Since 2006, Transformative Arts, a nonprofit collective of artists and scholars, has collaborated with artists in neighborhoods around the world to reconnect art and creativity to daily life. With a focus on freedom, equity, accessibility and diasporic narratives, our projects refuse hierarchies in the art world and beyond to elevate the collective and collaborative making of creative languages, knowledges and experiences in our communities for our communities.

Transformative Arts focuses exclusively on enduring relationships between artists and communities to build sites of agreement that address fugitive needs, the ethics of making as praxis and visual language and sensing as both resistance and geography.

Our work amplifies freedom by focusing on the historic and contemporary site-specific creative practices of our diasporic community and ancestors. These projects and art works are beacons that sustain community through somatic language and demonstrate how and why collaboration is vital for fugitivity and world building.

Our vision is the aspiration for shared ownership in celebratory, protective, care-focused creativity that forms intersecting relationships between cultural sensing, intentions and content.

The work we do in our communities is for our communities. We are committed to imprinting the narratives (past and present) of people whose lives, labor and history are often forgotten or erased onto the architecture and topography of place. We recognize that sharing these individual and communal stories through collective art making of public works is where our work matters most.

All workshops and activations are free, open to the public and available on a first-come first-serve basis.