Support Bay Area Arts and Culture

At Decentered Arts we believe the movements that shape the future will emerge from San Francisco, and it’s up to all of us here today to decide what they become. 

Where to start? Perhaps a bit of context. San Francisco as a city of paradoxes. While marginalized groups have found sanctuary here, a history of displacement exists— from the Ramaytush Ohlone, Japanese internment, eviction of Filipino neighborhoods, and the gentrification and erasure ofand low and working class communities - many Black and Brown - by tech booms. 

While our art spaces face constant threats of eviction and institutions struggle for funding, we have birthed world-changing art movements such as Conscious Hip-Hop, Psychedelia, Cacophony Society, and Beat Poetry. Social movements like Free Speech, Black Panthers, Women’s and LGBTQ+ rights are rooted here, yet a divide persists. We face growing polarization and disconnect, “liberals” arguing over who is the “wokest” while walking past unhoused neighbors to get into self-driving cars. While “the right” laughs, licks its lips and wins elections. The only way to fight imperialism, climate, colonialism, and capitalism is to fight together. 

What can we do? Decentered Arts is an artist-led 501c3 building community using art of all mediums. Decentered Arts is both our resistance as artists and our source of resilience as a community. It’s where we speak our truths, learn with open minds, and heal collectively. It’s a space that fosters diversity, inclusivity, and a profound sense of belonging, bringing hope and energy to create change in a climate of defeat. Now more than ever, we need each other.

Who is Decentered? It can be anyone that shows up and feels a connection with  the work we are doing. I can be someone that takes inspiration from us. Anyone that wants our status quo to transmogrify into a loving and supportive community.  BIPOC, white, straight, LBGTQIA, cis, low income, high income, disabled, abled, youth, elder, neurotypical, neurodivergent, monogamist, polyamorous, religious, atheist - Humans who want to create together. We boldly push back on tokenism and identity politics gone too far. These silos and divisions of groups serve power structures that benefit from fractured communities. 

How we work. Our programming whether in person or digital creates supportive spaces for people to share their work and grow as artists and individuals. We create opportunity for people to learn the skills of facilitating, performing, curating. We teach people to advocate for themselves through grant application support and provide free high quality work samples for promotion and grant applications. 

How will it grow? We think scaling out is greater than scaling up. We aren't trying to become the ivory tower or the corporate behemoth. We want to get better at what we do with growth we can sustain for more than one lifetime. We want to move smart and build things. We hope that most of our success is exponential in the dominoes that fall in the first, second, third out to nth degrees of separation. It’s more people out on the streets, it's a packed theater in Antioch, it's a second book from an artist who first spoke at our open mic, it's a chef making rent because an artist could buy a meal out. It's infinate butterfly effects across time. 

As stewards of the organization's core we humbly accept the work ahead, the fun highs and the harsh lows and all the murmuring in between and that we can’t do it alone. What say you?

describe our approach more make it less political - people of different levels of experience learning from eachother and traversing mediums - 

Liz Cahill, Theory Song, Rhea Joseph, Ben Draffin