Noah Kaplan: Building Creative Businesses That Last
In this episode of Creative Currents, host Mark Clague sits down with University of Michigan alumnus and entrepreneur Noah Kaplan, ‘91, to explore how an arts education can become the foundation for a lifetime of creative innovation.
As the founder and president of Leon Speakers, Noah has spent more than 25 years transforming an idea born from his background in art and design into a globally recognized company that blends premium audio, craftsmanship, and beautiful design. He shares the story behind Leon's early days, the challenges of building a business from the ground up, and why leading with creativity—not just technology—has remained central to the company's success.
The conversation also explores how Noah has expanded that same philosophy beyond Leon Speakers through ventures including York Food & Drink, Mothfire Brewing Company, and Blimpy Burger. Together, these businesses form what he describes as a "Creative Campus" in Ann Arbor—spaces where design, community, entrepreneurship, and local culture intersect.
In this episode:
Noah’s journey from NY to the University of Michigan
How Noah founded Leon Speakers and built it into a global design and audio company
How an arts education prepared Noah for entrepreneurship
Advice for students and aspiring entrepreneurs
The concept of arts as “team sport”
Season 5, Episode 3
00:34:13
Listen on:
Creative Currents is produced by Jessica Jenks and edited by Brian Lillie.
Transcript
Mark Clague: 00:06
Welcome to Creative Currents, a Michigan Arts podcast, where we explore the power of collaborative creativity and how the arts spark meaningful conversation. I'm your host, Mark Clague, and today we're joined by University of Michigan alumnus, artist, and Ann Arbor entrepreneur, Noah Kaplan.
Mark Clague: 00:22
Noah, who just told me to call him "this dude."
Noah Kaplan: 00:24
"This guy over here."
Mark Clague: 00:25
This guy is founder and president of Leon Speakers. And over the past 25 years, Noah has used his background as a visual artist, designer, and entrepreneur to drive Leon's vision of blending design with technology and art with audio. His passion for building successful, creatively driven, craft-oriented businesses has stretched really across a whole series of businesses, including Mothfire Brewing, York food and drink, and most recently, in a fave of mine, Blimpy Burger, into a thriving creative campus that really reaches not only across the Ann Arbor community, but beyond.
Mark Clague: 01:00
Noah is also a graduate of U of M's Penny W. Stamp School of Art and Design, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. And his arts education will be part of our topic today to talk about how it laid the creative foundation for Leon Speakers and his entrepreneurial ventures that have followed. Noah, it's great to welcome you to Creative Currents.
Noah Kaplan: 01:18
So nice to be here, Mark. Thanks for having me.
Mark Clague: 01:20
So give me a little bit of story. Like how did you go from artist to entrepreneur?
Noah Kaplan: 01:25
There was a really interesting time, I think, when I was growing up as an artist. This is really almost pre-internet, if you could imagine that. So I always I was there. There was a time before the internet. I know you used to have to give directions to people. I gave directions. I don't remember exactly how I got anywhere, how I showed up to meetings, how I got on an airplane. I'm definitely directionally challenged. So it was it was difficult times. But as an artist, I think it was a really interesting time to be alive. I was born doing art for my whole entire life. And so my journey really was always through an art lens. And it really took me almost wherever I always wanted to be or go.
Mark Clague: 02:05
So you grew up in New York and then you came to Ann Arbor to come to the Stamps School, right?
Noah Kaplan: 02:09
Even that was, you know, I would call it a curious way to end up here because I really was vested into being a lifelong artist. And so as an artist, you go to what's called a portfolio review. I had no idea what that meant. It was at Pratt University in New York. I always imagined going to school in New York City or really highly dedicated art school. Um, and so when you create your portfolio at that time, you know, you're working when you think about it, from when you're what, 14 to 18?
Mark Clague: 02:42
Yeah.
Noah Kaplan: 02:42
And I created a portfolio based on everything, all the work I'd been doing, which is really just creative exploration. Art school really wasn't super focused.
Mark Clague: 02:51
So for you, was it drawing or painting, or what was the gateway?
