Nonprofit Management- The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art- Reflection Paper #5

This week you will meet Ms. Debra Kerr, President and CEO of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. Link to the website to review the interview is:

https://app.vidgrid.com/view/GLD2uy95xzHT/?sr=SWEKs2

Please view Debra’s interview, and then write a reflection paper (300–500 words) describing what you learned from her interview. You may want to talk about her organization and its mission. Or you may what to describe the challenges she faces in her work. Since this is your observations of the interview, you may focus on any topic that Debra addressed in the interview.

ANSWER

Nonprofit Management

Debra Kerr, the CEO of The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (Intuit), discusses what her company is about and the challenges they face in raising finance for the organization. Intuit focuses on outsider art, art based on individuals who come up with their form of art without any support and putting them on an appropriate platform to gain recognition for their masterpieces. The museum mainly focuses on people who create art that they feel need to be ‘put out there. Such individuals may come from poor backgrounds or abusive relationships and people from incarceration, expressing their frustrations, anger, or ambitions through their art. Most of the time, such individuals do not even realize that they have created art due to the primary urge of creating as an outlet to their underlining conditions (Kerr, 2021). Therefore, Kerr and her team stumble on such individuals and use their artistic eyes to help create awareness for such people and their art in order for them to get recognition and even benefit financially.

However, being a small museum, Kerr confesses that they face various challenges like any other nonprofit organization. She believes that museums are still relevant in portraying social justice and scenarios despite their reducing number and continuous development of social media platforms that people nowadays use to air their work. Being a small museum, the main challenge for her and her colleagues has been to cater to the overwhelming art materials that keep streaming in through their door and the small manpower that they have (Kerr, 2021). She says that they have had to work through different shifts with minimal days off around the clock for the past five years to keep the museum running and maintain its relevance.

References

Kerr, D. (2021). Interview of Ms. Debra Kerr, President, and CEO of Inuit: The Centre for Intuitive and Outsider Art. Retrieved from https://app.vidgrid.com/view/GLD2uy95xzHT/?sr=SWEKs2