Seven Organizing Partners
BULK SPACE is a collective dedicated to uplifting the works of marginalized artists in taking up physical and digital space.
We understand first hand the needs of marginalized artists and are committed to building platforms for success via community conversation, exhibitions, and performance in which we identify and develop resources for all of our participants.
Charlotte Street envisions Kansas City as a dynamic home for artists in various career stages and disciplines to thrive, while serving as natural catalysts for an exciting, innovative, and culturally rich city.
Confluence (MN)
The work of Confluence Studio, co-founded by Sam Gould & Duaba Unenra, is formed out of the initiative Beyond Repair. The Studio looks past the rhetoric of “people and places that need fixing” to support ideas of collective learning, community control, and the harnessing of the radical imaginary. Our practice is to resource the entire neighborhood with social tools so that public gatherings might allow us to take the conversation beyond basic needs and towards a shifting and expanding of power, democracy, and communal living.
Public Space One (IA)
Public Space One (PS1) is an artist-led, community-driven contemporary art organization sited in three historic houses in downtown Iowa City. We program events, exhibitions, projects, and performances as well as maintain an infrastructure to host community events and projects.
Our resources and projects include: two community-access studios (the Iowa City Press Co-op for printmaking and book arts, and the Media Arts Co-op for audio, video, and new media), artist-led workshops, residencies, festivals, an art equipment lending library and free art supplies program, private studio space, and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies residency program and reading room. We value experimentation, process, and dialogue, and our spaces and initiatives are dedicated to being welcoming, supportive, and vital to artists and all who share a curiosity or interest in art.
Wormfarm Institute (WI)
Wormfarm cultivates connections between our rural and urban neighbors through art, food, and the land. We do this by investing in our cultureshed:
A cultureshed is similar to the agricultural concept of terroir in which products grown in an area reflect its unique geography, geology and micro-climate. To foster the development of a strong, regional culture, Wormfarm creates, sponsors and hosts artist-led projects that engage the surrounding community.
We believe the power of the arts brings to the sustainability conversation the complexity and context the subject requires. For thousands of years, farmers in cultures around the world interwove dance, music, and art through rituals of planting and harvest in celebration of the land, soil, and those who care for it. Through a contemporary approach and within this timeless context, we continue that tradition.
Public Media Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3, community-based art & culture organization with a mission to create, incubate and sustain innovative and equitable cultural programming through the production and presentation of socially engaged projects, music and art performances, books and magazines, community aid platforms, festivals, radio and video broadcasting, and visual art exhibitions.
Public Media Institute is run and founded by BIPOC and queer community members. PMI’s board, staff, and volunteers work to bolster antiracist, anticapitalist, and anticolonial cultural communities. We do so by championing the work of historically oppressed artists, thinkers, activists, journalists, and other cultural producers, and by nurturing intentionally heterogeneous creative communities. We strive to make PMI’s projects braver, safer, more inclusive, and welcoming to all, especially publics historically unwelcome in cultural institutions.