Reginald Baylor and Heidi Witz
If there’s one notion that Heidi Witz wants to dispel about Plaid Tuba, the creative company she started with artist Reginald Baylor in 2008, it’s that it primarily specializes in painting. A quick stroll through Plaid Tuba’s Third Ward headquarters/studio space refutes that misperception. The bustling space hosts not only painters and designers, but also inventors, community advocates, a filmmaker, an author and a lawyer. The Shepherd sat down with Plaid Tube founders Baylor and Witz to talk about how their company works and their vision for the role that art can play in Milwaukee’s economy.
You’ve described Plaid Tuba as a “creative services” company. Can you explain what that means?
Baylor: It comes in a lot of different forms. It depends on the client. We worked with the Pfister, for example, on an artist-in-residency program that had to do with space and with telling a story. We also worked with Interstate Parking. That had to do with an installation in the garage of their parking structure, to redesign the functionality of the space. So we come in to work with a brand or a company to try to go one extra step that they might not have thought of, because there’s not a creative professional in their company. We also deal with operations and logistics and client relations, and these are not typically things that creative professionals have practice with or knowledge of, or even things that they’re expected to understand. We’re trying to bring value to artists. Artists generally aren’t perceived as valuable on a corporate stage, but Plaid Tuba is trying to dispel that notion, and to encourage good relationships between artists and clients.
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Are these services something that the artists you’ve worked with understood the need for?
Baylor: Every starving artist knows it. Every starving artist knows that the entrepreneurship of their business and product is necessary for them to be a sustainable brand. They understand that artists are really independent business owners. Artists are small businesses, and Plaid Tuba is trying to bring that to light.
Where do you see most artists going wrong? What is the one thing they’re not doing that they should be doing?
Baylor: We have narrowed it down to six specific Plaid Tuba philosophies: client relations, creativity, community, economics, your use of technology and your ability to provide an experience. We try to bring those six components to all we do.
Witz: The biggest factor people look at is economics, but what’s your scalability? Are you only going to work on one canvas? Is that your only product? So it’s not just passion: You have to build a sustainable product.
Baylor: It’s a matter of profit margins. I like comparing it to a chef. You can either produce one meal, or you can produce one meal for 200 people every night. If you can’t figure out how to produce many meals, then you’re just cooking for one person. We are looking for artists that are willing to have the ability to feed as many eyeballs as possible.
I imagine a lot of artists recoil when they hear you use a term like “profit margins.”
Baylor: Yeah. And I think that has to do with the training artists receive. We need to bring business into the studio, so that these aren’t strange words when they go out to be an artist. But when nobody’s talking about scale or content, then it does seem to be foreign once you graduate. But also one of our main focuses with Plaid Tuba is to change the culture within this country, so the perception of what art is isn’t as exclusive as it seems right now. Most Americans think that art is not for them, due to a lot of unnecessary fears.
Do you get resistance from the corporate world, or is this a service they appreciate?
Baylor: I would say both. We do have a list of corporations that have worked with us, and we are gratefully indebted to them for understanding what we do. I think there could be far more understanding, though, especially when the city has been talking recently about the necessity of the creative economy in Milwaukee to bring in and retain talent. Today’s younger working demographic is really interested in the experiences that artists provide when they choose the city they are going to live in. If corporations want that talent here, then aligning themselves with the creatives in the city now is even more vital than ever. It should be a necessity.
