“Why Culture Matters to Justice” is a series of essays commissioned by 

 as part of their Culture Justice Initiative (CJI). Believing the value of this content goes beyond our organization, NPN reached out to online publications within the arts and social justice movement sectors. This series is being cross-published by National Performance Network, 

Convergence, A Magazine for Radical Insights

Landscapes, a digital platform from A Blade of Grass

. Each day this week, an essay will be released. None of what you read this week is sacrosanct. Agree, disagree, contemplate, or expound on—are all welcome forms of engagement. This work is offered in the spirit of protagonism with the hope of provoking dialogue, influencing strategy, and deepening practice.


Artists and cultural workers are an integral part of all revolutionary movements across geography and time. From Chinese puppetry, to the harmonies of Sweet Honey in the Rock, to the Místicas of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, culture has added to the canon of what resistance can look like.

Living in a time of authoritarianism and proto-fascism means culture has been hijacked. These conditions did not appear overnight. Little by little, we have been trained through reward and violence to accept and even champion systems and ways of being that were never designed to hold the well-being and dignity of all life.

These means of coercive control answer the age-old question: “Why would people work against their own interests?” The answer is because many have come to believe that there is no alternative but to be successful within these systems. One’s beliefs about the world are transmitted through culture—both popular and intimate. If we are going to inspire collective action, we must intervene on the level of belief by experimenting, investing in, and uplifting ways of being that counter the current hegemonic culture. It is time to grow our understanding of, and delve more deeply into, cultural strategy.

In 1995, the novelist Toni Morrison gave 

the convocation speech at Howard University.

 It was entitled “Racism and Fascism.” In it, she says, “Racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new.“ As this speech and many talks before and after show us, Morrison was a brilliant student of the world. She entreats that the twins of racism and fascism do not make anything new and through that she provides us direction on how to be strategic in the moment.

In this current moment of authoritarianism and proto-fascism, our strategies require people who can create something new. For artists and cultural workers, creation is craftwork and that extends beyond an artistic discipline. It makes them instrumental in this current moment of struggle.

A presenter during a major arts conference spoke about the ways arts and culture helped people get through the pandemic. He quipped, “I mean, what would we have done without Netflix?” While that may be true in some sense, statements like that reduce culture to a commodity. Culture supported well-being during the pandemic by providing critical mutual aid networks, activating public spaces for care and protest, and reviving long-standing community practices. In the face of fractured systemic social support systems, cultural interventions connected people and moved us towards collective care.

This reference to the value of art and culture by the conference presenter appears throughout movement spaces as well. The request for fifteen minutes of performance for the rally or the strategy to “meet people where they are” has often meant an engagement with culture in its most popular sense. Culture and pop culture are treated as the same.

Movement history has demonstrated that shifts away from a racial capitalist colonial culture never start as popular. Culture is something that starts at the margins and grows to become the center. Not only is it not popular, but attempts to create different, more just societal arrangements are met with violence and coercion to keep people in their place.

Oppressive forces use two primary strategies to keep us in a culture of repression and dominance. Societal arrangements rooted in racial, economic, and social hierarchies work to truncate the imagination and keep people ahistorical, disconnecting them from lineage.

The first strategy disappears or rewrites history, erasing labor and fostering a fixation on the “never seen before.” Unlike Morrison’s invitation towards something new as evolution, this strategy creates disconnection. It uplifts individual inspiration over collective learning and rewards singular, charismatic leadership. Being ahistorical makes it impossible to connect and learn from each historical moment.

We see this tactic used over and over again. Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their land and sent to boarding schools to “kill the Indian” in them. CLR James writes in 

, “The only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of capitalist history.” Erasure is a tactic of cultural warfare because without connection to a lineage, the subjugation of the individual is much more possible. Every insurgency has found a way to forcibly push against erasure.

The second strategy used to reduce culture’s fundamental role in revolution is the truncation of our imagination. That our imaginations are contested spaces is not new. In a 

 author and abolitionist organizer walidah imarisha reminds us that we are “living inside the imagination of old white men.” Fevered dreams of power, supremacy, and fascism are shaping the conditions of our lives every day. When the question asked is “In what world does any of this make sense?” the answer is that our spiral towards mass poverty and the destruction of the Earth’s necessary resources across race and class makes way for a few billionaires to play.

