Plating up
Plating up
BizArts is Deon Generette's initiative with the City of Columbia's Office of Business Opportunities. We came in as creative partner — and turned a small-business programme into somewhere people actually wanted to be.
The challenge
Cities fund small business and cities fund the arts, and the two rarely meet. Columbia's creative economy was full of people running real businesses who had never been handed the city's business playbook — and a municipal office with resources that were not reaching them. The gap was not money. It was the room where those two groups would actually sit down together. 7Sunday and the OBO had the idea and the mandate. What the series needed was for the idea to become tactical.
Our approach
Our role was creative partner and producer: taking a civic programme and curating it as an experience rather than a seminar. Programming, staging and brand storytelling through space — so that a session about capital access felt like somewhere you wanted to spend a Sunday afternoon. The studio also helps run business selection for the series, placing roughly six businesses to table at every event.
The outcome
The inaugural series launched at the Columbia Museum of Art and BizArts has continued as an ongoing civic programme, moving to a quarterly cadence. Its State of the Union edition drew coverage from ABC Columbia and Carolina Panorama, and the partnership was profiled by the Post & Courier's Free Times in March 2026.
Pull up a chair
