What need does Street Work address?
Too many artists working at the intersection of justice and community are unsupported, underfunded, and isolated. And too many communities—especially BIPOC communities—are resisting systems that take civic power and tell us we don't belong.
Meanwhile, dominant arts institutions still uphold systems that exclude. Museums and major funders often prioritize prestige over people, and product over process. In 2017, 60% of all arts funding went to just 2% of large institutions. These legacy systems rarely reflect the realities, leadership, or stories of the communities most impacted by injustice.
Street Works exists to meet that gap. We create space—literally and figuratively—for artists and communities to come together in public, without gatekeepers, and make justice visible through collective creativity.
We support a growing ecosystem of social practice artists—many of them BIPOC, underfunded, or working outside formal institutions—who use their work to inspire dialogue, strengthen belonging, and drive civic and environmental action.
Street Works is designed for:
Artists whose work doesn’t fit traditional molds, but whose ideas and community practices are vital to building a just future.
Communities that deserve to see themselves reflected in joyful public life.
A broader public that benefits when art and democracy are more participatory, relational, and accessible.
We work in shared public spaces, because public space should be a democratic platform, not just a backdrop. We treat the sidewalk as a stage, the street as a gallery, and community as the primary audience and co-creator.
Street Works addresses the need for an arts ecosystem that:
Centers BIPOC communities as both artists and audiences
Makes space for joy and healing in the face of systemic injustice
Invests in artists as civic leaders, not just cultural producers
Uses art to bridge the gap between individual expression and collective action
This is not just about visibility. It’s about power, ownership, and reimagining the infrastructure of belonging.
Serving justice in the arts
It’s no secret that most major museums and art institutions have colonial roots, prioritize the interests of the super-rich, and are swayed by money. As these actions add up, they work against justice at all levels.
Here's how we think it works: Museums were created to house colonial histories, and the way they tell and present stories came from the points of view of wealthy collectors who were also looters or benefited from colonialism. Today, most wealthy buyers and institutions follow in the footsteps of these traditions: they’re often white/white-led, ascribe to Western, Eurocentric worldviews, and have ties to looters. They also play an outsized role in what gets made and seen, which artists get supported, stifled, and even erased, and which artistic assets are seen as valuable and devalued.
If you are an artist seeking to make a living off your work, this means that wealthy buyers are often your primary shadow-audience, even if you might be making for people that match your worldviews. For the artists among us, sometimes-subtle and sometimes-overt forces are in place to pressure the work to cater to the tastes and opinions of people in positions of power. This isn’t to say that we artists have no agency or don’t create things we believe in. But we can't factor out how the system influences the very content of art itself.
By extension, buyers control cultural production and shape it in their world view. By extension, their stereotypes, cultural norms, paradigms of beauty, and conceptions of value seep into our consciousness. Even if we don't ascribe to their worldviews, we feel the effect of resistance throughout our lives. They also seep into our bank accounts; artists of color are much less likely to earn money off of their work. Museum acquisitions clearly demonstrate that pattern.
We need new kinds of arts organization that are built on different values and operational models. Street Works strives to be one.
Serving justice in climate and environmental action
Racial bias and other forms of bias in media are well known. In climate change narratives — the climate worldviews that pervade mainstream media — these biases affect how we all think about and understand climate change. First, there’s evidence they don't spark action. Instead, they have caused depression and hopelessness among people that care and alienated those that can't relate to the cultural contexts that climate writers soak their stories in.
We also have reasons to be suspicious of dominant narratives. For example, as carbon removal sees more investment, there is evidence that the oil and gas industry is advancing such “solutions” to continue polluting and access precious public dollars for climate action.
Bias is human. We can all do our best to address it, but we also need spaces for the points of view that are suppressed, oppressed, or crowded out by larger, wealthier institutions with profit-driven motives. We need organizations that prioritize their narratives and center joy as the pathway to climate action. Street Works strives to be one.
Serving artists who center democracy
Imagine a large game or poll on the street in which multiple people can express their opinions, create something unique, have fun, and contribute to a collective idea or object. Street Works are for artists who co-create things like this with passers-by, in dialogue with social action.
The evidence is strong that art improves civic engagement and mental health. But in a time in which democracy is at risk everywhere and loneliness is becoming an epidemic, we hope for a home by and for social practice artists who seek to turn community participation and democratic action into something we can feel and take further — to the polls or elected officials — when we’re ready.
By blueprinting what these artists do, we hope we can support the development of Street Works all around the world that center BIPOC communities, and particularly Blackness and Indigeneity. Our first Street Work centers artists and volunteers who design for a neighborhood that is ~88% BIPOC and have family and ancestry in places that will be hard hit by climate change.
Serving BIPOC-led micro-organizations
We started Street Works, because we believed that art should be part of mutual aid — by artists, for artists — and that the basic operational and business models of arts institutions have advanced injustice for too long. We need them to get remade with the same care and radically imaginative thinking we artists put into our practices. Who better to do it than artists ourselves?
As a result, we naturally center artists — not artistic assets or products — in the way we think about business model. That's why the processes of our program are the works of art that we are focused on now. And we think that our processes will be the sustaining works of art that lead to many mysterious things. Here's an early glimpse of process as an art.
Centering people, not product, a characteristic of loving care, is also among reasons why we think place-based programming should be in the hands of local residents and agile community based organizations that can meet on the street, know their neighbors, and invest love, time, and capital in their homes. But they're not often set up to scale quickly for events, navigate public space, or sustain connection year-round. We need national platforms that structurally enable — without appropriating — the brilliance of micro organizations positioned to create Street Works near home.
