South Arts

06/02/2026

"Arts are not just a reflection of culture, they're a force for reshaping it." That's Descolonizarte. Founded in 2019 by Nadia Garzón, a q***r Colombian immigrant in Orlando, Desco is the only Latinx LGBTQ+ theater organization in Central Florida, built from the ground up with no dedicated space, no full-time staff, and a first-year budget of $2,200.

Today they take theater to farmworker communities in Apopka, perform Forum Theater on HIV stigma, create space for trans and nonbinary voices, and produce work in Spanish, Spanglish, and Indigenous languages for communities that mainstream arts have long overlooked. And every program, every community conversation, every production is free or sliding scale, because they believe the arts belong to everyone.

This Pride Month, we're proud to celebrate their work, supported by a 2025 Cultural Sustainability Grant of $73,013. 🌈✨

05/22/2026

What does it mean to find “home” when you’ve spent your life between worlds?

As we honor AAPI Heritage Month and celebrate contributions, particularly those shaping the cultural fabric of the South, we’re reflecting on the voice of 2024 Tennessee Fellow for South Arts Literary Arts and inaugural Southern Prize for Literary Arts winner, Yurina Yoshikawa.

“As a Japanese-Korean woman who has spent half of her life in Japan and the other half in various parts of the United States, I have always felt like a straddler of two worlds.”

Growing up in Tokyo, Yurina writes that she was often made to feel like a foreigner because of her Korean surname. In New York, she found herself gravitating toward Japanese expats out of homesickness for a place that never fully accepted her. Then, in 2017, she moved to Nashville.

There, she began noticing quiet parallels between Japanese and Southern culture. Hospitality. Memory. The lingering weight of history. Though often the only person of color in the room, she found herself feeling “at home” for the first time in her life.

Yurina shares that after the pandemic, those questions of identity and belonging deepened further, becoming part of the emotional terrain her fiction continues to explore.

“My fiction is not meant to give clear answers to these questions, but I find it important for my characters to wrestle with them, as I have.”

Through her work, Yurina explores the spaces between culture, memory, identity, and belonging, offering reflections on home that resonate far beyond geography and tap into questions many of us carry about our place in the world and the people who make us feel at home.

Read more about Yurina and her work at

View fullsize A little about me… I am a writer and educator based in Nashville, Tennessee.I grew up moving back and forth between Tokyo and California, and I spent most of my life feeling like a Japanese person living abroad or a foreigner living in Japan. I have a B.A. in philosophy from Barnard ...

05/22/2026

What does it mean to find “home” when you’ve spent your life between worlds?

As we honor AAPI Heritage Month and celebrate contributions, particularly those shaping the cultural fabric of the South, we’re reflecting on the voice of 2024 Tennessee Fellow for South Arts Literary Arts and inaugural Southern Prize for Literary Arts winner, Yurina Yoshikawa.

“As a Japanese-Korean woman who has spent half of her life in Japan and the other half in various parts of the United States, I have always felt like a straddler of two worlds.”

Growing up in Tokyo, Yurina writes that she was often made to feel like a foreigner because of her Korean surname. In New York, she found herself gravitating toward Japanese expats out of homesickness for a place that never fully accepted her. Then, in 2017, she moved to Nashville.

There, she began noticing quiet parallels between Japanese and Southern culture. Hospitality. Memory. The lingering weight of history. Though often the only person of color in the room, she found herself feeling “at home” for the first time in her life.

Yurina shares that after the pandemic, those questions of identity and belonging deepened further, becoming part of the emotional terrain her fiction continues to explore.

“My fiction is not meant to give clear answers to these questions, but I find it important for my characters to wrestle with them, as I have.”

Through her work, Yurina explores the spaces between culture, memory, identity, and belonging, offering reflections on home that resonate far beyond geography and tap into questions many of us carry about our place in the world and the people who make us feel at home.

---> Hear more from Yurina in her conversation with singer-songwriter, author, and producer on the Morse Code Podcast: youtu.be/MxqpCYoiwZE?si=sIAQ7Ol3vvCZIGvU.