The capture of imagination leads masses of people to believe that fevered dream could be theirs as well. Racial imperial capitalism subjugates the imagination through systems of violence and coercion to reward complicity in the world never built for the well-being of all living beings: a world that requires racial, economic, and gender inequality and subjugation of the majority of people for a few to amass ecologically unsustainable amounts of wealth.

This series addresses these strategies directly with essays that ask us to evolve our thinking and engage history as a practice of Sankofa, to go back and fetch it. Uplifting the history of resistance through culture within the Chicano Movement of Denver, Colorado across generations asserts the potency of culture as a pathway to renewed strength through remembering. This series also asks us to open up our imaginations. It asks the question, 

 Each essay charges our curiosity by offering language, concepts and strategies towards a more nuanced relationship between culture and justice.

There is a difference between engaging aspects of culture to further a goal and the intentional shaping of culture itself. Cultural strategy involves both, but far too often the focus is on culture as an instrument for change. Culture is used to make the change rather than culture being the focus of the change. In this moment, we need to investigate, experiment with, and uplift cultural practices rooted in communalism, care, and justice for the sake of collective liberation. Cultural strategy looks at the past, present, and future to develop the capacities we need to fight for and live in a different world. In other words, cultural strategy addresses history, assesses the current conditions, and imagines how to organize people. Cultural strategy is found in the how as much as the what.

If we take culture seriously as a front in the fight for liberation and justice, then “fighting” on that front requires strategy and collective action. We can no longer think about culture as something that just happens or solely as something that is passed down. Culture is a living, evolving organism that shapes us all and has the capacity to be shaped through intention.

For some, that has meant leaning into pop culture as a way to connect and build movement. In 2024, the Democratic National Convention used 200 social media influencers to spread the word and encourage civic participation. Many of these influencers had no history of political content on their platforms and were given unprecedented access to candidates and officials. 

The DNC’s choice to use influencers left little room for traditional press and skilled journalists.

 This is an example of a strategy colluding with oppressive forces to limit the press under the guise of engaging with popular culture. While the DNC is neither Left nor Radical, this example can still be used as a warning and an invitation for rigor in our methods.

When people refer to the Culture War, they are often referring to the repression of artistic freedom in the late 1980s and 1990s in which federal lawmakers became moral police for the National Endowment for the Arts, and obscenity charges were brought against individual artists and directors of predominantly white arts institutions.

Yet there is a larger and longer view of the war on culture dating back to enslavement and the first attempts at colonization. The outlawing of the drum was not only an assault on a cultural connection that could provide enslaved people a respite from the horrors they endured. It was an assault on the very act of communication itself. Similarly, the strategic decision to ensure that the few people who spoke the same language or were from the same villages were not housed together was a war on culture.

Attacks on artists such as Billie Holiday, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paul Robeson were attempts to silence anyone who was using culture as a strategy towards liberation. In 

 Amílcar Cabral, revolutionary strategist of the decolonial revolution of Guinea-Bissou, states, “History teaches us that in certain circumstances it is quite easy for a stranger to impose his rule on a people. History equally teaches us that whatever the material aspects of that rule, it cannot be sustained except by permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people in question.”

Today, we see how the Kennedy Center has become a tool to weaponize and erase culture for the current administration. And we see people showing up and protesting outside the building because of the cultural legacies embodied in the institution. The community is organizing because they understand the importance of culture.

The possibility of a progressive, functional democracy is hampered by a failed two-party system, vicious voter disenfranchisement, and a collective descent into Antonio Gramsci’s crisis of legitimacy that undermines people’s belief that a democratic government can be salvaged, much less work for all. At the same time, there are brilliant organizers working on building a multi-party system and fighting in the streets and the courts against redistricting and voter disenfranchisement.

