Schedule
Times are in Central Time
Subject to change. Registered attendees will have access to more details.
ON-DEMAND RECORDED SESSIONS
These are available through the app for registered attendees from March 24-May.
Arts Writing and Publishing as Creative Infrastructure
Led by Xiao deCuncha and Nyonu Branch-Watkins
Arts writers, critics, and publishing professionals will discuss how arts writing is an essential link in the arts & culture infrastructure. Some topics to be discussed include:
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How do local arts and culture-focusing publications contribute to the development of the artistic community and connect the public with the arts?
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How do art writers and artists mutually benefit each other when it comes to professional development?
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What is the impact of the general lack of structured training for new art writers?
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What type of programs can be incorporated into public and private programming from schools, galleries, organizations, and cultural institutions to ensure a robust art criticism community, especially in the Midwest (outside of Chicago)?
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Faced with worsening funding struggles, how can independent publishers, art critics, and publications find creative ways to sustainability and lasting growth?
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How can art writing serve as leverage to propel local artists into larger markets? And vice versa, how can art writing bridge the gap and bring in new ideas into local art scenes?
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How do art writing and art/culture publications interact with activism, policymaking, and other pressing matters in civic spaces?
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Becoming a Teaching Artist
Led by Gowri Savoor and Heather Bryce, Co-directors of Teaching Artists Connect
In this fun and engaging session, participants will be introduced to the field of Teaching Artistry, and find alignments with the Artists Thrive Rubric, Planning and Capacity. We’ll explore what teaching artists do, what settings they work in, and how to generate income. We’ll define how teaching artists are different from art teachers and/or art therapists, and explore different residency settings where teaching artists can thrive. For those new to teaching artistry, we’ll introduce participants to different pathways to entering the field of teaching artistry, and offer strategies for assessment and documentation. In our final section, we’ll discuss what success looks like, and ask participants to complete a worksheet defining their unique attributes, passions, and goals, and how they can use their creativity to activate the artistry of others.
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Creating Your Own Artists’ Collective: Why, How, Where?!
Led by Alana Ladson, Freelance Artist
This presentation is about creating your own artist collective wherever you live or virtually. Alana will be speaking on her journey into creating her artist collective, The Rooted Collective, in Connecticut, and how she was able to run three cohorts of the fellowship and foster a sense of community amongst the members during that time. Here's how she did it, and here's how you can create your own!
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Creative Futures: Understanding Arts Alumni Experiences and Trajectories Through SNAAP Pulse
Led by Lee Ann Scotto Adams and Christian Folk, SNAAP
How do arts graduates build meaningful and sustainable lives in today’s creative economy? This session introduces insights from SNAAP Pulse, a new initiative of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project that explores how arts alumni define success, sustain creative work, and adapt to challenges such as AI and financial precarity. Drawing on national survey data from thousands of graduates, presenters will highlight trends in creative careers, equity, and artistic identity after graduation. Participants will learn how institutions and arts organizations can apply SNAAP findings to strengthen alumni engagement, reimagine curriculum, and advocate for creative labor. By centering alumni voices and data-driven insights, this session invites educators, funders, and arts leaders to re-envision how we support artists across their careers and to imagine creative futures grounded in connection, evidence, and care.
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Estate Planning and Readiness for Musicians and Its Possibilities
Led by Gene Meneray & Ashlye Keaton, Co-founders of The Ella Project and Elizabeth Meneray, Founding Partner of the New Orleans law firm, Meneray Family Law, L.L.C.
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The Ella Project presents Rampart: A Legacy Planning & Readiness Guide for Musicians. This is a step by step guide for musicians and/or their heirs to protect their legacy, their intellectual property, and prepare their estate. Rampart also provides guidance to heirs whose loved ones may have died without complete estate planning.
In this Guide, you’ll learn:
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How to document your work right now to develop an estate plan.
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How to work with museums and institutions if you are interested in leaving them assets.
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How to protect your digital afterlife.
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How to protect your files from loss, theft, fire, hurricane, flood or other disaster.
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What information you need to draft a will.
