WE BELIEVE ART IGNITES CHANGE.
We create art with others to transform places, individuals, communities and institutions.
Through this work, we establish new standards of excellence in the practice of public
and contemporary art.
Our process empowers artists to be change agents, stimulates dialogue about critical
issues, and builds bridges of connection and understanding.
Our work is created in service of a larger movement that values equity, fairness and
progress across all of society.
We listen with empathetic ears to understand the aspirations of our partners and
participants. And through beautiful collaborative art, we provide people with the
inspiration and tools to seize their own future.
Philosophy
Our workshops seek to approach the art of collaboration from a reality-based perspective. The reality is that we live and work within a multicultural environment, rich in stories, rituals, perspectives, and ways of knowing. We want to engage in
practices that do not “assume” so that we may break down barriers so we may achieving healthy collaborations and desired results, considering all voices and experiences as valid.
Our workshops are developed to help people build social communities out of pluralistic societies and makes explicit the following assumptions:
1. All pluralistic societies that strive to integrate many cultures must simultaneously strive to safeguard their uniqueness
2. All the unique cultures that comprise the societal unit have validity, worth, and enrich the community
3. Efforts to set apart or exclude any contributing societal member or their culture diminish the whole and impoverish the common culture it seeks to build
4. Unless, all cultures are respected, included, and validated we regress all efforts to build community and a better future.
In the United States of America and in our increasingly diversified global community, educational and training programs of any type that do not incorporate cultural literacy are not only obsolete, but also serve, however unwittingly, to
further divide society. We therefore have elected to eliminate terms, descriptors, and labels that divide our thinking of our society as disparate parts, majority or minority, mainstream or marginal. We look instead at American society as one
pluralistic, richly diverse, and constantly evolving family of cultures, indigenous and immigrant, in need of sustaining common and shared bonds, values and visions among its citizenry while preserving and respecting unique differences. So that out
of many we may become one (“Ex pluribus unum”). “Many voices, one community” seeks to build one nation, one world, one human family.
Our Audiences and Partners
If you participate in our workshops you will know that, since we posit that there is no one universal approach to collaboration that is appropriate for every culture or situation, we have not simply provided you with a training on multiculturalism.
Cultural inclusiveness is embedded in our curriculum. Our approach to training in general, and the collaborative process specifically, springs out of a commitment to nurturing, strengthening and adding to the wisdom inherent in communities so that
social justice in all of it forms, can be advanced by all voices in the community.