Cultural strategies can bolster this work by refounding the belief that collective care can be central to a thriving society and grow what Aisha Shillingford of Intelligent Mischief refers to in her essay “

” as “a collective political imaginary grounded in love, care, regeneration and interdependence.”

The essays in this series are designed to introduce an expanded engagement with culture. This is an invitation to wrestle with the content and concepts offered and allow your agreement, disagreement, and/or curiosity to sharpen your understanding of the role of culture in our lives, movements, and society. This series takes on the expansiveness and importance of culture as a necessary component for building interventions that can move from the intimate or hyperlocal to the level of societal transformation. These essays bring philosophies, practices, and lessons from behind the paywalls of the academy where much of the current cultural theory is expressed. The authors represented are practitioners. Their ideas have been born through years of experimentation and study.

To come to this body of work, the writers brought their ideas to a four-day convergence in rural Mississippi. They spent their time having morning discussions and writing in the afternoon. The essays offer thoughts on shifting our understanding of culture(s), strategy development, a historic case study, and a current intervention.

Vanessa Whang – “What Is Cultural Justice?”

Evan Bissell – “Experience As a Whole: Expanding the Boundaries of Cultural Strategy”

Allen Kwabena Frimpong (nii.a.k) – “Building a Reparative Framework for Cultural Equity: Redesigning Creative Business Through Solidarity Economy”

Tanya Mote – “Chicano Cultural Resistance, a Case Study Across Generations”

outline of the 5 basic stages of movement building

 starts with “Making visible the invisible.” This series makes culture visible as a front in the fight for justice, so we can hone our strategies and be intentional about where society goes from here.

Attendees at the Culture Justice Institute retreat. From top left: Tanya Mote, muthi reed, Vanessa Whang, and Brandon Black. From bottom left: Evan Bissell, Allen Kwabena Frimpong, Sage Crump, and Riley Yaxley.

Sage Crump (she/her) is a culture strategist, artist, and movement facilitator who expands and deepens the relationship between the cultural sector and social justice organizing. Based in New Orleans but working nationally, she leverages creative practice and the cultural sector to transform systemic oppressions. Sage is a member of Complex Movements, a Detroit-based artist collective whose interdisciplinary work supports local and translocal visionary organizing. She is co-founder of The Kinfolk Effect (TKE), an incubation space for multimedia installation work that examines the movement of Blackness through time and space with artist muthi reed. Sage was an inaugural cultural strategy fellow at Opportunity Agenda and released a Cultural Strategy Toolkit. At NPN, she led Leveraging A Network for Equity (LANE) before founding the 

Department of Racial Justice & Movement Building

 in 2023; she was named Co-Executive Director in 2026. Sage is a former co-director of the Emergent Strategies Ideation Institute. She is a former member of LeftRoots, a member of the Guild of Future Architects, Women of Color in the Arts, and a board member with the Center for Cultural Innovation, Art2Action, Double Edge Theater, Change Elemental, and Mark-n-Sparks. Sage’s work incorporates movement history, complex sciences, emergent strategy, and creative practice to imagine the world we want to live in and build strategies and practices that will get us there.

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Sage Crump

Artists and cultural workers are an integral part of all revolutionary movements across geography and time. From Chinese puppetry, to the harmonies of Sweet Honey and the Rock, to the Místicas of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, culture has added to the canon of what resistance can look like.

Why Culture Matters to Justice

Culture and the Moment

“Cultural justice” is not a term we hear very often—or perhaps at all. We hear and read about social justice and racial justice, economic justice and environmental justice, gender justice and disability justice, and retributive justice and restorative justice. So, when asked if I would write what I thought about cultural justice, my first thought was, 

Wait, do I know what I think cultural justice is?

This essay reflects my journey to answer that question. Along the way, I will address how I think cultural equity is different from cultural justice and why I believe the difference between them matters—not only to those of us working in the cultural sector, but to pluralistic democracy in our country.

First, some context. As I write, we are journeying through a second Trump term in the White House (yes, we did it again). To put it mildly, it’s been a bumpy ride. So, what I have to say is much more tragic now than it would be in more benign times, and it continues to be a confounding fact: The extreme right understands the importance and power of culture more deeply than many of those in the middle and left of the spectrum—including those in the nonprofit arts and culture sector.