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What to do if someone dies without a will.
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What documents you need (living will, power of attorney) to prepare to take care of your needs when you no longer can.
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How to open a succession for a large or small estate.
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Findings from the National Survey of Artists
Led by Gwendolyn Rugg, Senior Research Scientist at National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and Jessica Feldman, Senior Research Associate at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The recent National Survey of Artists was commissioned by Mellon and conducted by NORC. This nationally representative survey provides a new perspective on the lives, work, and economic realities of artists across the United States. This was recording was shared by SNAAP who supported the project by administering the National Survey of Artists to arts graduates participating in the SNAAP Pulse project. The recording invites you to explore the findings report which shares key statistics on artists’ job holding, sources of income and benefits, health and well-being, and economic precarity. The technical report provides information on how NORC designed and fielded this innovative new survey.
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The Next Leader is You: Why Local Office Needs Your Voice
Led by Tom Tresser, 100K Project (www.100kproject.us)
Are YOU a leader? This presentation will help you realize that the answer is a loud “Hell, yes!” The presenter, Tom Tresser, has been mixing civics and the arts for over 30 years. He will demonstrate that the values, skills, and experiences that you use every day in your creative work are assets desperately needed in public life right now! The presentation will contain links to worksheets and other resources that will help you if your journey to lead in public life – including running for local office, helping someone run, and organizing for political power in order to serve and solve. Hey. It’s what we do!
11:00 am CT
Registration Open
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12:00 pm CT
Lunch available
1:00 pm CT
National Welcome Session
Kick off your Summit experience with intention and excitement! Join us for this essential opening session where we'll ground ourselves in the spirit of Artists Thrive, setting a positive and collaborative tone for the days ahead.
We'll guide you through a brief exercise to help you write a meaningful goal for your time at the Summit, ensuring you focus on what matters most to your artistic journey.
Finally, we'll equip you with everything you need to navigate the Summit Whova app like a pro! Discover all the "bells and whistles" – from session locations and networking opportunities to recorded content and helpful resources. We'll ensure you have the inside scoop to make the absolute most of your week and leave feeling energized and empowered.
Don't miss this crucial first step in your Summit adventure!
2:00 pm CT
Visualization Mapping & Networking
Introduction to visualization and experience mapping through the lens of Artists Thrive networking. Participants will engage in principals of visualization, design their summit experience and meet colleagues.
3:00 pm CT
National Breakout Sessions
I am For A Nation…
For this session, Mark will invite all 6 sites to create a collective manifesto for our country: "I am for a nation…." The workshop starts with a discussion about social sculpture and the ways we shape the world through our words, thoughts, and actions. This will be the foundation for our time together. Participants will then complete their "I am for a nation…" statements at their tables. They would also share with each other at their tables, then from each location. By naming the kind of city we want, participants can begin to name next steps in their own creative practices that align with the collective manifesto. After the workshop, we will compile the statements together into a document to be shared with all participants across all 6 locations. Participants would also be invited to activate the project in their own contexts, at any time, without the need for permission. This form is a tool that can be used by anyone.
Lead Presenter: Mark Menjivar, TX
The Art of the Pivot (Strategic Change Management for Arts Leaders of the Global Majority)
We are living in an era marked by uncertainty and precarity in our sector and society in ways that are unprecedented in recent decades. One that requires us to be grounded in our center and equipped to pivot the ways we steward, manage and lead change. This workshop will provide insight into a step-by-step process developed by a table of arts leaders of the global majority across US and Canada. This resource exists to support arts leaders of color to dynamically navigate pivots and steward change (both externally imposed, and internally devised).
Lead Presenter: Phoenix Sun Park, Voice of Purpose
4:40 pm CT
Lay of the Land Session
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​6:00 pm CT
Dine Arounds
8:00 am CT
Breakfast available
8:55 am CT
Bus Departs for Field Trip #1 East Crossroads Studio Visits
A visit to Artist-Led studio spaces in the East Crossroads area of downtown Kansas City, MO. We will tour the Belger Crane Yard Studios, the Bunker Center for the Arts and The Studios Inc. Transportation provided. This bus will leave promptly at 9:00am in front of the Kauffman Conference Center. Advanced registration required. Space is limited to 25 participants.
