Transcript, Parts 1 & 2 of our Conversation with the Founder of BloomBars, John Chambers
With Hosts Elizabeth Bruce and Michael Oliver
If you would like to read a transcript of our entire conversation with John Chambers, Founder of BloomBars, you’re in luck. Below is the opening with a link to the whole conversation here.
John Chambers is the visionary behind the community arts and education organization BloomBars. We consider BloomBars a home for creativity and, thus, for creativists everywhere, and it is perfect for the Innovators Series.
Originally from Massachusetts, John graduated from Howard University and has an illustrious history as a global communications professional. He has worked on issues of national importance. He left that success behind, however, because he had a vision of a truly extraordinary organization, BloomBars. An award-winning Washington, DC, community arts nonprofit, BloomBars is a creative incubator—home and sanctuary to people of all ages and stripes.
John is also an incredible father, a passionate vegan, a creative writer, and a beloved advocate for the healing power of arts and community.
For more information about John and his community, click here and here and here.
Glossary
Elizabeth: Welcome to Creativists In Dialogue, a podcast embracing the Creative Life. I’m Elizabeth Bruce.
Michael: And I’m Michael Oliver.
Elizabeth: Our guest today is good friend and deeply creative colleague John Chambers. John, who is originally from Massachusetts, is a Howard University graduate with an illustrious history as a global communications professional working on numerous crisis issues who left that field to found the extraordinary organization BloomBars, an award-winning community arts nonprofit that is a creative incubator, a home, and sanctuary to people of all ages and stripes in Washington, DC. John is an incredible father, a passionate vegan, creative writer, visionary entrepreneur, and beloved advocate for the healing power of arts and community. Welcome, John
John: Thank you. [00:01:00] Thank you. Although that felt like an obituary. I should just stop right here. Thank you.
Elizabeth: John is very much with us.
Michael: Alright, so we like to start off our interviews with a couple of questions. The first one is this: In what aspects of your life do you see creativity as having the greatest impact?
John: What aspects of my life at present—
Michael: Throughout your,
John: Throughout my life?
Michael: Yeah.
John: Yeah, I think just thinking about problems differently. I think the end result of creativity is creation, and I think about art as the way that creativity tries to achieve its fullest potential.
Michael: So whenever you run into a problem, that’s when you—
John: I think of creativity means so many things to so many people. I think there’s creativity in everything. There’s creativity in everyone. There’s creativity in science, there’s creativity in every field that we study. People express it differently. [00:02:00] We just call it different things. I think, there’s inspiration, there’s muse, there’s the idea that our ancestors are present, which I think of, about, about a lot. Some of these things actually, I think our ego tells us that they came from us, but they actually came from some ancestor whispering something in our ears that we just need to be in the right, a right space to receive.
Michael: So it sounds like your whole life is just infused with creativity.
John: I think that’s—
Michael: Which you try to—
John: Yeah, I think that started very early on, just having parents who were very different from each other, trying to carve out a place for themselves that is in the service of people, of humanity, and not necessarily putting money first and I think that crossed over to their parenting and how they wanted to raise their children and with a level of freedom and independence that allowed us to figure it out on our own, you know. But they’re very different from the [00:03:00] children that they raised, I can say that for sure. I don’t know. We’re, all of us are creatives.
Michael: Oh, maybe we’ll get into that.
John: Okay.
Michael: That difference.
John: Alright, sure.
Elizabeth: We, you’ve been speaking actually about, what we often ask our guests about, which is the different perspectives about creativity and how to extend and expand the definition of creativity to include, as you mentioned, a wide variety of human activities. Do you personally have a particular definition of creativity or was there a particular definition of creativity in your home growing up, in the community in which you were growing and becoming a young person?
John: Always. Always, I think from, from birth, I think it was just, I was seeped in different cultures. I was seeped in art from Africa, art from Europe, my mother and father coming from very different backgrounds, there was all this art everywhere in our [00:04:00] house. And it was, half of it was, my father spent two semesters in Ghana, and he had brought back nothing but art.
Elizabeth: Wow.
John: Stools and benches and—
Elizabeth: Textiles?
John: Textiles, yes! The whole thing. Offering many, much of it to my mother’s family—
Elizabeth: Sure.
John: —as an offering to try to get into good graces. But yeah, we had, from the classic, Matisse and Rodin, posters—that, of course, didn’t have the real ones—to my mother’s.
Elizabeth: Oh, no Rodin sculptures in the living room?
John: No, no Rodin sculptures in our space. But we had these, seriously, we had these very ornate portraits of my grandmother’s side of the family, with the gold leaf and the, painted by some portrait maker and chipping a little bit here and there, but sitting in my parents’ library. So it’s very interesting contrast. And yeah, they were always driving us, I think to, yeah, just do things creatively. Whether it was forcing me to play the piano and clarinet as a child or [00:05:00] just drawing and putting things in front of us that were challenges.
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