Artists who participated in American Arts Incubator 2020 (AAI) exchanges with Brazil, Colombia, and Peru will offer tours through the virtual spaces and galleries they created to address social challenges in their home communities. We will begin our artist-led tours with AAI Brazil project Retomada, a prototype virtual space “based on the need and urgency to imagine possible futures in this present moment. A vision of what ‘humanity’ could be, within the realm of a colonizing western interpretation, no longer serves us.” Tours will continue to Colombia, Peru, and outward to other AAI exchange countries.
Participating Artists:
AAI Colombia: Wendy Levy, Valentina Vargas-Sosa, Juliana Matallana Neira, Hansel Obando
American Arts Incubator (AAI) is a creative exchange program that utilizes community-driven digital and new media art projects to instigate dialogue, build communities, bolster local economies, and further social innovation. Each incubator addresses a relevant social or environmental challenge such as economic equity, youth empowerment, gender equality, and environmental health.
AAI sends a U.S. artist abroad to collaborate with local communities in each exchange country during a month-long incubator. These creative collaborations transfer skills in art, technology, and entrepreneurship. Through digital and new media art workshops, they facilitate dialogue and explorations of the social challenge. AAI provides small grants to participants who break into teams to prototype creative projects applying workshop skills to the challenge. Each exchange culminates in an open house that showcases the prototypes and solicits public feedback. After the international incubators are complete, ZERO1 hosts one visiting international participant from each exchange country for a 10-day professional development workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area during the summer to further build participant skills.
American Arts Incubator is an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs developed in partnership with ZERO1.
