Remember2019

Project Lead: Ashley Teague, Mauricio Salgado and Arielle Brown

Location: South Phillips County, AR

Partner Organizations: Delta Cultural Center and the Second Baptist Church; Elaine Legacy Center, and Elaine Community Opportunity Seekers; Elaine and Helena city governments

Description: Within the scope of this long-term collaboration to unearth and share through theater the buried history of lynching and its aftermath in South Phillips County, this prototype focuses on influencing public policy by working with city and county authorities to: (1) embed oral history-based arts work in S. Phillips County public life as an instrument of public education and engagement, especially when difficult issues are engaged; and (2) dedicate disused public school space to the creation of an accessible community performance space to serve local needs for public truth-telling and the creative dialogue it engenders.

"conNECKted"

Project Lead: Gwylene Gallimard and the “conNECKted” team

Location: Charleston, SC

Partner Organizations: Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs, City Gallery, City of Charleston

Description: Overall, this is a multi-part project: creating community maps, installing them, with video interviews and other participatory installations in a major exhibit at the City Gallery, engaging community members and public-sector leaders in assessing the damage to cultural and social fabric from prior development. This process is intended to stimulate dialogue about and serious consideration of the adoption of a Cultural Impact Study (CIS) policy in Charleston to prevent future such harm.

Cultural Impact Study in Seattle

Project Lead: Diana Falchuk

Location: Seattle, WA

Partner Organizations: City of Seattle Racial Equity Lab

Description: This project will embed a Cultural Impact Study within the City of Seattle’s Racial Equity Toolkit (RET) and provide guidance on using creative, culture-based formats in the RET process. The RET is an iterative tool that analyzes how a proposed policy, program, initiative or budgetary decision can achieve racial equity outcomes.  Each City department is required to use the RET a minimum of four times per year, so the CIS will become a requirement for all City departments, across a range of content areas, as part of their Toolkits.

The Sanctuary City Project

Project Lead: Marangeli Mejia Rabell

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Partner Organizations: Philadelphia Latino Film Festival

Description: This project will be a collection of Public Service Announcements (PSAs) produced by local young artists focused on a) promoting a positive image of living in a city that has identified itself as a Sanctuary City for immigrants and b) promoting and advocating for the idea of a Policy on Belonging (and possibly other platform points), as featured in the USDAC’s Policy and Action platform. In addition to promoting the Policy on Belonging, these PSA’s will serve as a means of starting dialogue with city agencies about employing artists to produce PSA’s that foster cultural citizenship and belonging.

BeCville

Project Lead: Matthew Slaats

Location: Charlotesville, VA

Partner Organizations: Pause Lab, City of Charlotessville, NEA, Thomas Jefferson Planning District

Description: Inspired by the international participatory budgeting project, BeCville pairs artists and community members together to use the arts as a means for making neighborhood investments. The project, in partnership with public housing, local schools, and the local planning district, aims to develop new modes of deep community engagement that rests on the creativity of local neighborhoods and allows them to define a vision for their city. 

Migrant Stories and Rights, Inside Out

Project Lead: Heidi Vogel

Location: Harrisonburg, VA

Partner Organizations: Inside Out Playback Theater, Legal Aid Justice Center

Description: Inside Out Playback Theatre, in partnership with the Legal Aid Justice Center, will host storytelling and know-your-rights events in communities of migrant workers on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and use this body of work to create a toolkit for how participatory theater groups/techniques can partner with other legal defense agencies working with vulnerable populations.

Stories of Community: An Arts-based approach to neighborhood planning

Project Lead: Lisa Jo Epstein

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Partner Organizations: Just Act, Germantown United CDC

This project will use arts-based neighborhood engagement processes to amplify residents’ voices in informing commercial corridor planning, demonstrating the way that arts engagement can be an asset to planners and developers and building a model to eventually share with the City of Philadelphia Planning Commission.

Belonging Bandwagon: a Performance Art-Driven Dialogue for Cultural Change

Project Lead: Cristina Cabeza-Kinney

Location: Crestone, CO

Partner Organizations: Company of Players, Crestone Town Board of Trustees and Planning Commission, Awakening The Phoenix

This project will dispatch performative characters across the community for a series of playful, participatory dialogues and actions that build momentum and support for a Policy on Belonging, Cultural Impact Study, and Community Cultural Center in the town of Crestone, Colorado.  

Stick + Move

Project Lead:  Free Egunfemi, Historical Visionary and Founder, Untold RVA and Case Study X

Location: Richmond, VA

Partner Organizations: Case Study X, City of Richmond Public Art Program, Venture Richmond, Story Shop, Storefront for Community Design, Studio Two Three, A People's Record of Richmond, 1708 Gallery/Inlight, University of Richmond, Black History Museum and Cultural Center, Richmond Region Tourism

STICK + MOVE  is Untold RVA's nimble and responsive public history project presented as a series of wheat paste murals reimagining the untold narratives of Richmond’s self determined Historacles -- homegrown change agents and warriors for freedom and justice from the bygone era.

The term STICK + MOVE refers to the agility of street art to install quickly and make low cost/high visibility transformations to the urban landscape.

Beautifully designed low cost, high visibility public art installations will harness the power of tactical urbanism to transform the city’s vacant properties and urban facades into a curated collection of monuments to the uncelebrated achievements of the past.

STICK + MOVE aims to build momentum for more community based content creators to access public funds and benefit from the support of other city agencies so that even more commemorative projects have a greater chance to come to fruition.

Ultimately, STICK + MOVE will inspire the formation of nationally recognized collaborative teams that strive to instill a sense of cultural citizenship and belonging in their own cities based on Free Egunfemi's creative vision for Untold RVA.

OUR VISIBLE WORLD: A (MULTI)ILINGUAL ECOLOGICAL LITERARY/ART EXPERIENCE

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Project Lead: Jessica Ceballos

Partner Organizations: Audubon Center at Debs Park, Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, & more TBA

Through multilingual, environmentally-focused cultural events in public and/or accessible green spaces, this project aims to lead a call to action, supported by Los Angeles Neighborhood Councils representing over 3.5 million residents, for the L.A. City Council to adopt an "Arts for Parks" (campaign title TBD) program. This program, developed through Arts for L.A.’s ACTIVATE Cultural Policy Leadership program, would be explicitly multilingual, centered around, and facilitated by communities of color and low income populations, and focused on supporting the sense of connection, stewardship, and ownership of our green spaces as practiced by exciting communities.