Case in point: created by an Executive Order on Trump’s first day in office, the so-called 

 (DOGE) was charged with, among other things, ridding our national government of supposed billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. But that stated purpose was a smoke screen for a different agenda. It was no arithmetic mistake that DOGE went after a number of agencies with miniscule budgets. Some of the small agencies and organizations pointedly attacked or eviscerated were the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Archives, the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Combined, their budgets are less than one percent of the federal budget. But these agencies punch above their weight as propagators of knowledge building, discernment, critical thinking, innovative arts production, traditional cultural practices, trusted information, and as repositories of documentation, material culture, history, memory, and stories we tell ourselves about who we are or could be. In short, they are the holders and molders of our culture—or more precisely, 

Authoritarians understand that to usurp power you must create new, simple narratives and destroy the old ones: replace fact-checked journalism with “Truth Social”; punish those who question and reward those who kowtow; call what is actually just “unfair” and what is equitable “prejudicial”; erase the plural and promote the monolithic. When you destroy the cultural institutions that aspire to be open and democratic, you lay the foundations for autocratic rule.

Sadly, liberal society in our country, even in the best of times, maintains an anemic resource environment for the broad diversity of culture makers in our country. Why is that, when the cultural diversity of the United States is often trumpeted as our superpower? Why aren’t we championing the creativity, insights, and ingenuity of our many cultures—the different ways of being in and knowing the world—when they have the potential of lighting the way to how we might best coexist and be sustained?

Unfortunately, our country as a whole is held in thrall of an increasingly extreme form of capitalism and the 

 that it relies on. (As of 2024, less than two percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are Black, while Black workers make up 13 percent of the labor force and 19 percent of minimum wage workers.) An overclass needs an underclass to extract from to build wealth, and racial discrimination and its allies, patriarchy and class prejudice, have proven a faithful framework to promote what is too often greed cloaked in narratives of growth, trickle-down prosperity, and meritocracy.

The construction and perpetuation of dominant culture and systems are foundational to:

our New Gilded Age inequality (as of 2024, 

the richest one percent in the United States held almost 31 percent

 of the country’s wealth while the bottom half of households held 2.5 percent; the median Black family in the US has 

a net worth of just 15.5 percent of a median white family

11 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were women

“today’s top 1 percent of companies by sales account for 80 percent of revenues”

the now fast-motion destruction of the equalizing effects of the public sector. “Wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are the punching bags of this administration because they acknowledge and attempt to address the historical power and resource imbalances and injustices that persist in our country, our states, and our neighborhoods.

The desire for an equitable multiracial/multicultural democracy is in direct conflict with the desire to keep racialized capitalism alive and well.

But this essay isn’t meant to be a political analysis of the moment; nor am I an economist. This is the backdrop to a critique of habits in the arts and culture field that make it complicit in upholding the pernicious hierarchies of racial, cultural, gender, and class inequality that undergird United States economic dominance—even though we might think we are standing for the exact opposite. My critique, however, acknowledges that complicity can be difficult to avoid given how much established infrastructure holds those hierarchies stubbornly in place. It is hard not to drink the Kool-Aid when you’re swimming in it.

Since at least the Industrial Revolution in the United States, we have constructed temples to high art and learning—that is, museums, symphony halls, opera houses, and theatres. Captains of industry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrated their success, sophistication, and sometimes civic spirit (noblesse oblige) by creating fine arts venues that looked to Europe for inspiration and validation. The philosophy of 

 by Andrew Carnegie had broad influence on the cultural infrastructure built in the United States and on the philanthropic sector. So, it is not surprising that the arts field (including its funders) lives in the shadow of European notions of “high art,” “fine art,” and “art for art’s sake,” often maintaining Europe’s elite and ethnocentric eye for judging what excellence looks like.

