Art.coop was born out of a report Nati Linares and Caroline Woolard wrote as a labor of love for Grantmakers in the Arts in 2021. Today, we are becoming a committed group of six core organizers: Nati and Caroline plus Sruti Suryanarayanan, Marina Lopez, Ebony Gustave, and Robin Crane. We are developing an organization together and preparing the soil for a major announcement in 2024. Read on for more!

Art.coop continues to strengthen the intersection of cultural work and cooperatives, mutual aid networks, and land trusts in the Solidarity Economy movement (see below). We are proud to contribute to major shifts underway, as more social movements and networks are lifting up cultural work as essential components of strategy, organizing, and building the worlds we want. We are glad that our organizing and research work, alongside our report, podcast, courses, articles, social media, and in-person gatherings (see below) are reaching so many people. Thank you for reading this, and for being in community with us.

As a team, we are most proud of the internal work we are doing. In 2023, we recognized that we needed to make a commitment to one another as a team. We decided to slow down to clarify and hold our commitments to one another and to the broader movement of arts and culture in the Solidarity Economy. So often, we as cultural workers aren’t able to prioritize slowing down to be intentional about how we embody and practice our values and ways of being in right-relationship to ourselves and to others. We want to uplift the incredible facilitators who guided us with such patience and enthusiasm -- Kelly Baker, Herukhuti Williams, and Hope Ghazala -- and to Sam Liebert of the Eureka! Residency for providing us with an incredible place to gather in person for the first time over four days in our first Art.coop retreat. Our work is relational and requires time, trust, generative conflict, and joy. 

We are emerging from 2023 with a team of six people and a clarity that Art.coop is a network of artists and culture bearers who make the Solidarity Economy irresistible.  We are now clear about our mission, vision, and goals:

Art.coop is a hub where artists get money, ideas, and tools to strengthen their communities.

Here is a summary of our work in 2023:

Thank you for reading!

If you would like to support us, please do so, here: https://opencollective.com/art_coop/donate and note that in 2024, we will be moving fiscal sponsors to Movement Strategy Center. Feel free to book a call with us in the New Year to discuss this change.

In cooperation,

Art.coop