Where to start? Last fall I spent a week at Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, New Mexico on an art retreat. The land was alive with stark contrasts from the unexpectedly green floor where plants and lichen bloomed after too much rainfall to unusual rock formations that sometimes seemed alive. I was part of a small group learning how to communicate spiritually through art using mandelas to contain our expressions. We used everything from paper to the desert to create these mandelas. Below the Rock Owl, I was able to build a stone mandela around a rock altar that someone had built before we came. As I worked in the desert gathering stones and materials to incorporate into my mandela, the Rock Owl watched over my movements just as it had watched over the happenings of the desert for many years. It was a magical moment where I could feel part of the land while I communed quietly with God exalting in the beauty and majesty of the world that had been created for us.
Georgia OKeefe’s desert
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[…] by kelcym on October 20, 2008 Earlier today Lewis Shepherd commented on a blog post that I had written last year. In that comment he proposed ”Knowledge Artist” as a better phrase or […]
In Search of Knowledge 
Just saying hi.
Hi Kelcy – glad you’re picking this back up, to complement your “antiquated internal LAN” blogging 🙂
Your study of mandalas’ contribution to communication and expression is interesting; I’ve been wondering what to use as a better phrase or term than “knowledge worker” or “information worker,” as a way of describing people who work in information-dense but critically informed, pensive environments, whether it’s in the Beltway, on Wall Street, or in a media-centric career. Your note made me think that, better than “knowledge worker,” with its tone of drudgery and labor, we might use “knowledge artist”?
That phrase “knowledge artist” only gets 626 hits on Google, 1330 on Live Search, and many of those are spurious connections. But it sounds good to me 🙂 Nowhere to go but up.
I like the sound of “knowledge artist”. We have been so busy studying and mandating critical thinking for intelligence analysts that we have forgotten about creative thinking other than in very traditional modes like brainstorming with post-it notes (with the exception of a project by Carmen Medina several years ago). What fun to explore what being a “knowledge artist” means to me and exchanging ideas on the subject with a whole new audience. I’ll start writing about this and putting some tweets out on #knowledgeartist.
I also like the idea of a “Knowledge Artist”–the title implies that there is much more to KM than just following a pre-determined set of checklists and standard operating procedures. There certainly has to be an “art” component that allows for creativity and critical thinking as well. Looking forward to reading more about your thoughts on “Knowledge Artists.”
So that photo, you know, shows the form of a right hand making a peace sign – or, one-half of Richard Nixon’s ‘Victory’ gesture