The American Festival Project was founded in 1981 to maximize the ability of performance companies from different cultural backgrounds to work together publicly – making a visible statement that the arts could bring diverse people together in focused conversation to support social change.

From its beginning, the American Festival Project led the emergent community arts field in promoting cultural exchange, the valuation and performance of the local, and the benefits of bringing a diversity of voices together to address social problems through the arts. Since 1988, the Project has resided at Appalshop, a media and cultural center in Whitesburg, Kentucky.

Through the years, the American Festival Project has constantly reimagined itself, clarifying its mission and experimenting with a number of formats and partnerships in an effort to better serve community: free-ranging, state-wide festivals based on story-telling; place-based partnerships to address a single issue of local importance from multiple perspectives; a consortium of universities and community colleges exploring culture as a center for teaching the value of diversity; festivals that purposefully cross borders and explore notions of representation . . .

At the heart of each of its two dozen projects (addressing issues as difficult and pervasive as violence, gay and lesbian rights, divisions created by class, and an ongoing exploration of race and racism), the American Festival Project has focused on the importance and analysis of individual and collective narratives.

In 2000, the American Festival Project took stock of its resources and potential, history and experience, and made a conscious decision to evolve to a new level of purpose and activity. Recognizing the need for creative support systems and a deeper investment in community engagement, a more responsible self-governance, and an ongoing platform for analysis and communication, the Project began a series of working gatherings of artists to explore the practice and potential of community based arts.

Project experimentation, based on mindful intuition, experiential learning and a desire to expand the notions of narrative and the role of art in community, began with the Artist and Community Gathering of June 2000 in rural southeast Kentucky and southwest Virginia. Seeking a way for artists to work in under resourced areas without traditional arts infrastructure – to meet up, recognize, merge with local expertise, and explore open-ended ways to define and begin place-based projects, the Gathering allowed twenty-two artists (most of whom had never before been involved with the AFP) from across the nation and twice as many local participants live together for a week, walk the terrain, and talk endlessly – an intense exchange of information and ideas without mediation or imposed agenda.

Out of this investment in the front-end of the community arts process, universally valid in small towns, suburban expanses, or city neighborhoods, came a whirlwind of ideas, possibilities, and concrete projects: alternative history plays, media workshops, arts training camps, alternative transportation systems, new venues for performance, and new ways of identifying and exhibiting the existing arts and artifacts of place.

Large, ambitious collaborations developed as well: Suzanne Lacy, Yutaka Kobayashi, and Susan Steinman working with a town of four hundred to explore their collective sense of land and self; John Malpede recreating Robert Kennedy’s seminal 1968 Poverty Tour in real time through the region with hundreds of participants; Nobuko Miyamoto and the brilliant activist elder Grace Lee Boggs exploring Detroit and Lee County, Virginia communities dealing with the traffic in rural and urban exigencies, the notions of loss and travel, and desperately needed ways to reclaim and respirit devastated landscapes.

Recognizing the challenges presented by this new way of working (an institutionalized artistic freedom) to its notions of membership, governance, project development, information sharing, and management, the American Festival Project convened a gathering of its peer practitioners at New Mexico’s Upaya Zen Center in April 2001 to ask their counsel on the needs and directions of the field as a whole, and what role the American Festival Project could play in moving that agenda forward. At Upaya, and a year later at the Trinity Retreat in Connecticut, we created and affirmed the structures and programs described on this page.