Noah Kaplan: 02:55
I always worked in all medias. Like I love mixed media. Drawing was natural to me, but I also studied drawing through scientific illustration. I was really curious about how the body worked. Um, life drawing, I studied the old masters myself. Art really wasn't part of like education at that time. I was in programs, like pace programs, and I was working um within the arts, but um it really wasn't ever thought of as like a career or a foreground thing, especially where I was from.
So when I went to that portfolio review, I ran into this one professor, his name was Professor Montalvo. And as we were reviewing the portfolio, he starts looking through it and he's curiously leafing through it. And I'm like, and this was a last-minute decision. So my mother, who's from the Bronx, went to the University of Michigan. And she's like, "You gotta show your work to the University of Michigan." I was like, "Why would I do that? What's the University of Michigan? Do they have an art school?" It sounds like a big school, it's in Michigan. I wasn't aware exactly where that was.
Mark Clague: 03:58
Yep.
Noah Kaplan: 03:59
Exactly. And but at that last minute, and this is what's so interesting about life, like that last minute thing that she told me because we were walking out the door was to go show the portfolio to the University of Michigan. So as he's leafing through it, he stopped on one drawing, which was a drawing I did of a scientist kind of looking over a specimen. And I drew it chaotically in crayon, tons of color, really expressive. And he said, Why did you use crayon when you drew this picture? And I told him, because I had a box of 64 crayons. And I was like, I think he liked that I wasn't trying to like overthink it. And it wasn't an abstract answer.
And I always actually consider myself an artist as a trade. You know, it's something you do, it's work, it's something you learn, it's something you study. It's not always that abstract, it's not always that heady. It's got stuff and you make stuff. And he said, "How are your grades?" And I said, "They're fine." They were not stellar, but they were fine. Yeah. And he said, "Do you want to come to the University of Michigan?" I said, "I have no idea." And he actually FedEx-ed me an acceptance to the school. So I didn't apply to the school in a regular way. Um, so that little chance interaction led me to Michigan.
Mark Clague: 05:12
Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, it changed your life, you know, and the turn of a dime.
Noah Kaplan: 05:17
Exactly. And you're in some ways you'd say, Well, you've just fallen in your mom's footsteps. But in fact, that had nothing to do with it. It really didn't. And my mom isn't appeared because she loved the sweatshirt from the University of Michigan that her friend wore. So for my mom's 80th birthday, I drew her a drawing of that sweatshirt, which led our entire family to this state.
Mark Clague: 05:33
Wow. That's that's totally amazing. Thank you. So you're in art school and you graduate. And then what happens?
Noah Kaplan: 05:41
As life and luck would have it, I get a call from a friend who was working at the athletic department. His name was Stan.
Mark Clague: 05:47
At Michigan.
Noah Kaplan: 05:48
At Michigan. And Stan calls me, and we had worked together as artists at like upstate summer camps. You know, we are leading art programs. And Stan calls me and he says, "Noah, do you know how to draw portraits?" I'm like, "Yes, Stan. I know how to draw portraits." Like, good, because I just almost took a job drawing portraits for the University of Michigan, but I don't know how to draw portraits. I'm a ceramicist. This we knew, but Stan knew to get us in the door.
Noah Kaplan: 06:15
So he calls me into this meeting. I'm completely not knowing what it's about. I come with my normal portfolio, which I had been building for a long time, for four years and from before. And I walk into a meeting to learn about this project. And there are like 30 people in the meeting wearing suits. Like this is old school Michigan. They're at a conference room that you could barely see the end of. They sit me down at the end of this table and they describe this project. It was all about drawing scholar athletes for the University of Michigan. Weird backstory. I was also a scholar athlete, but in high school. So it was also a weird twist for me to just be there. Stan was also an athlete.
Mark Clague: 06:56
So what sport did you do?
Noah Kaplan: 06:58
I was a wrestler.
Mark Clague: 06:58
Wrestler, okay.
Noah Kaplan: 06:59
What was amazing about this experience was kind of the approach for me was always just walk in as yourself, be who you are, don't try to oversell yourself. And so they started lighting me up. There's people that I recognized in the room, executives. And they're asking about these portraits and what you could do. And it turned out there'd been almost 45 people identified as scholar athletes at the University of Michigan since the turn of the century.