The way we think and talk about the arts today, arguably, is a product of the wealth concentration of the Renaissance, when patronage of the arts made anonymous artisans into individual artists. The meaning of the word “art” moved from referring to a generalized skill (like the art of cooking or the art of blacksmithing) and became something bespoke, commodified, and product-focused—commissioned by the wealthy as symbols of status. This market-driven, “genius”-pedestaling way of defining artistic production and artists still lives with us and can dictate what kind of cultural production gets valued most highly in esteem and in dollars.

The complicity of our field in upholding the United States’s social hierarchy can be found both in actions and in words. It has been a minute since the 2017 

 study by the Helicon Collaborative showed that in the previous five years of arts funding and staffing in the United States had become less equitable despite significant efforts (and claims) to address this issue. Have things gotten any better since then?

 research brief that looked at managers working at museums; publishers of books, magazines, and newspapers; advertising, public relations, and design firms; and at bookstores from 2015–2019, roughly 80 percent were white, as were 75 percent of managers of performing arts companies. And in a 

 of the diversity of artists in the collections of eighteen major United States museums, 85 percent of artists were found to be

Things may have gotten a bit better regarding the racial diversity of arts organizations’ rank and file makeup at museums, for example—

. Increased funding in 2020–21 to Black communities due to the “racial reckoning” is turning out to be a 

, and the percent of Black-led arts organizations (11 percent), in particular, hovers below the average for Black-led nonprofits overall (15 percent).

“Diversifying faces in high places” is not a new strategy to address imbalances. Yet it hasn’t progressed very far very fast, and it hasn’t done enough to advance cultural equity. Even given a broader spectrum of decision-makers allocating support for diverse art forms: If the review criteria always come from a dominant culture lens, what difference can it make?

The arts field’s added complicity in its use of language is a subtler and sneakier thing—a form of covert power. It shapes our mindset in the way implicit bias does. The hierarchy is encoded in how we speak, though we may not notice it. So even though we think we are doing the right thing to combat inequity, our use of language can pull us back.

The term “arts and culture” is a culprit in the perpetuation of the cultural hierarchy that places European elite art forms (chamber and orchestral music, ballet, opera, theatre, painting, sculpture, etc.) at the top and everything else below. By literally putting “arts” first, the focal point of our attention is on them, and it is the European elite forms that usually spring to mind when we hear the word “arts.”

So, instead of putting “arts” first, what if it was “culture & arts”—moving the notion of culture before arts? What difference would that make to how we think about our work and how we feel about our field?

I believe placing “culture” before “arts” creates a useful Gestalt switch—and puts culture where it belongs. Of the two notions, culture is primary when we think of it as the overarching framework for the things we do that make us recognizable as a group, a people, a society. I’m talking about the language we speak, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are. Culture springs from our ancestry, the kind of environment we grow up in, and our relationship to the land we live on. Culture is what shapes how we think about family and community and our responsibilities to them, how we define shared or private resources, and who has power and who doesn’t. Culture gives us our sense of what is beautiful (aesthetics), why we exist (spirit), and how we should behave (ethics). Those sensibilities in turn imbue what we do, make, perceive, and experience with meaning and significance. It is from this cauldron of culture that artistic activities and products emerge. Arts are a set of practices; but culture is the context from which these practices spring and get their meaning.

Saying “Arts and Culture” Reinforces the Status Quo

Using the phrase “arts and culture” acts as an agent of the status quo in other ways—not only by putting “arts” in the first position. The use of the word “culture” in the singular also serves to maintain the status quo. Again, with “arts” first, our go-to image is of the typical items and activities in marble institutions. Then, having “culture” follow up in the singular leads us to default to the dominant culture, the supposed one culture that all “serious” art forms belong to and that functions as the lens through which to judge not only its own arts but all others.

The linguistic habits of our field reinforce the othering and denigration of art forms that are not a part of the dominant culture image of high arts with European roots. We typically add qualifiers to the word “art” or names of different artistic disciplines to distinguish art forms that are not part of the dominant culture club: “folk art” is not considered refined, “outsider art” is not legitimately schooled, “traditional art” is branded as an artifact of the past and not contemporary, “community art” is often considered to be low brow and low quality, “world music” is everything except European classical music (as if the latter were so sublime as to not belong to this world), and my particular pet peeve, “ethnic arts/music/dance/theatre,” which erases the ethnicity of Europe altogether.