9:00 am CT
Local Breakout Sessions
Where We Make: Space as Practice
Where We Make: Space as Practice is a candid conversation with working artists about how and where creativity survives. Together, we’ll explore the real conditions of making — the rooms that shaped us, the spaces we’ve lost, the ones we’ve built from nothing, and the cost of taking up space in the first place.
Panel conversation with Heidi Van, Calvin Arsenia, Quez Beasley, and Rachel McMeachin
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The Future is an Artist Run Space - Futures Track #1
Session 1: Getting the Present Out of the Way: Challenges & Barriers to Planning for the Future
During this workshop we’ll briefly introduce futures foresight principles and other decision making frameworks that influence our understanding and usage of resources. Within this framing, we’ll inventory the barriers artists are currently facing and establish priorities for necessary change.
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Sessions in the Futures Track will build upon each other chronologically however it is not required for conference attendees to participate in each session. Session content is designed so anyone can participate at any time.
10:30 am CT
Local Breakout Sessions
Strategies for Managing Uneven Income
In Strategies for Managing Uneven Income, Tamara Bates, financial coach, will offer practical tools for how to pay off debt, save for the future, and other protective factors when your income fluctuates month to month.
This workshop will explore:
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What goes into your credit score and how to pay off debt
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Short-and long-term financial plans that flex with the rhythms of your career
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How to manage uneven income without constant stress or confusion
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Picking the right investment structure as a self-employed artist
The Future is an Artist Run Space - Futures Track #2
Session 2 - Building Scenarios and Big Ideas
What would our lives & communities look like if artists were thriving? In this session, we’ll compare the challenges identified in Session 1 against Artist Thrive rubrics and begin to construct specific scenarios of success. Attendees will challenge each other to dig deeper and aim higher with purposefully lofty goals. Being audacious is harder than it sounds.
Sessions in the Futures Track will build upon each other chronologically however it is not required for conference attendees to participate in each session. Session content is designed so anyone can participate at any time.
11:30 am CT
Lunch
1:00 pm CT
National Breakout Sessions
A Rally for Cultural Placekeeping: Building Affordable, Accessible, and Creative Communities
Across the country, creative spaces are disappearing due to market pressures, displacement, and inequitable growth. As a response, artists and cultural leaders are partnering with civic and economic organizations to redefine what equitable development looks like. This panel highlights Rally Austin, a real estate nonprofit created by the City of Austin to steward public and private assets toward community benefit through initiatives like the Austin Cultural Trust and Iconic Venue Fund. This panel will explore innovative, artist-centered approaches to real estate and cultural infrastructure, strategies for growth, and replicable models of creative placekeeping. Attendees will gain practical insight into frameworks that support equitable, creative ecosystems and learn how artists and cultural workers can be active stakeholders in shaping the cities and communities where they live and work.
Panel organized by Sara Vanderbeek, TX
Money Mindfulness: Rewriting Your Financial Story with Self-Care and Vision
This workshop invites artists and creative entrepreneurs to explore the intersection of money, mindfulness, and self-worth. Through guided reflection, group dialogue, and a hands-on table activity, participants will examine personal money narratives, identify scarcity patterns, and map a values-aligned vision for financial resilience. Rooted in contemplative practices and practical tools, the session supports shifting limiting beliefs around money. By integrating mindfulness with creative financial planning, it offers a compassionate, empowering approach to building a healthier relationship with money. Participants will reflect on money stories, clarify values, and sketch a vision for financial well-being—encouraging self-care, clarity, and action to move from financial stress to intentional, values-driven decision-making.
Led by: Rhonda Schaller, NJ and Dr. Esmilda Abreu, NJ
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2:00 pm CT
Visualization Mapping & Networking
Checking In and Networking. Participants will reflect on their summit experience maps and network with colleagues.