Noah Kaplan: 07:24
So some of these were living people, but many of them were historic people. There were historic people dating all the way back to the turn of the century. So I got to see these photos. And the vision that they had was that they wanted to commemorate these people in some kind of way with portraiture and put it up in a building.
Noah Kaplan: 07:38
And so I got in there and they started grilling me. "Can you draw? What kind of drawings can you do? How would you mount the all these?" You know, very simple questions. And then they wanted to see the work.
Mark Clague: 07:47
But you had no prep at all. You had no idea.
Noah Kaplan: 07:49
I really didn't. I came with my portfolio, which was like a win. So I turned the pages. You know, I had studied life drawing a lot. I drew hundreds of portraits throughout my life. I took life drawing every single semester of all of college. So I had tons of work there, and it really is in my wheelhouse to draw portraits. And so when I started looking at these portraits, it was just like a pile of photos, black and whites. The first thing I noticed was the haircuts. Many haircuts have changed. Haircuts have changed over time. Facial hair has changed.
Mark Clague: 08:20
Yes. People used to look older.
Noah Kaplan: 08:21
I think they used to, I don't know if they lived different lives, but like they seemed more mature. Some of them look like they were 40. And these were these were college athletes. These were college athletes. And it was really cool, though, is to to see these. And as life would have it, I get this project.
Mark Clague: 08:34
So now you're not going back to New York. Now you're staying in Ann Arbor.
Noah Kaplan: 08:37
I am here. Yeah. I'm now working professionally as an artist. And these portraits, I don't even want to tell you what I charged them for these portraits because it was not a lot. But to me, this was a very simple time. You know, my rent in my house back then was $350 a month.
Mark Clague: 08:55
Different times.
Noah Kaplan: 08:56
Different times. And like each portrait, while it was barely $1,000 each, um, for me, I can do portraits pretty quickly, especially at small formats. So I would do one to two portraits a day as I was starting to build up my other work, my other actual portfolio work, you know, my studied work. So this was a great job to launch. Crazy great job. It also just showed me not only is there a need for art, but almost everybody universally wants art in their lives in some way. And so it gave me a quick perspective and a quick job and cash to be able to kind of live this life right away. That job happened before I left college.
Noah Kaplan: 09:38
So here I am going into my art career with a gigantic commission that would take me almost 16 months to finish. That's how I got into music. That's how I started meeting all the artists and engineers and friends because I had to not only create drawings, but we had to figure out the woodwork. You know, I made all the plaques for them out of mahogany. I had to learn about mahogany, how to finish the mahogany, how to cut it, how to write it. That's when we started building our first wood shops, so which turned out to eventually be the wood shop of the company, which is now called Leon Speakers, which at that point was a garage wood shop in our basement.
Mark Clague: 10:13
So then where did Leon Speakers come into the thing? Like the technology and the audio and sort of seeing these as I mean, the custom, the handmade, the bespoke, like that's sort of part of your life from the beginning as an artist.
Mark Clague: 10:23
My father was a doctor, was always he was a true folk artist. We always grew up like working in the shop. He loved working in the shop. He's been a completely raw, untrained artist. He makes insane things to this day. You know, he'll recreate his house in Brooklyn out of little wood objects. He will, you know, craft hundreds of little characters out of wood. He'll create projects for us. He always was having us work in the shop. So I was always working around woodworking. And I was doing woodworking and playing in the shop and experimenting in the shop. And then I learned a lot more about that in college when used to actually take technical and shop class, you know, learning in wood shops. So I knew what to do, but the technical expertise definitely came later.
Mark Clague: 11:04
What started to happen at that time was something that was a carryover for my whole life. Like, so I am an extrovert. So I like to be around people a lot. And one of the weird things about art is you end up a lot alone. You know, some of my days working, I'd be alone for 10 hours working on, you know, a commission or a portrait. Even those little portraits, I mean, you got to get in that right headspace. So music was always kind of my battery.
