Artist Communities Alliance

Contracted and consulting services: aca partnerships with grantmakers (including pew fellowships in the arts and 3arts) provides residencies and fees to artists and residency hosts in the u.s., canada, and europe. Additionally, we consult directly with our member organizations with business planning and assessments.

Equitable capacity workshop: grounded in the aac's five pillars of a healthy residency framework, these trainings engaged programs across five key areas of organizational health: identity, program design, stewardship, fund development, and operational excellence. This initiative provided tactical strategies for consistent program evaluation, equitable jury and selection models, staffing protocols and other key areas of residency operations. Artists' experience continued to be centered and artists served as lead presenters. Workshops, running in tandem with continued meta- network and field conversations, modeled a culture of reflection, transparency, and change. Cohorts of leaders created within these sessions buoyed a constellation of support and exchange across the field.

Emerging program insitute: aca has historically hosted an annual conference to advance knowledge-sharing and exchange within the Artist residency field. Since 2009, this conference has brought together arts leaders, community organizers, funders, policymakers, educators and cross-sector partners from around the world to gather in various cities across the united states. The annual conference has been on hold since 2020. Aca continues to build its virtual programming to make similar opportunities available throughout the year.

Aca is an international network of Artist Communities and residency programs. Aca includes more than 400 members a diverse field of Artist Communities, residency programs, individuals and institutions that support living artists in the creation of new work in more than 20 countries worldwide and in all 50 u.s. states, with budgets ranging from 8,000 to 4 million. Aca members have access to a range of services and programs including knowledge sharing and advocacy.