The normalization of this Europe-inflected default culture in the United States, mixed with the dominance of a deculturized whiteness

 places all other races/ethnicities in a second-class position (or lower). Assimilation to the dominant culture doesn’t have to be as brutal as it was in the missions of California or the plantations of the South to be deeply injurious to those who have experienced cultural erasure, internalized self-hate, and never feeling a sense of belonging—never mind not being able to thrive economically or health-wise.

A side effect of perpetuating an ethno-sanitized dominant culture that is not often talked about is that it can make white Americans’ cultural rootedness invisible to them. When your culture is the default, it becomes invisible to you in the way water is to a fish—it surrounds you, so you don’t even know that it’s there. Hence, many white folks are at a loss when asked about their cultural identity.

This is the flip side of W. E. B. DuBois’s 

 of oppressed peoples—where one suffers the devaluing of one’s own culture and must adopt the culture of the oppressor to survive. The dominance of an idealized whiteness also serves to zero out the deeper cultural rootedness of the white soul.

So, where were we? I was arguing that “culture” should come before “arts” because artistic products and practices can’t be deeply understood (or evaluated) without first knowing about the cultural context they spring from. If you don’t know anything about the specific cultural context and history of an art form, how can you really know what it’s all about? How can you understand what the classical North Indian dance form of Kathak is about if you don’t know anything about the storytelling aspects of its gestures and movements? If you are asked to evaluate singers of 

 who are trading couplets and you don’t understand Spanish or realize that the singers are improvising words and musical phrases and are jousting in a game of one-upmanship, your job will become an impossible task.

How Do We Level the Cultural Playing Field?

If we want to promote cultural equity—that is, leveling the cultural playing field—we need to acknowledge our country (and the world) is full of a multiplicity of cultures that are valid ways of being in and knowing the world. They should be respected on their own terms, not for how they fit (or don’t fit) into the dominant culture. That is, we need to take our lip service to pluralism more seriously.

But aren’t people coming here because they want to partake of American culture as it is?

I can’t speak to what people who come here think of United States culture. I would say, before the current administration, that the United States’s professed values of freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, and due process, though flawed in their execution, were admired generally. But I would challenge how our idea of “out of many, one” has played out.

As noted above, assimilation to a dominant culture has not only done great harm. It has shut out the myriad possibilities of becoming a stronger and wiser nation made possible by respecting diverse cultures and being willing to try different ways of moving in the world, managing resources and relationships, and practicing democracy. That is, to give being a truly multicultural country a try, we need to stop treating non-dominant cultures as essentialized tourism opportunities (“festivals, food, fashion, flags, and famous people”) and question why we are still celebrating “minority” history months (a sure indicator that we still don’t consider those histories a part of history proper). Instead, let’s explore how our pluralism doesn’t have to be put in a box beneath dominant culture.

Not only should “culture” be considered conceptually primary in our work in the arts, but we should be saying “culture

” in the plural, not in the singular, to remind ourselves of the true breadth of the cultural landscape to consider and learn about. Let’s explicitly make plural what has stood in the singular for at least as long as there has been a nonprofit field. Try saying

and see how it changes how you think about it.

Now, let’s consider what it would be like not to just be a pluralistic democracy, but a 

one. I believe this is a step that needs to be taken to achieve cultural justice. Beyond the cultural equity of respecting and acknowledging the validity of the many cultures that exist here in the United States, I believe that

 can only be achieved if we 1) respectfully and ethically engage with each other to understand the parts of our different cultures and 2) negotiate how the best of them could be harnessed for us to live together better. This is what I mean by our democracy being truly 

Can we have enough mutual respect and openness to each other’s ways of being and knowledges to make our “out of many, one” not assimilationist but integrative?

But where did the arts go? Don’t we still get to support what artists do and make?