Mark Clague: 11:32
Since I was— for as long back as I can remember, I always had my stereo, I was always obsessed with music. It was kind of like not only my energy, but it was a vibration that kept me moving. As I started doing this other work, there was a lot of other artists around. Because what that translated to over time was I started not only listening to music obsessively, but I would, you know, go into the city, I would start through crates, I would dig into like different genres of music. And eventually I was like, I'm playing, I gotta play. So I started playing music to kind of just um distract myself or to take a break from drawing and working alone because I like physicality.
Mark Clague: 12:08
Yeah. Did you play a particular instrument?
Noah Kaplan: 12:10
I play guitars and percussion and anything that would shake or move, or I could bang or bust or break. And I like to play it real physically, so a lot very rhythmic stuff. I come from an artistic family. So my brother was like a true musician. I watched him playing in New York City and live shows and Ben, he's younger than me. And we started playing music a lot, and we started a band, and through that band, we started meeting lots of different artists and engineers and recording people. And at U of M, the coolest part is like this amalgamous of people that you meet.
We met this one person who worked under Amir Bose from MIT, who was living here, and he saw that we were like really into sound and music, and he started hanging around. And so I would say organically, like the swirling thought of Leon speakers was coming to formation, but we had no idea that it would be a company.
Mark Clague: 13:03
Yeah.
Noah Kaplan: 13:03
It was more of a collective, you know.
Mark Clague: 13:05
But in a way, yeah, you've built this collective, you built a community of creative people just through your work, and then then that becomes then the catalyst for a range of ideas.
Noah Kaplan: 13:14
It was really organic and time felt really slow then in a beautiful way. I every morning, every day, we'd wake up and meet outside and play. Till sometimes at sunrise, sometimes we'd be awake all night.
Mark Clague: 13:29
Yeah.
Noah Kaplan: 13:30
You know, sometimes I'd work through the night and play in the morning all day and like, you know, walk and then meet the community, meet in the town. And so as we started to think about things, like we started to look at the way things were being built and being made. Like we explored making instruments, we explored making guitars, we built a pirate radio station. We built a 30-foot antenna off of the house and broadcast ridiculous music shows from it. Um, and so we were just doing a lot of exploration within the arts, and there was no boundaries.
And so the days floated. And in a day, I could create where I can do a portrait and then write a song and then go next door. We could work on, hey, we want to make, you want to think about a product, or go help somebody else with what they were working on. Help one of the engineers figure out a problem they were having with electronics or how to plug stuff in or how to create a system.
And once we started recording more, I started becoming really interested in all that equipment and how it worked, the whole signal path from the microphone all the way to playback. And you start getting really invested in this. I started getting moderately obsessed, which I realize is like a thread that keeps me moving to this day. I get obsessed, I dive as deep as possible and I'll explore it forever. You know, and I still explore it forever.
But so, like when we were doing those original things, we started looking at the products that you could actually get at the time. And this is in the mid-90s, when really mass market had taken over the entire world. We didn't know what that meant. We we were we couldn't really afford fancy things anyway. You know we saw those fancy things in studios and you start hearing, you're like, wait, why is that so good and this is so bad? And like, oh well, this is from 1975, you know, this is a NIV recording console. You're like, what is that? So I started just becoming really curious about why it looks so beautiful, you know, why it had wooded accents, why the knobs were so tactile, why the lights look so interesting.
And this goes back to like understanding that things used to be drawn, everything started as art. Ah, I see, yeah. And it led to my belief that every literal thing is created through an artistic lens.
So when we started imagining like speakers or studio monitors trying to get them and seeing like, I remember I typed into the early internet. I was not technically savvy, but I was a searcher and explorer. So I uh in the early internet, I typed in like studio monitor speakers, and slowly pages after pages of black boxes came up. So even when you think of a speaker in your mind now, what do you see? Yeah, you see a black box.
Mark Clague: 15:59
A black box. Pretty, pretty ubiquitous, boring standard.
