(the American Festival Project has closed)

Mission and Goals

Recognizing that it is the artist who gives life and form to imagined futures, the American Festival Project exists to support community-centered arts practice: expanding the capacity of the field to enact its hopes and dreams, connecting learnings with learners, protecting and growing the resource of collective and singular imagination.

Our Mission

The American Festival Project believes in the inherent value of cultural identity, cultural diversity and cultural exchange, supports and promotes community-centered arts projects and the development of critical analysis, documentation, and learning exchanges. Culture and the arts are our grounding place, where collaborations between artists and community members make the visible statement that the arts can bring diverse people together to create and foster social change.

Our Goals

The American Festival Project believes that the arts, in mindful conjunction with local and national activism and expertise, are one important approach to facilitating the honest exploration of our shared circumstances. This analysis, coupled with the creative disciplines of the arts through passionate and challenging exchanges, can result in the imaginative enactment of different, non-habitual outcomes to the problems that plague our local and global communities.

The American Festival Project works to:

• Build a network centered in the arts, of practitioners, resources and ideas to approach the labyrinth of problems facing both individuals and communities.

• Develop a straightforward and beneficial infrastructure capable of supporting a democracy of ideas and practices in the arts, led by artists taking responsibility for the state of their field.

• Enact an inclusive conversation within and about the field of community centered arts, exploring practice and theory, aesthetics, and service.

• Help communities, through our practice, reassess the value of art in their homeplaces; its civil, social, political, and imaginative functions; and the necessity of its integration into our daily lives.

The Project believes that the arts can be both valuable in a practical context and stand as brilliant examples of their form.