Patrick Olson is an artist and businessman. He founded Hayden-McNeil, now a subsidiary of Macmillan Publishers. In 2022, he wrote and starred in the performance art piece, Emergence.
Olson founded Hayden-McNeil, based in Plymouth, Michigan in 1992. It published custom-made materials for schools and student bodies including "textbooks, lab manuals, and curriculum supplements across a range of subject areas and for colleges and universities."[1] Macmillan Publishers acquired Hayden-McNeil in 2008.[2] [3]
In 2004 he opened the Patrick Olson Gallery.[4]
Olson co-produced the 2013 film Love and Honor, originally titled AWOL.[5] [6]
In 2021, Olson released his first album Music For Scientists.[7] Olson lists Arctic Monkeys and The Rolling Stones[8] as well as the New Wave movement and performance artists of the 1980s as influences.[9]
In 2022, Olson performed Emergence: Things Are Not As They Seem at the El Portal Theatre in Los Angeles. The show transferred to Pershing Square Signature Center in October 2023 for a three-month Off-Broadway run.[10]
Emergence was a collection of spoken-word monologues about the human experience featuring art, science and music. During an interview with New York Live, Olson described the show as "[bringing] art and science together into some kind of intersection."[11]
Doctor Gary Small reported in Psychology Today that Patrick Olsen's work "reminded [him] that although [he] might not ever be able to answer those big questions, [he] thoroughly enjoyed pondering them."[12]
Heavily influenced by Talking Heads, Emergence has been likened to American Utopia by David Byrne[13] due to "the jerky staccato moves and probing questions that evoke the lyrics of Talking Heads’ 1980 hit “Once in a Lifetime”."[9]