Vital Conversations

INTRODUCING VITAL CONVERSATIONS

Our movements for justice and liberation are fractured. People are isolated and under attack: hunted on the streets by immigration agents, threatened with deportation for their political expression. And it’s become increasingly clear that we can’t turn to our elected officials for guidance.

At the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, we’re returning to our roots: gathering wisdom from our communities through honest, creative conversations. We're launching Vital Conversations, a new multimedia series where USDAC team members sit down with thinkers, artists, and organizers to ask big and small questions—and make beautiful things in the process.

We’re going to be sharing these conversations in different forms: video, zine, comic, music, and more. We’re engaging our own networks and friendships to model the kind of community connection that’s going to help us fight, and we’re making art while we’re at it.

Learn more about the program here.

 
 

People's State of the Union

People's State of the Union

This year, we asked what it might look like to transform our grief and rage into justice. We are honored to present you with this year’s Poetic Address to the Nation, crafted by Emmy Pérez, 2022 USA Fellow & 2020 Texas Poet Laureate. Pérez draws upon her visit to Uvalde last month in the days after the massacre to memorialize the victims, and to call for change.

A People's WPA

A People's WPA

A People's WPA is a storytelling project with the goal of convincing policymakers to invest in arts, culture, and newly imagined sectors of labor critical to our healing and survival. Our newest publication features conversations with artists, writers, and policy makers into a policy toolkit that outlines how to create an artist jobs program at the local, state, and federal level.

Artists Unite for a Green New Deal — Toolkit

Artists Unite for a Green New Deal — Toolkit

What is the Green New Deal? How will it address the climate crisis? What are creative ways to get involved? As artists, educators, cultural workers, and community leaders, it’s our job to envision the more just world we know is possible—and to invite others to help bring it into being. Use these resources from the USDAC to get started!

Artists Unite for a Green New Deal - Summer Call Series

Artists Unite for a Green New Deal - Summer Call Series

Check out the recordings from this three-part series of calls with artists, organizers, scientists and others to unpack the policy and science behind a Green New Deal—and dream into the cultural strategies and creative actions that can help make it real.