Noah Kaplan: 16:03
And boring was not in our vernacular at that time. We were like borderline extremists when it came to like, you know, creativity and what we thought creativity should be and how much output and how much work we were doing. So we started just seeing why were they built this way. So we'd go to like Kiwanis or like the PTO and like buy old speakers and chop them up. Then we bought both speakers and like cut them in half. And we're like, oh my god, they're making out of plastic. And wait, they just colored in this little part. Like these speakers from the 60s, 70s, 80s were made of like wood and beautiful veneers, and they had interesting grills. And then you'd go and see the ones we had now, and you cut them, it's like made of plastic and yeah, you know, as cheap as possible. That didn't sit right with us. So we started making the original speakers for our studios in the wood shop out of solid hardwoods.
Mark Clague: 16:51
Got it.
Noah Kaplan: 16:51
And we would paint them. And one of our first moves was actually to go to Zingerman's, which everybody who went to University of Michigan knows. We went to Zingerman's where we thought a possible customer base could be. And we said, "Hey, can we leave these little catalogs here?" Where we had created these little, we over the time speeding up, we had started making speakers for friends and family or for us people. For our studio, for playback, for playing.
We started looking at all the electronics and the amplifiers and the woofers and the tweeters, and again, obsessed at that point. And you start realizing it's a really beautifully simple device, like an instrument. We had the woodworking skills to be able to build them, and we learned a lot from each other and learned about wood. And it was just like a really fun thing to explore.
Mark Clague: 17:36
Was it a business at that point?
Noah Kaplan: 17:38
I wouldn't say so. I was a lucky man in that I had that art gig. But from a musical standpoint, we were playing so many shows, but it really wasn't paying the bills. So, you know, this was another beautiful distraction. Keep me out of the studio to get around people and really collaborate and learn.
Mark Clague: 17:56
So, what was the thing that clicked that turned it into a business?
Noah Kaplan: 18:00
I really never thought of a business, you know, working as a business. Like, I thought of everything as an approach, you know, like a an exploration or an approach. I learned through this art lens that some things are universal. Like the thing I learned as an artist that I always tell young artists is that if you ask or inquire about what people love or what they want, like I'll ask you the question right now like, do you like music?
Mark Clague: 18:26
I love music. Yeah.
Noah Kaplan: 18:27
Would you ever want a piece of art?
Mark Clague: 18:28
Absolutely.
Noah Kaplan: 18:29
So I learned that those questions were always yeses. To me, they're absolute yeses. And so I was always like, I knew that there was a desire there for people to have something meaningful. Art is all about like finding and discovering meaning through imagery or through exploration. And so, similarly with the speaker company, I just was super curious. I never thought I would be a business person.
You know, years past, I have a wood shop at this point. I have a little space downtown. It's called Noah's Underground Gallery, Leon Speakers. It's a collaborative art space. We used to do the U of M art shows down there. We were kind of like an underground counterculture.
So just to lend a little bit of context there, we opened this place. It is a business and it has retail, and we had designed it and made it beautiful and people started coming down. And one of those people is from U of M.
His name was Jack, and he said, "Oh my God, this place is amazing." He's like, "How'd you become so entrepreneurial?" I was like, "What is entrepreneurial? What does that mean? I've never heard of that. What is that?" And he's like, "You're like an entrepreneur". I'm like, "What the hell is that?" And so I became curious about what he was talking about.
He's like, "No, you know, like, you'd create a business plan?" I'm like, "A business plan? No. I'm an artist, you know, I'm a musician. Um, I could create a, I could paint for you." Um, which is funny because I realize now like visualization is part of a business plan.
But he's like, "Oh, there's a program at U of M that helps local businesses create business plans." So I literally went home, looked up in the directory, and called the business school.
Mark Clague: 20:02
Wow.
Noah Kaplan: 20:03
On the telephone. This is a thing with a cord and you hold everything.
Mark Clague: 20:07
Yeah, I've seen those in the museums.
Noah Kaplan: 20:09
Yeah, exactly. So I do this, and what happens? The guy who created the map program picked up the phone.
Mark Clague: 20:15
Wow.
Noah Kaplan: 20:15
I'm like, "Hey, I heard you can help local business owners with a business plan." He said, "Yeah, we have a program. Like, we're actually doing this right now. Do you want to present your idea?" I'm like, "Yeah, I do."
