Sara Zia Ebrahimi Published in Art Journal Open

Three decades into the long culture wars, how are artists, scholars, and cultural organizations navigating shifting political, community, and financial tides? Art Journal Open presented a collection of responses to this pressing question from twenty-three artists, curators, scholars, writers, and cultural workers, with an introduction from Sarah Kanouse.

From Kanouse's opening: 

“Beyond Survival” began as an open call for reflections on the state of arts funding in the United States as it actually manifests today. When the Senate took its vote this summer, responses were already trickling in. They revealed that many creative and scholarly communities find the status quo both unhelpful and undesirable. The intelligence and accumulated experience of the respondents helped to broaden the definition of “support” from the purely financial to encompass the networks of care and community that sustain and make relevant cultural and intellectual labor.

Among 23 responses to this open call, Program Director Sara Zia Ebrahimi penned a short essay titled "Thriving at the Margins", depicting Leeway's relationship-building model and how funding streams from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities affected disenfranchised communities.

Read Sara Zia's essay here.

To read the full Beyond Survival forum entries, visit Art Journal Open.