From 2017-2020, Cherry Rangel and Ron Ragin conducted a research project that culminated in the report Freedom Maps: Activating Legacies of Culture, Art, and Organizing in the U.S. South. Freedom Maps resulted from nearly three years of research and interviews with artists, cultural activists, community organizers, and grantmakers. The report examined the state of artistic practice in the South, how artists and culture workers are helping to build movement infrastructure, and practitioners’ visions for the future.
We are reactivating Freedom Maps in response to escalating political struggles in the region, the need for ongoing investment in cultural practice as a means to imagine and create freedom and safety for all of us, and the urgency to protect arts and cultural legacies from attempted state eradication. In this next phase of research and activation, we will update the data, broadcast more stories about Southern cultural organizing, and build a more robust network of funders in and outside of the region who support homegrown cultural work for liberatory change.
We believe that now is the time for arts and cultural philanthropy, as well as funders of grassroots movement building, to step up and make bold, explicit, long-term commitments to community arts and cultural power building in the U.S. South.
Ron Ragin 