Yurina Yoshikawa is a writer, educator and Director of Education at The Porch Literary Collective here in Nashville. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, N...

05/21/2026

What does cultural sustainability look like close to home?

For Wilmington-based Techmoja Dance and Theatre Company, recipient of a 2025 South Arts Cultural Sustainability Grant, it looks like investing in Black artists, community memory, and creative futures rooted in place.

“Cultural sustainability is not theoretical for us. It is urgent.

If Black-led arts organizations disappear, entire cultural narratives disappear with them. There are no multiple institutions waiting in the wings to fill the gap.

Techmoja exists because our community deserves beauty, rigor, and truth. We exist because young Black artists deserve professional platforms without having to leave home to find them.

This grant has not simply supported a production cycle. It has supported a declaration:
That rural Black art matters.
That sustainability requires equity.
And that with the right investment, small organizations can create seismic impact.”

— Kevin Green, Founder, Techmoja

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Photos courtesy of Techmoja

05/18/2026

Artist in Focus: Folk & Traditional Arts Cross-Border Mentor-Apprentice Teams

Sheila Kay Adams, a National Heritage Award recipient, has spent decades preserving Appalachian ballad traditions.

Through a mentor-apprentice partnership with Ian Kirkpatrick, she has helped carry this cultural knowledge forward, strengthening both artistic practice and the continuity of traditional arts.
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Sheila Kay Adams

05/15/2026

In the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, a banjo is a conversation between generations.

Cowan Community Action Group is helping keep that conversation alive through weekly music instruction, instrument access, and hands-on workshops in banjo, dulcimer, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin for students in grades 4 through 12 in Letcher County.

South Arts is proud to support this work through In These Mountains: Central Appalachian Folk Arts and Culture, investing in the artists, learners, and archives carrying these traditions forward.

📍 Whitesburg, Kentucky
🎵 2026 In These Mountains Folk Arts Education Partners

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Featured in photo from L to R: Valerie Horn (Cowan Community Action Group), Taylor Dooley Burden (South Arts), and Charles Phaneuf (South Arts).

05/15/2026

In the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, a banjo is a conversation between generations.

Cowan Community Action Group is helping keep that conversation alive through weekly music instruction, instrument access, and hands-on workshops in banjo, dulcimer, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin for students in grades 4 through 12 in Letcher County.

South Arts is proud to support this work through In These Mountains: Central Appalachian Folk Arts and Culture, investing in the artists, learners, and archives carrying these traditions forward.

📍 Whitesburg, Kentucky
🎵 2026 In These Mountains Folk Arts Education Partners

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Featured in photo from L to R: Valerie Horn (Cowan Community Action Group), Taylor Dooley Burden (South Arts), and Charles Phaneuf (South Arts).

SouthArts

05/14/2026

... what stays with you?

The South Arts Artist Takeover continues with Angelica Reisch's world now unfolding.

“There’s something about the slowness of drawing,
the pressure of the hand on the page,
that feels right for this kind of subject matter.”

For Angelica, sound became another way to hold memory

less visual
more atmospheric

something you move through
rather than simply observe.

She shares that the South Arts grant was instrumental in bringing The Things That Stay to life:

“For artists, this kind of institutional support means as much as the funding itself: It makes it possible to take greater risks, work at scale, and share the work more widely.”

Alongside South Arts, Angelica's work has also been supported by the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and Vermont Studio Center.

The Things That Stay is on view at MIFA (Miami International Fine Arts) in Miami, FL, curated by Pamela Solares, through May 22, 2026.

05/13/2026

This week in the South Arts Artist Takeover: Angelica Reisch

“My practice centers on memory
and the domestic

the objects we keep
the gestures that repeat
the emotional residue
that accumulates in a life.”

Working in graphite, oil pastel, sound, and installation, Angelica explores the quiet ways memory lingers in spaces, materials, and the body.

These ideas shape
The Things That Stay
currently on view at Miami International Fine Arts through May 22, 2026.

—> A more lingering kind of storytelling begins here. Sound on for the quiet details behind the work as you swipe through the first of two posts with Angelica Reisch.