Throughout 2021, Amplify Arts' Alternate Currents Groupworked to address issues surrounding the future of for- and non-profit arts and cultural institutions broadly conceived, their position within the communities that support them, and the shared cultural logic from which colonialism and museums emerged. The Alternate Currents Working Group, a cohort of arts workers and cultural practitioners, collaboratively shaped and influenced those discussions by examining arts economies, organizational hierarchies, cultural labor, museum collections and archives more deeply. 

Group members stretched the boundaries of their practices to create work in response that interrogates institutional frameworks by proposing a shared set of values around artists’ relationships with institutions, cultural labor as care, and reorienting settler narratives to better understand Omaha as an Indigenous place. We collected their projects in a forthcoming publication titled, Given All This: Collective Institutional Futures to encapsulate where we’ve been, how we’ve changed, and what the future might hold.

All proceeds go to Amplify Arts