So at that point, I worked collaboratively again with the industrial design people from the U of M to create a presentation. And at that point, we learned that the bookshelf speakers were really drawing people's attention because of the natural hardwoods.
But this is at the beginning of a new era of television that was also going on. I mean, I had a local friend who worked at a company called Morantz, and they had just put out some of the first flat panel plasma TVs. And we got one in our little space somehow. We beg barred. We're like, we need this thing, it's super important, it's going to change everything. And it did change everything.
So we had designed these studio monitors that we were making and we changed the form factor of them after seeing like what people wanted. So accidentally, we had made some of the first speakers to match flat panel televisions at the time. So they were like studio monitors. We weren't really seeing this contextually, how important it would be.
We also did other things like we filed patents for a product called Picture Sound. So, like we were seeing that like technology was moving onto the wall and into living spaces. We were too young and definitely too broke to be able to afford anything fancy. But we started to see and look through a window where people were buying these televisions for like $25,000 for a small television.
And so it really opened us up as we traveled back to New York and started showing our products to other stores in New York City, the hi fi stores that we had grown up seeing, getting their feedback and coming back and realizing like, oh my God, like there's definitely no one trying to work on new technologies for making sound for these TVs and definitely nothing artistic.
So, like the first products had like silk screens on the surface of the speaker. And guess what? We created a presentation. We called the speakers Plasmax. We came to like the most clunky, hysterical 3D presentation. Um, and we did it. At that time, I had like long dreadlocks, probably four feet long and I'm like presenting to the business school with my partners. PS, we won the competition.
Mark Clague: 22:20
Wow.
Noah Kaplan: 22:21
And so we got an amazing group of young business people who helped us write a business plan. And that really opened up my eyes to what this was. So I was born with hustle. I was never afraid. Uh, you know, I never actually planned on getting a job because my job was clear to me from day one be an artist. And so through curiosity and really not knowing what I'm doing, it's led me down amazing pathways. And you get to meet so many smart people. And that's what I love about being at the U of M and still being here 25, 30 years later is I can't believe the projects that we've done and the people we've met and how diverse it's been.
Mark Clague: 22:57
And so what is it about art thinking that makes that possible? Is that is it the willingness to put stuff out there? Is it the willingness to experiment and iterate and try something new? Are there things that you think are sort of the key to why an entrepreneur or why an artist can go into that space and not even know it?
Noah Kaplan: 23:14
I love that question. I think it's very different in introspective for anybody who's answering, but for me, art is an approach towards life that leads you towards exploration and expression. You know, so when you're always expressing something, and sometimes that expression isn't that deep or that meaningful, or like when you're even just drawing something to see if you can, there's a learning that's going on there, and you're wondering like, how am I gonna do this? Why, why do I know how to do this? And it also left me always imagining different ways to do it.
There's immense ways to approach the same exact thing. You know, if you put a skull on the table and you have 50 artists around, they're all gonna see it a different way. They're gonna use different mediums. So you're seeing the same object, but you're seeing it through different lenses. So it gave me this strange thoughts about the way human beings look at things and how our senses perceive them and then how we output them.
And so I always allow myself to let my imagination float wild, which I still take time to do. So I allow myself those thoughts to break free of convention. And I think convention can be a cage, but I always felt free of it.
Mark Clague: 24:24
Well, one of the conventions you're also breaking, seems to me anyway, is the the notion that arts are a team sport at all. Like that you're seeing art as something that is part of your extroverted proclivities, right?
Noah Kaplan: 24:35
It's about connecting with people. As opposed to, I think, the notions that I was raised in with art. You know, there's the lone genius sort of in the wilderness, nobody understands them. They're sort of misanthropic and and nobody, you know, you sort of totally so and nobody gets them and they're ahead of their time and they're they, you know, they're lonely. And uh and yours you're just totally the opposite. You know, art is about, you know, hanging out and sharing ideas and bouncing things around and exploring through other people the possibilities that they would add to your creative vision.
Mark Clague: 25:08
Right. I love that.
Noah Kaplan: 25:09
Um it's like you think about a group like the Beatles, who were a massively powerful art group. Not only are they creating music, but they're creating the visuals, the stories, impossible depth that they created by collaborating. Though I think because I worked with music too, that I just was so open to it.
