Sarah Charlotte Jones’s first job was at Ross, and “It was awesome,” she says. Today she has another awesome job as the Education and Programs Manager at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco. Creatives featured in programs she has produced include Marcel Wanders, Ben Venom, Wendy Muriyama, Jay Nelson, Rae Dunn, and Future Cities Lab (now Futureforms).

She has a gift for creating a “Party with a Purpose”, and she works to utilize museums as platforms for meaningful partnerships that inspire the public for good. We’re excited about exploring this with her at In/Visible Talks 2020, where she’ll moderate a Lunch+Learn on “Beyond Exhibitions: Creative Channels for Getting Your Work Museum-Featured”.

Get to know Sarah Charlotte.

What is your relationship to the creative process?

“As a programmer, I am inspired by themes and concepts. Give me any subject matter and I will immediately begin developing a menu, a playlist, a community partner, an artist instructor, collaborations, and some takeaways. I revel in creating spaces for learning that are both fun and inclusive. As an artist, I start with a vision and reverse engineer from there—often incorporating multiple mediums and utilizing materials in somewhat unintended ways.” 

When did you first realize you needed to be in a creative field?

“I was finding success in more conventional fields, but intuited that I could apply these very marketable skills to subject matter that was actually interesting and could also potentially make a difference in people’s lives. I was right.”

How or where do you find inspiration?

“In museums of all kinds, festivals/events, music, friends ’n’ fam, books, fashion, pop culture, and travel.”

What was one of your biggest creative challenges?

“One of my biggest creative challenges is in having the bandwidth to make a fully formed programmatic idea come to fruition. The blessing and the curse of my creative process is that I can immediately see this very robust, holistic vision, but the laws of space and time limit what is realistically possible. So, my challenge is to constantly be assessing and shifting what stays and what gets moved elsewhere, for later.”

What drives you to create?

“An instinct for curating my experience on this Earth.” 

Bonus Round: What’s on your current playlist?

“RL Grime’s Halloween 8, Scarypoolparty, Danny Brown, Post Malone, Pure Wrath, Phem, and Kate Mo$$.”