PROGRAM OVERVIEW
Our programs bridge the gaps between cultural organizers, artists, and social change movements through the following four strategies.
Check out our latest project: Vital Conversations!
When political repression is on the rise, the creative spirit must rise with it. The USDAC is launching a new series: Vital Conversations—real talk with culture-bearers, truth-tellers, and resistance artists shaping our collective future. View the project here.
POLITICAL EDUCATION FOR ARTISTS
We support and sustain a vibrant movement for liberatory change by investing in the leadership development and training of artist-activists and cultural workers.
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!
Check out our newest guide: Imaginings: A DIY Guide to Arts-Based Community Dialogue, everything you need to know to host a vibrant, creative, equitable, and powerful community dialogue.
In this Citizen Artist Salon, we’ll get ready for the Global Climate Action Summit by hearing from leaders of three projects centering art to build power and confront the climate crisis—and we’ll discuss ways that we can all step up our creative action.
CULTURE & POLICY SHIFT
We aim to shift the material conditions that artists and cultural organizers are currently working within by using policy as a tool. We do this by advocating for policy changes that improve and expand access and resources for cultural organizers.
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.
In this Citizen Artist Salon, we’ll get ready for the Global Climate Action Summit by hearing from leaders of three projects centering art to build power and confront the climate crisis—and we’ll discuss ways that we can all step up our creative action.
We offer this platform to amplify ideas that can advance social healing and bring us closer to a future that countless Citizen Artists have told us they wish to inhabit: cultural democracy grounded in equity and engagement; full cultural citizenship, belonging without barrier; and deep respect for the right to culture—expression, participation, recognition—underpinning any just and caring society.
Disrupt narratives of hate. Model participatory democracy. Here are nine creative ways to step up with a Super Public Act of Compassion or Participatory Act of Culture!
We the people have the power to enshrine the #RightToBelong as public and private policy. A policy is a kind of pledge to guide future action. When an agency or institution adopts a policy, they are saying, “Hold us accountable to this.”
NETWORK WEAVING
We connect artists and cultural organizers to each other, and to movement organizations. Our programs create clear pathways for cultural organizers to connect, convene, and collaborate with each other and with movement organizations.
We commemorated 6 years of our #HonorHativeLand toolkit with a special Network Gathering online concert featuring music from Frank Waln and Pura Fe, with a special Q&A with Pura Fe afterwards.
In April 2023, we hosted our Spring Network Gathering with special guests Layel Camargo from Shelterwood Collective and Saleem Hue Penny, who helped us understand the broad ways that cultural organizing takes place.
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.
Hosted in partnership with 400 Years of Inequality: A People’s Observance for a Just Future, this salon explored place-based creative strategies for truth-telling and collective healing.
PLAY & PERFORMANCE
In the absence of a "real" federal department of Arts and Culture, we are “performing” the state, supporting the communities and work we'd want to see that agency support. We catalyze possibilities for new worlds, new systems, and new rituals through this play and performance.
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.
This July 2016 petition delivered to members of the Democratic Platform Committee in advance of the Convention in Philadelphia, calls on elected officials and policy-makers to invest in artists and community development. A healthy democracy embraces the right to culture, engaging us as whole people, not just workers or consumers, but as creators and communicators. This platform shared with the DNC demands equitable investment in cultural infrastructure and in artists who put their gifts at the service of community.
On 27 January 2017, a presidential executive order was issued blocking refugees and restricting immigration from Muslim countries. Protest has been immediate and massive.
History teaches us that authoritarian regimes start their mission of domination with the right to culture: limiting cultural communities’ freedom of movement and practice; condemning or restricting press freedom; condemning or restricting artistic expression; and denying the fullness of belonging to all but a privileged few. Artists and creative activists have key roles to play.
Join over 1,000 artists and allies who have already signed the pledge.
In the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, in August, 2014, the USDAC called on all artists and creative activists to join in the movement to demilitarize the police and bring justice to victims of publicly funded racism. Find links and resources to other post-Ferguson activist projects here too.