Our Mission

In collaboration with artists, Project& creates new models of cultural participation with social impact. We amplify artistic voices that risk, engage, investigate and inspire, highlighting issues at the forefront of our time including: race, justice, access and equity, identity, gender, cultures of violence, human rights and economic inequality.

Project& believes art changes the world. We believe that the core of the artistic practice is courage; when unleashed, it creates conditions for collective action that are inspired, resonant, and contagious. Forging expansive connections and engendering trust is fundamental to unleashing the artistic spirit in the work of Project&. As we seed chance through artist collaboration, we spark chain reactions and consequences that set cultural participation in motion in ways we cannot anticipate or predict. The impact of the Project& practice and of our artist/collaborators come into ever-sharpening focus over the arc of time.

Our extraordinary creative collaborators include emergent as well as award-winning artists—such as Project& Fellow, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario; MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage; Project& Fellow, MacArthur Fellow and Avery Fisher Prize-winning flutist Claire Chase; acclaimed visual artist Hank Willis Thomas; accomplished scholar and artist E. Patrick Johnson; Scholar, Poet, Eve L. Ewing; Musician and vocalist Lucy Smith; Pulitzer-Prize winning composer Du Yun; Oscar-nominated filmmaker Yance Ford; South Africa Constitutional Court Judge, anti-apartheid leader and scholar Hon. Albie Sachs; and innovative and multidisciplinary artists, Kaneza Schaal, Chris Myers, and Cheryl Pope.

Equally essential to our practice and ability to further equitable participation in the arts are our partnerships with local communities and organizations such as Garfield Park Conservatory, The Kitchen, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Center for American Progress, Riseboro Community Centers Queens and Brooklyn, the City of Reading PA, the Public Theatre, National Public Radio, Studs Terkel Archives, Library of Congress, After School Matters, Chicago Park District, Shriver Center for Poverty Law, Poetry Foundation, Access Living, Black Youth Project 100, Center on Halsted, Goodman Theatre, Little Black Pearl, SPARK, DuSable Museum, Women Employed, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Public Library and many others.