Arts @ Large is committed to providing equitable access to arts educational experiences. Since 2001, A@L has engaged Milwaukee’s students, their families and the community in arts-rich experiential learning. The organization is grounded by four cornerstones: eco-literacy, civil rights, technology and innovation, and peacemaking, and they cater their work to serve three distinct groups: community, artists, and teachers/students/schools.

Arts @ Large will further develop their Artist-in-Residence program and establish a Legacy Library. Artists-in-residence will present work, host field trips for local schools, and lead crucial community conversations. Each residency contributes to their Legacy Library, creating content, curriculum and instructional design that will be available for all their artists and educators.

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts facilitates the creation, presentation, and understanding of contemporary art through an international residency program, exhibitions, and educational programs. The artist-centric nonprofit inspires an open and diverse dialogue on the critical issues that give shape and meaning to the human condition.

Bemis intends to develop a campus-wide facility plan, expand its residency program to include families and artists with disabilities, and create a full-time Community Experience and Engagement Manager position. These initiatives sustain Bemis’ objectives of serving the state of Nebraska and the region as an epicenter for the production, presentation, and understanding of contemporary art, while working towards eliminating existing barriers that prevent artists and community members from engaging in their programming.

The Coleman Center for the Arts is a nonprofit contemporary arts organization located in York, Alabama. The center’s mission is to integrate contemporary art into education, civic life, and community development throughout the region by providing community-based artists’ residency programs and exhibitions, free resources, and space for artists-community experimentation.

As arts programs for schools in the region remain scarce, the organization plans to develop a visual arts curriculum in collaboration with a local junior high school, and rehabilitate a residency space to accommodate visual, performing, digital, and culinary arts opportunities. The center will also launch the Black Belt Art Collective, a monthly gathering of local artists, artisans, and makers to inform new ways to create and bolster a local art economy.

Independent Curators International (ICI) supports curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement. Curators are arts community leaders and organizers who champion artistic practice; build essential infrastructures and institutions; and generate public engagement with art. They work with art spaces in the US and around the world to present exhibitions and public programs for broad audiences; and professional development initiatives for curators.

ICI launches a five-year initiative focused on the Mississippi River basin, bringing together curators, artists, and art spaces to expand and energize the region’s cultural landscape and contemporary art through collaboration, research, and experimentation; and re-imagine the U.S.’s identity through the river, the lands it connects, the histories it weaves together, and the cultural flows it has enabled.

People’s Kitchen Collective is a grassroots project that works at the intersection of art and activism with the goal to not only fill stomachs, but also nourish souls, feed minds, and fuel a movement. The collaboration’s practice reflects the diverse backgrounds of co-founders Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, Jocelyn Jackson, and Saqib Keval. Written in their families’ recipes are the maps of migrations and stories of resilience, serving as the foundation for immersive experiences that honor the shared struggles of their people. PKC believes in radical hospitality as a strategy to address the urgent social issues of our time.

PKC launches Earth Seed, a project that unfolds across California through a series of walks and a community meal. Inspired by Octavia Butler’s Theory of Change and the legacy of survival programs by the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, PKC enacts hospitality as a survival practice, cultivating mutual aid, and bolstering collective resistance in this time of transformation. Through Earth Seed, the collective asks: what is the future of survival?

The Black School is an experimental art school teaching Black, POC students and allies to become agents of change in their communities through art and design workshops based in Black radical histories and public projects that address local community needs. Based on their commitment to community building and their core principles of Black love, wellness, and self-determination, The Black School’s mission is to promote and extend the legacy of art in Black radical histories by providing innovative education alternatives.

As they build their schoolhouse, The Black School will bolster their Youth Program initiatives, including their Design Apprenticeship—a New Orleans to NYC youth exchange program. The organization hopes to expand their capacity by pairing all their teaching artists with trauma-informed educators in future drop-in programs, and have plans to document their Schoolhouse Building journey and process to share widely as a model for the creation of autonomous BIPOC space making.