And I wasn't the best musician ever, you know, at playing, but I was always there for it. I could always appreciate everybody else's skills and talents. And so I think, you know, appreciation of others and what has been come before us and the study of what comes before us and like leaving yourself open to learning as like a lifelong thing.
Mark Clague: 25:43
Yeah. Right.
Noah Kaplan: 25:44
So like art is about learning and exploring. And so all these collaborations always lead you somewhere. The other thing I've let go of is even needing to know where they're going. That was a whole different phase of life. You know, in your first phase of life, you're like, can I pay the damn bills? You know, what's going, what's coming up next? You know, you're building a family, you're building a house, you're building a business. At a certain point, it flips.
And I always allowed myself to do non-commercial work. In fact, probably most of my best work was done procrastinating for instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing. But no, I think art is incredibly collaborative. And even the projects we're doing right now, like the one we just finished, was with a group called Mesantoukani that was an artist I met at a trade show doing a Leon Speakers event at a design show. And through our collaboration, you know, even today, we are exploring the depths of new work, new products, new imaginative things.
Mark Clague: 26:38
You know, we can't forget to talk about Mothfire because I have become a big fan of craft beer and love Mothfire Brewing. And so, how did how do you get from speakers to beer?
Noah Kaplan: 26:49
Speakers to beer. That is an incredibly important.
Mark Clague: 26:52
Musicians never drink. So I wouldn't have possibly have happened by accident.
Noah Kaplan: 26:55
Exactly, exactly. So as we were building Leon Speakers, I never would have imagined how much travel I would do. You know, I was traveling to different states, coast to coast, all the time, you know, spending almost a third of my life on the road. And at night, what I would do is I would look for who was playing local music and what breweries were open, and then what vintage shops I can go to.
So I started living through that lens of craft breweries.
Mark Clague: 27:20
I see. And then you st—
Noah Kaplan: 27:22
I started becoming completely enthralled by the styles that were going on on, you know, the West Coast versus the East Coast.
Mark Clague: 27:29
Oh, I remember, yeah, going to Denver and going to left-hand brewing and all over it.
Noah Kaplan: 27:33
It's it's incredible. And you start noticing like, wait, how did the style evolve? Like, why and why how did hazy IPAs come up? I'm like, this was as interesting to me as rock and roll itself. The other cool thing was like watching them start in these little industrial lots and seeing them just evolve into full-scale businesses and campuses and you know, lines forming when people are releasing beers.
That's when the spark came like, wait, we have to create something that will bring the energy to our campus, to our factory. I had been working there at that point where we are currently in the campus for almost 10 years. We worked all the time. We're just we're still like a crazy obsessive art studio. And we'd be working there all day and then it'd be in the dark. No one's around. We decided at a certain point, we're like, you know what? We need, why isn't Ann Arbor have any hazy IPAs? Why don't we have any West Coast IPAs? Who's making the beers? We have like three breweries at the time where like, we need to start making beer. So we started like almost a beer club in the file room. Fast forward a few months, all of a sudden we had a professional one-barrel custom-made system from Colorado with all the stainless steel rigged into the back of the factory.
Mark Clague: 28:39
In a way, you've been answering this question the whole way, but in terms of like what you say to young artists today, whether they're current students or recent alums, what are the keys do you think of of helping them uncover their artistic potential?
Noah Kaplan: 28:53
I love talking to people about the trade and the craft and the work. You know, not to get in your head. You can get in your head because of all these myths and stories that we've all grown up with. You know, we only see the top .0001% of what's ever been created right in museums or in books. And now you're exposed to so much on social media, it can almost become overwhelming.
Mark Clague: 29:13
Right.
Noah Kaplan: 29:14
The best thing to do is the work, relentlessly work. And when you're doing that work, to be around friends, to be around other people thinking about other things besides art, you know, the the multidisciplinary thinking that it takes to like just move beyond what you were doing. So I'll meet with young artists now and I'll look at a work and be like, "Can you do this same work again?" "What do you mean?" I'm like, "This is the first thought you had to do this. Maybe you can try it, treat the background differently." "What do you mean?" "Do you know what a ground is?" "No." So by studying all art throughout history, like, you know, at least I can now aim people at new thoughts. And like when you look back on art history, you know, it wasn't Michelangelo just working by himself, right? It wasn't Da Vinci working. They were companies of people behind them.
