Angels Gate Cultural Center or AGCC will be serving as a cultural hub as part of the Artists At Work or AAW initiative.
AGCC will host artists Nancy Woo and Taylor Griffith for year-long artist residencies, and work with AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles and Strength Based Community Change or SBCC as its social impact partners. AAW is organized by The Office Performing Arts + Film with the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, through $3 million in funding from the Mellon Foundation.
The Office, in collaboration with the FreshGrass Foundation, conceived AAW early in the pandemic, as artistic communities were ravaged, careers were halted, and dire financial struggles ensued. AAW was inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era Works Progress Administration or WPA and its Federal Project Number One, and addresses an urgent need to reimagine the culture sector and how society values the artists’ role — a need that the pandemic has starkly revealed, and that will continue as the public health crisis abates.
Artists At Work is a workforce resilience program designed to support the rebuilding of healthy communities through artistic civic engagement. The program pays artists to keep making art; gives support to cultural organizations (Culture Hubs) and arts workers in that community to host and work with those artists; and connects both artists and cultural organizations to local social impact initiatives in areas such as youth mental health, suicide prevention, food justice, prison reform, at-risk youth, sustainability, and environmental justice.
Sixteen artists will work with eight cultural organizations and 16 community-based social impact initiatives across LA County’s five supervisorial districts. Participating artists receive a salary, calculated using the MIT Living Wage Calculator for their respective region, for a period of one year, as well as full healthcare benefits. Artists working in any artistic discipline qualify for the program; they must be local to the region, and actively interested in a social practice.