Thriving Together: A 5Rhythms® Movement Practice
This 5Rhythms session is a dynamic, guided, movement meditation practice. We will focus on five distinct, evolving rhythms - Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness, to access our embodied creative essence. And we'll explore how moving with others and in community exponentially catalyzes our potential. Bring your curiosity and fascination. All bodies and abilities are welcome.
3:00 pm CT
National Breakout Sessions
We Will Not Go Silent: Building Communities of Care Through Creative Collaboration
How do artists sustain creativity and community in the face of challenge, distance, and change? In this interactive presentation, four members of Breaking Wave Theatre Company (BWTC) - a community-rooted, artist-led organization from Guåhan (Guam) – will invite participants to explore how care, culture, and collaboration can shape thriving creative ecosystems. BWTC ensemble members will share real-world strategies for building partnerships rooted in reciprocity, shared power, and belonging. Participants will reflect on their own creative practices and communities - asking how collaboration can become a form of care, and how care itself can become an act of artistic resistance.
Led by: CJ Ochoco, Breaking Wave Theatre Company, Guam
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The Creative Revolution: AI and the Issues at Stake
Artificial intelligence is not just another digital tool for the arts. It is a structural technology — one that is quietly rewiring how creative work is made, owned, distributed, discovered, and valued. In this talk, ArtsJournal founder and Diacritical author Douglas McLennan examines how AI is beginning to scramble the cultural sector’s operating assumptions: who counts as an artist, what institutions are for, how audiences find meaning, and how creative labor is compensated. Drawing on his ongoing writing about AI and creativity — from copyright and training-data conflicts to the emergence of synthetic media ecosystems — McLennan maps the shift from a human-centered creative economy to one increasingly mediated by generative systems.
At the center of the talk is a national experiment: the Regional Arts Organizations’ AI artist-commission initiative, which asks artists to engage AI not simply as a tool but as a cultural condition. The project offers a practical lens for understanding both the opportunities and risks AI presents — new forms of collaboration and expression alongside profound questions about authorship, labor, provenance, and trust. Rather than framing AI as either salvation or threat, this talk explores it as infrastructure: a technology that will reshape how arts organizations do business, reach audiences, support artists, and define cultural value. The question is no longer whether AI will change the creative sector, but how consciously the sector will participate in shaping what comes next.
Led by: Douglas McLennan, founder and editor of ArtsJournal
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4:00 pm CT
National Networking
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5:30 pm CT
Join us for an Evening in the West Bottoms!
5:30 - 6:30pm West Bottoms Self-Guided Walking Tour
6:30 - 7:30pm Food Truck Dinner at the Black Box
7:30 - 8:30pm Evening performance presented by: Fishtank Theatre entitled, “Necessary Conditions: You are invited to exist. Please ensure all internal and external variables are aligned before entry. A participatory, absurd dive into the fine print of human flourishing. Success is mandatory. Logic is optional.”
8:00 am CT
Breakfast available
8:55 am CT
Bus Departs for Field Trip #2 18th and Vine Studio Tour
A visit to Artist-Led spaces in the 18th and Vine area of downtown Kansas City, MO. We will tour the Zhou B. Art Center, BAM (Base Academy of Music), Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey and the Mutual Musicians Foundation. Transportation provided. This bus will leave promptly at 9:00am in front of the Kauffman Conference Center. Advanced registration required. Space is limited to 25 participants.
9:00 am CT
Local Breakout Sessions
Storefronts & Pop-ups : A conversation around the commodity of Artist-Run Spaces
In economic terms commodity is defined as a good that can be bought sold or exchanged for products of similar value. The properties of said commodity are that they can be produced or sold by many different companies, and that they are fungible i.e. they are uniform in quality between the companies that produce or sell it. Artist-run spaces might include: arts activism and advocacy; social practices, community arts practices, arts-based community development and research. However framed or designed, more and more artists engage with community, consistently and intentionally. As audiences demonstrate an appetite for creative engagement, what are the characteristics of this growing sector? Why are artists central to these happenings? What is it about how the artist perceives, processes, communicates, exchanges and facilitates that glimmers and shines outside of other social constructs? Is there validity and benefit to this wave motion? What are the parameters that help to structure these spaces? What other metaphors serve the artist in considering h/her work?
