Parasoleil’s CEO will moderate a timely public-art conversation in Santa Fe as Artist Series collaborator Virgil Ortiz opens the summit.
Public art begins with vision. Bringing that vision into the world - and sustaining an artistic practice after the unveiling - demands something more: collaboration, operational discipline, financial fluency, and the courage to build a business without flattening the art.
That tension sits at the center of ‘The Artist as Entrepreneur,’ a featured spotlight at CODAsummit 2026. Tanner Flynn, CEO of Parasoleil, will moderate the session on Thursday, October 1, from 9:45 to 10:45 a.m. in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The conversation brings together four artists and community builders whose work moves across civic memory, monumental installation, education, placemaking, and public engagement.
A practical conversation about sustaining public art
The panel features Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, known for large-scale civic works including In America: Remember; Nikolas Soren Goodich, founder and director of The Luminous Community Center; Marjorie Guyon, chief creative officer of the I Was Here Project; and J Muzacz, owner of The Mosaic Workshop. Their practices are distinct, but the business questions underneath them are shared: How does an artist create durable partnerships, translate an idea for a public setting, manage risk, protect authorship, and build the capacity to take on more ambitious work?
Flynn brings a useful perspective to that discussion. His work at Parasoleil sits where creative expression meets the realities of design development, engineering, manufacturing, construction schedules, and long-term performance. That is familiar territory for public artists. A compelling concept must ultimately survive budgets, codes, stakeholder reviews, fabrication constraints, installation conditions, and years of public use.
AT A GLANCE
Session: Spotlight: The Artist as Entrepreneur
Moderator: Tanner Flynn, CEO, Parasoleil
When: Thursday, October 1, 2026 | 9:45-10:45 a.m.
Summit: CODAsummit: Art, Technology and Place | September 29-October 1 | Santa Fe, NM
The Artist Series puts the same questions into practice
Parasoleil’s Artist Series provides a concrete example of how a product company and independent artists can build value together. The program invites guest artists to translate their visual languages into architectural patterns that can live at the scale of facades, screens, shade structures, and other built environments. Parasoleil contributes pattern development, engineering, and a repeatable path to fabrication; the artists contribute authorship, meaning, and ways of seeing that no generic pattern library can reproduce.
The structure is intentionally collaborative. Artists participate in the application and customization of their designs, and Parasoleil’s publicly described program provides a 10 percent royalty from sales using an Artist Series pattern to the artist or a charity selected by the artist. It is a model designed to turn artistic identity into an ongoing asset while keeping the artist connected to how the work enters the built environment.
Virgil Ortiz brings the story home to Santa Fe
The summit’s Santa Fe setting makes this year’s program especially resonant. On Wednesday, September 30, from 9:15 to 10:00 a.m., Cochiti Pueblo artist Virgil Ortiz will deliver the Barbara Tober Opening Keynote Address. Working across clay, couture, film, and digital media, Ortiz connects ancestral storytelling with Indigenous Futurism, using contemporary forms to carry history forward rather than confining it to the past.
Ortiz is also a Parasoleil Artist Series collaborator. His four architectural patterns - Wild Spinach, Rez Spine, Sun-Moon-Kiva-Steps, and V-Maze - draw from painted surface designs used on his family’s clay works. At architectural scale, those patterns become more than decoration. They carry cultural memory into the daily experience of a building, creating light, shadow, identity, and a direct relationship to the artist’s larger body of work.
The pairing of Ortiz’s keynote and Flynn’s panel makes an important point: artistic legacy and entrepreneurial practice are not competing ideas. The structures that support an artist - trusted partners, fair compensation, technical expertise, clear agreements, and access to new contexts - can help the work travel farther without separating it from its source.
Tanner Flynn plans for more
Collaboration has always been central to Parasoleil’s process. Whether it’s a joint design with a sculptor for public art or a private commercial project specified by an architect, Parasoleil has built decades of their reputation upon collaboration. Flynn sees how different perspectives make a project better, giving it lasting design integrity. “My goal in Santa Fe is for artists and public arts administrators to walk away seeing our panel systems as a canvas, a way to realize public art at an architectural scale, with the structure, durability, and code compliance already solved. The best work happens when art and construction expertise are in the room from day one, and that's the conversation I want to have here.”
Join the conversation
CODAsummit 2026 runs September 29 through October 1 and brings together artists, fabricators, commissioners, consultants, designers, and public-art leaders for tours, panels, presentations, and the CODAawards celebration. Parasoleil will also host the Wednesday evening networking cocktail party at VLADEM Contemporary Museum from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m.
Explore the program and register: https://codasummit.com/
Explore the collaboration: https://www.parasoleil.com/patterns/artist-series
