Creative Response is a New Orleans-based initiative for art, movement building, and radical possibilities. Initiated by Antenna at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020 and led initially by Antenna, Ashe Cultural Arts Center, and Junebug Projection, Creative Response provides direct support to artists while engaging a network of 70+ arts and cultural organizations, projects, collectives, and individuals to advance a more just and transformative ecology of equity and sustainability within the arts and cultural sectors of New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana.
The Creative Response Collaborative Fund (CRCF) provides emergency grants to artists, performers, filmmakers, and culture bearers in the Greater New Orleans Metro Area facing the social and economic impacts of disasters, global health crises, emergencies, and unmitigated climate vulnerabilities. From displacement, loss of income, and health challenges to toxic exposure, severed resources, evictions, and ongoing affordable housing needs, the Collaborative Fund exists as an equity-centered approach to engagement and resource distribution. Since April 2020, the Creative Response Collaborative Fund has distributed nearly $1.2 million in emergency relief grants, making approximately 1,610 awards to artists in the Greater New Orleans Metro Area.
The Creative Response Network (CRN) is an emergent and collaborative effort led by a consortium of local arts leaders representing diverse, critical, and justice-focused arts-organizing efforts in New Orleans. Meeting monthly since the start of the pandemic, CRN serves as a resource and advocacy hub. CRN’s approach seeks to reimagine the region’s arts landscape to one that centers on equity, justice, accountability, and sustainable livelihoods through the production, presentation, preservation, advocacy, and cultivation of art. The Network works to address immediate and long-standing forms of inequality and exploitation within the arts through working groups. CRN work focuses on the complicated relationships between place, race, gender, disciplinary practices, and leadership inequality that continues to plague New Orleans’ cultural economy.
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Creative Response is a New Orleans-based art and movement building initiative encompassing a network of 70+ small and mid-size arts and cultural organizations working together to advance a more equitable, transformative, and sustainable ecology for artists, culture bearers, and arts organizations in New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana.
