ARTS FOR ART, INC.
Arts For Art is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to encourage innovation and build awareness of avantjazz and related expressive movements through encouraging community. Our principal activities are the presentation of innovative, creative music, dance, multi-media performances, spoken word, and the exhibition of visual arts. Through RUCMA, Arts for Art, Inc. is now creating networks for artists that identify problems and create effective solutions. Arts for Art, inc. remains dedicated to encouraging and presenting experimental American music from an afro-American perspective and traditions. This jazz inspired innovative music has gone worldwide gaining audiences and artists from all cultures. Thus our programming is multi-racial, reflecting this development into a multi-cultural music. Much of this innovative music was first developed in New York's lower east side and is acclaimed and supported worldwide, yet has remained underexposed and without support in its place of origin. Thus our goals are to acknowledge and sustain the legacy of this art form, by establishing a place for its future development. The very institution of Arts for Art, Inc. is a political act of self-determination. We hold to the belief that art really moves people and to move people is a powerful political act.
Over the past year, Arts for Art., Inc. has worked closely with Rise Up Creative Music and Arts (RUCMA), a new creative music organization founded in 2007. RUCMA is built around a grassroots coalition of musicians and music lovers who have united to address a variety of creative, political and practical concerns relating to New York's artistic culture. Most essential in this regard is a coordinated effort among both organizations to build an innovative new center for creative music and arts in lower Manhattan. This proposed center would fulfill three essential needs within the New York music scene:
1) Providing a performance space for creative improvised music to replace the closure of Tonic at the hands of real estate developers,
2) Fostering musical education programs geared towards improvisation to replace music programs that have been steadily cut from public schools, and
3) Interacting closely with the community in an effort to reintegrate the arts as a central part of New York's historical and cultural legacy.
While this central goal is pursued, it is also the goal of both organizations to help maintain an ongoing presence for creative music in lower Manhattan. It is our hope that the Vision/RUCMA Series will convey our overriding message of the importance of creative arts in the heart of our community.
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WHAT IS THE VISION FESTIVAL?
The Vision Festival is the largest AvantJazz festival in New York City. Since 1996, the biggest names in Jazz and Experimental music have come together in New York City to celebrate music, dance, visual art and the community of these artists and fans.
Arts for Art is the not-for-profit organization that founded the Vision Festival, and now has grown to include a weekly Music Club Series, as well as week-long festivals in the Dance/Music Collaborations Series. Devoted to the arts as a borderless, multi-disciplinary terrain where all things are possible, Arts for Art seeks to provide a platform where all kinds of can not only present their work but experience fruitful contact with fellow artists and their audiences in a mutually sympathetic environment. Operating outside the realm of corporate-stamped New York art and music festivals. Arts for Art has focused its efforts on a kind of annual summit meeting called the Vision Festival.
Rooted in the Lower East Side community, with its history of progressive action in the arts, the festival is global in its outreach. Once again, nightly concert programs will feature unique collaborations between jazz, contemporary and world music performers, dancers, poets and visual artists. The core component of artists is drawn from New York and chosen by a committee of musician peers, with additional performers in invited from other regions. (New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago) as well as Europe and Japan. Dance, visual art and poetry participants and are invited by separate curators who are, themselves part of each field.
A fundamental theme of the Vision Festival is that each program should be a voyage of discovery. Audiences, which often numbered 450 people a night at the 2006 festival, are drawn both by a palpable element of surprise and the chance to hear cherished performers in an informal, community-oriented setting. The festival is programmed to showcase the gifts of the unheralded, the emerging and the "on-the-verge" artist alongside those of the established master or star attraction. Arts for Art wants to emphasize the important place in our culture for the individual whose creative notions often are obscured by the hype and static of the commercial status quo, for the individual who fails to fit the appropriately trendy niche. It's necessary to give voice to the silence, and equally so to provide silence for that voice to be heard. At the same time, Arts for Art heeds the democratic model implicit in jazz improvisation, in which a group of individuals rises together as a collective voice. Through these actions, we build a bridge to the future.