Achievement Award. Info and tickets can be found here.

St. Pete Catalyst: You’ve run an art gallery, and directed an art museum, so you’re in a unique position to understand the relationship between businesses and the arts, and how they have to be symbiotic. I thought that was very interesting.

Zora Carrier: Yes, I was on both sides, both on the business side and on the nonprofit side of the bench. I started as an art educator. My degree is in education, and I am really a big fan, enthusiast and believer in the transformational value or power of art education. It’s just that you find, somehow, where you can make the biggest impact. That’s where I always try to go. I’m drawn to go wherever I can contribute the most.

There were some smaller, and some really big institutions that I worked with. We all feel that we are in control of everything, but conditions change, and institutions change, and people change. And I think that being flexible is very much part of the professional intelligence.

What do you think is the most important function of the TBBCA in the community?

To explain and make people understand that art is good for business, and business is good for art. And we see this over and over again; there is extreme need for creative thinking, for problem-solving in businesses that is taken from a different point of view.

We understand that the artist will for sure have a different point of view than somebody who’s, let’s say a professional engineer. Or a lawyer. All these can live in symbiosis in the way that they can support each other. And I know that there are a lot of companies that would give an opportunity to creative people that have an education in visual art, and in music. And that will give them a little broader scope, and a little different point of view.

You know, we all go through schooling, learning that things are correct or incorrect. But that’s not how life works. The art teacher is the one and only person in the school who will tell you that there’s more than one correct answer.

How does that apply to business?

Through creative design, where the aesthetic values are very much in concert with the functionality. We can see this because we can design, not just objects, but a process. And in businesses, the way blueprints are created for solving certain situations – they might need a fresh look. And the fresh look, if it comes from the creative side, can be extremely valuable.

Let’s say a hotel is built, right? It has to have certain functional qualities. But the soul of the hotel is created by creative persons, by artists, by somebody who has an aesthetic set of values. And that is what will make the business successful. Because that’s exactly the kind of hotel where you want to check in.

How does your organization facilitate that?

We do it with different programs. One which we are best known for is the Charlie Hounchell Art Stars Scholarships, where we help young people to pursue a career in the creative industry, and help them financially to be able to afford that. I’m very proud of that, since my background is in education.

And we have the Cultural Encounters program. It was very much changed, of course, by the Covid situation. But in 2023 we are going to go back to it – where we bring business people to art institutions. We actually facilitate the personal connection between the people who work in these arts institutions, who create an open and very welcoming atmosphere for these business people to come and enjoy art.

There is something about opening that possibility to people. Many people might have a little bit of a feeling that ‘contemporary art is not for me.’ I think that inviting them into the contemporary art exhibition, and giving them an opportunity to talk to the curator, will open opportunities for them to enjoy it, and show them the way they can actually benefit.

That’s something that we try to do with the music performances, the theater, and of course with visual art, and many others.