Mark Clague: 29:57
Right. Yeah.
Noah Kaplan: 29:58
All these early marble studios, these were factories of brilliant workers and crafts. The studio of Rembrandt. The studio of Rembrandt, these are craftspeople and they're led by vision. So figuring out what your vision is, your purest self, and like knowing that it's just an exploration and not don't take it too seriously. Play around, absorb it, change it, break it, shred it, throw it out, throw wine on it, step on it, ruin your favorite thing. Those are the thoughts I love to do because art school did definitely get heady at times.
And I think it was more like a crash into it kind of person. And I still am like, I don't throw a lot of thought at it for better or for worse. It's like, let's go, let's make this happen, let's create the vision.
Mark Clague: 30:39
That sense of play and the sense of feels like today, like there's so much like weight put on every little thing. And you know, you're gonna put it online and everybody, the world's gonna judge you for every little thing. And part of it was that that moment you were saying earlier in your career where you could play and it wasn't that expensive to do stuff and you didn't care about it, and you just made it happen.
Noah Kaplan: 30:59
You made it happen and like you did a lot of work, and you know, a lot of the studio artists I work with, like the best work, you know, those little scraps of paper where you doodled on or you wrote this thing that inspired you. And those are the things I'm looking at now. The finished work is beautiful at the end, often too. The museums, the galleries, what it takes. But that journey to get there to me is definitely the more interesting part. Once it gets to commerce, you're like, okay, let's hope people buy this work. And that's a lot of pressure for people.
So it is real, like it is real business at the end, and you got to really think about that. So I'm not saying career-wise or business plan-wise. Like, I love thought of planning about what you want out of your art career. What do you want? Discovering what you want out of your career is very hard for people to do. I didn't realize that.
I wrote a piece of paper when I was 21 years old of what I imagined I'd be doing right now. And I have the drawing, it's terrible drawing. But I had imagined this world, you know, and in this world, you know, that it was a music venue and a stage and a gallery and a space for people. It's so weirdly right. So to get to where we are now, like, how do you get into spaces and places?
And I've learned to love throughout all this, that my favorite parts about this has been the people I've met and the times where we're all just put everything aside and just be together, be people, be connected through whatever we're doing, laugh, drink, eat a burger, order a quad, order a triple.
So in this town where I've been now for 30 years, where we have factory spaces and a campus, and now, you know, campus at York. Like, if you go look around, you'll look in the details that like these are all art and music spaces, yeah. Um, and places for people to be together. And my hope is that people are hanging out and being together and creating and living and expressing themselves and spending time with friends, because sometimes today you could feel so disconnected and it's insane.
And so that's really still what keeps me here and draws me here is like all these real historical spaces, the culture of the campus, and like kind of the open atmosphere for thinking, you know, intellectually, academically, artistically, musically. It's still alive.
Mark Clague: 33:06
Well, I hope everyone listening to this just feels inspired to just go hang out and see what the possibilities are. And thank you so much for coming in and talking with us today. It's been an awesome conversation.
Noah Kaplan: 33:14
Same, same. Thanks for having me, Mark. Appreciate it.
Mark Clague: 33:20
Creative Currents is a project of the University of Michigan's Arts Initiative. Please subscribe to hear more great conversations with artists, scholars, and arts leaders from across the campus and across the globe.
Send your comments and suggestions via email to creativecurrents@umich.edu. This episode of Creative Currents was produced by Jessica Jenks and edited by Brian Lilly. Our original theme music is composed and performed by Ansel Neely, an alumnus of the University of Michigan's School of Music, Theater, and Dance.
To learn more about the University of Michigan's Arts Initiative, please visit our website at arts.umich.edu.
Thank you for listening and for being part of the Michigan Arts community. It makes our campus so fabulous. Until next time, stay curious, stay inspired, and keep your creative currents flowing.
