Heather Hottenroth

I'm the founder of WAM, Women's Art Movement, which is creating a new model for women's art museums, motorways, monuments, and market. Since women only had a bank account in 1988, the concept is that we're the first generation of women who have money and can self-fund a new type of art world. I'm building the first pilot in LaGrange, Kentucky, a historic site where I bought several buildings to build a campus, about half of Main Street. The founding father of Hollywood is from this town, so this is the origins of propaganda. The first pilot site is about propaganda and critical thinking, bringing women together to take art and distill it into how we should think about this, creating ways to think about life through a critical lens, not something that's given to us but that we create. On a daily basis, I'm raising money, working with the community for involvement, and creating new innovation like food experiences where we understand growing and local farmers and reteach food to create community. I work with the public health department on the epidemic of loneliness, with local community members, and with women-owned businesses in the region to create a participatory museum where we're all coming up in a collaborative way. It's about power versus collaboration. I spend my days with people working on how we collaborate and bringing innovation models into small-town America through human-centered design techniques.