Of course. The point is to put the cultural frame first and then the field becomes so much more capacious in its scope because of the plurality of cultures and the range of systems they encompass. And it can become much more equitable because we will use more relevant lenses to understand the insights of various art works and the cultural context from which they flow.

The senses of aesthetics, spirituality, and values that manifest in each of our cultures are often the portals that people feel they can step through to connect with others both alike and unlike ourselves. The more we explore cultural crossovers, the more we can find points of commonality that are so sorely needed at this time.

An open society must be willing to support, step into, and experience the nuances of our differences. The extremes tend to plaster over the complexity and richness of these differences and propagate intolerance over compassion. If we are to survive this moment of massive undoing of efforts toward belonging and self-determination, we need to not be afraid of our differences and to find and value the meaningful overlaps between us. Sometimes it just might be sparked by a song or a dance.

Let’s try saying “cultures and arts” and see how it changes our mindset. And if we can change our minds, we’ll have a chance to move the needle on cultural equity, and then, cultural justice.

The "Why Culture Matters to Justice" series is commissioned by the 

 as part of their Culture Justice Initiative (CJI). Essays in this series are edited by guest editor Sage Crump and cross-published by the National Performance Network, 

Vanessa Whang

What Is Cultural Justice?

This year, we’re reflecting on the act of gathering as an artistic form and tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. In a field as expansive and difficult to define as socially engaged art, the impulse to gather people, collectively organize, and build networks emerges as a throughline amongst a vast array of disciplines and practices. This work cannot happen individually; collaboration is inherent to the process at all scales, from artist cooperatives, ensembles, and mutual aid networks to broader efforts of convening and coalition building across networks and geographies. How can we create intentional spaces to build together and dream together? What are the formats we might create or return to in times of escalating crisis? How can the act of gathering build solidarity and coalition?

Our own rebuilding process as an organization revolved around a series of listening sessions in New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, and online, where we gathered artists, practitioners, and community partners to discuss the needs of the field and the types of models needed to meet them. Participants repeatedly emphasized the deep desire to be together—to think, to build, to rest. Our programs developed out of this feedback, centering support for artist-led gatherings in both our monthly microgrant program, Field Funds, and our fellowship program, In Fellowship. Our Field Funds cycles for artist-led gatherings consistently see the highest spike in applications. Across the country, artists are building schools, organizing festivals, hosting meals, and carving out space, both physical and virtual, to be in community together.

This past year also represented the introduction of our reimagined fellowship program, In Fellowship, which gathers a working group of artists, practitioners, and cultural organizers to collectively explore key facets and processes of socially engaged art. Over a year of virtual meetings dedicated to group reflection and mutual learning, cohort members shared the joys and challenges of collective work within the context of interconnectedness and shared power. Being able to convene regularly with this cohort, even virtually, offered a balm to our team during a year of unending crisis. “This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move,” Alison De La Cruz of Great Leap recently reflected during a group call. “There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together.”

To kick off the issue, we’ll hear from each of the cohort members, both individually and together in conversation, to offer learnings and resources that have emerged from their time In Fellowship. Each issue of 

engages a guest collaborator, and the cohort is assuming that role for the first set of contributions. Later this year, we’ll be welcoming the second cohort of In Fellowship and will invite those members to contribute, as well.

We’ll also be in conversation with artists from across the field who have built practices around the act of gathering, offering a glimpse into their work and process. What models are they developing? How can gathering unfold safely and accessibly right now? How can we build more channels of support for this crucial aspect of socially engaged practices? Welcome to the third issue of 

, a roving exploration of these questions and more from artists, practitioners, and their circles of collaborators and networks. It’s an honor to gather their voices and to share them with you.

This year, we’re reflecting on the act of gathering as an artistic form and tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. In a field as expansive and difficult to define as socially engaged art, the impulse to gather people, collectively organize, and build networks emerges as a throughline amongst a vast array of disciplines and practices. This work cannot happen individually; collaboration is inherent to the process at all scales, from artist cooperatives, ensembles, and mutual aid networks to broader efforts of convening and coalition building across networks and geographies. 