In January 2020, the Constellations Convening in Dallas, Texas, brought together 80+ Artist Disruptors, Culture Bearers, and cultural strategists from around the United States for an emergent strategy session to strengthen the nascent field of cultural strategy that rests at the intersections of arts, culture, and social justice.

THE CONVENING WAS A TIMELY AND SIGNIFICANT STEP TOWARD CENTERING NARRATIVE AND CULTURE CHANGE STRATEGISTS DEDICATED TO ENDING OPPRESSIVE SYSTEMS FORGED BY WHITE SUPREMACY.

We gathered as organizations and individuals to build our collective cultural power. Constellations surfaced the need for more robust and holistic support to anchor a cultural strategy ecosystem with artists at the center. This moment in history demands a culture shift to lay the groundwork for long-term lasting change toward justice. More and more funders are turning to cultural strategy as a missing tactic, yet both learning and coordination is necessary to resource the ecosystem. Now is the time to vastly expand the capacity and coordination of the cultural strategy field.

Of course, Artist Disruptors have merged storytelling, creativity, and activism for decades; with a highly visible example being the Black Arts Power movement in the 1960s, but they have largely done so without field infrastructure, general operating support or institutional infrastructure, which has resulted in chronic burnout and a lack of foundational theory and learning to build upon. While you can see the bones of these theories in many artist collectives from the 1960s on, their theories of change, successes, failures, and experiments are not collected in a way that allows new generations to build upon them.