What happens when the “work” is not a tangible object? When the work is collaborative? When the work impacts the lived experience of others directly, who owns the work? what is the commodity? Join this experiential conversation and help us to make sense of the above. We are two practicing artists considering these questions, sharing our personal experiences, and facilitating a dialogue that grows our collective understanding of how we curate, collaborate, and co-create. Are these experiences ‘goods’ ? Are the experiences ‘good’? Who decides? What is the value of what we are exchanging?
The Future is an Artist Run Space - Futures Track
Session 3 - Testing Our Ideas
Building on the goals identified in Session 2, attendees will work through implications of thriving in those goals. Using the Futures Wheel foresight technique, we’ll experiment with potential impacts for our concepts around thriving. We’ll make concrete that which at first seems ridiculous.
Sessions in the Futures Track will build upon each other chronologically however it is not required for conference attendees to participate in each session. Session content is designed so anyone can participate at any time.
10:30 am CT
Local Breakout Sessions
Artist Owned Spaces: Acquire, Secure, and Adapt
InterUrban ArtHouse Founder Nicole Emanuel and Co-Director Wolfe Brack discuss the history of the organization, how facility ownership, stability, and adaptability were made possible, and how the organization’s mission has been carried out through continual, intentional programming and community building both inside and outside of its physical space.
The Future is an Artist Run Space - Futures Track
Session 4 - 15% Solutions & Next Steps
What can we do right now to set ourselves on the paths we want? How can our individual decisions impact and influence our local community and our regional network of artists? In this session we’ll identify action items that can be implemented now to set our region on the previously identified paths of thriving in the future.
Sessions in the Futures Track will build upon each other chronologically however it is not required for conference attendees to participate in each session. Session content is designed so anyone can participate at any time.
11:30 am CT
Lunch
1:00 pm CT
National Breakout Sessions
Designing Funding that Nourishes the Artist - Not Just Their Output
What if funding didn’t just fuel the next project - but actually nourished the whole artist? This session centers four community-designed funding models - the BIPOC Artist Fund, Creative West Artist Fund, Cultural Sustainability Program, and Pacific Jurisdictions Artist Fund - that are reshaping the landscape by centering artist well-being, not just productivity. Led by cultural strategist Anika Tené alongside brilliant co-designers, this session dives into what it truly looks like when wellness, pacing, and relational trust are designed into funding from the start - not treated as afterthoughts. Participants will hear how these initiatives rejected extractive grantmaking and instead embedded coaching, wellness stipends, and flexible timelines to reflect the lived realities of artists - particularly those in BIPOC, Indigenous, rural, and under-resourced communities. Participants will walk away with concrete strategies, adaptable frameworks, and inspiration to champion care-centered, equity-rooted funding practices within their own institutions and networks.
Led by: Anika Tene, VA
Changemakers in Civic Spaces – Strategic Advocacy Pathways for Creatives
Artists are catalysts for empathy, innovation, and change. How can creative voices shape civic life and public policy? Changemakers in Civic Spaces explores how artists can move from community-based action to influencing decision-making at local, state, and federal levels. Three dynamic panelists will share real-world strategies across three key pathways: Community Organizing, where creative practice mobilizes neighborhoods and builds collective voice; Advocacy for All, which maps access points for every level of engagement from small, everyday actions to sustained leadership; and Creatives in Office, guiding artists who aspire to serve in appointed or elected roles. Participants will leave with practical tools, frameworks, and inspiration to see themselves as changemakers in civic spaces. They will gain a deeper understanding of how artistic skills translate into organizing, policy influence, and governance; recognize multiple entry points for advocacy regardless of experience level; and build confidence to move from awareness to action. The session fosters connection, empowerment, and a shared vision for sustainable, artist-led advocacy that drives thriving creative communities.
Organized by: Eepi Chaad, TX
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2:30 pm CT
Sending Session
3:30 pm CT
Summit ends