The UNITY Arts Alliance is a collective of artist-led and service providing non-profit organizations committed to using art and music as vehicles for social justice, education, and the betterment of the soul. UNITY was created to unveil a visionary model for supporting artists and engaging communities in the 21st century.
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The swiftly changing arts landscape presents a host of new challenge
s, but true collective action is timeless in its capacity to produce solutions. The UNITY Arts Alliance is a pooling of decades of wisdom and experience from committed artists, arts administrators, and human service professionals. The result is a consortium that is equal parts think tank, service organization and breeding ground for the work of powerful artists from their thirties into their eighties. UNITY gathers together ten non-profit organizations collectively representing a host of artists and other committed arts professionals throughout the United States, including New York, New England, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. The members of UNITY include professional musicians rooted in the traditions of jazz and contemporary classical music who seamlessly integrate world music, sacred music and experimental and interdisciplinary arts ranging from dance and theater to spoken word and visual art. Within UNITY are multiple organizations involved in arts generation and presenting, as well as those whose work is grounded in social justice and community outreach. These diverse activities are bound together by a shared understanding of the power of genuine community — both for the members of the alliance and for those who benefit from their work. The diverse individuals at the heart of UNITY’s constituent organizations include composers, educators, curators, presenters, entrepreneurs, social activists and multi-disciplined performers. These passionate individuals all wear many of these hats and some wear all of them. Through this breadth of experience UNITY helps to debunk the outdated stereotype of artists as incapable administrators, a debunking further reinforced by the involvement of two service organizations with combined successes in strategic management totaling over sixty years. UNITY seeks not only to provide a service to those in its sphere but also to suggest a more viable model for artists and arts organizations to thrive. We now inhabit a world where economic struggles and an adverse infrastructure can make artists particularly susceptible to insularity at precisely the point when coming together is most necessary. And, yet, the opportunity to collaborate, to disseminate work, and to find true community in our diverse world has never been greater. The UNITY Arts Alliance is poised to overcome the perceptions of scarcity for the greater good of the arts and the flourishing of the human spirit. For more information, please send an email to [email protected]
