Arts for Art Vision Festival 20 celebrates with innovation and social change
Arts for Art / YouTube

For 20 years, Arts for Art (AFA) in New York City has been producing Vision Festival, a multi-arts festival that showcases experimental jazz artists like Matthew Shipp, Michael Bisio, Gerald Cleaver, Kneebody, Darius Jones and many, many more. The festival works as a community builder which carries the understanding that festivals bring people together who can create change in a very chaotic world.
The festival features many creative mediums. FreeJazz, dance, visual art, poetry and ideas come together with an aim to “challenge and inform” creators and audience members alike. Through flexibility, diversity, experimentation, improvisation, sharing and collaboration, participants come together in the tradition of great innovators from the past who have successfully used experimental art to make change, powerful protest, and even as a catalyst for reconnecting or communing with Spirit.
“We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before and have inspired us to be our best, our most profound, and in fact, our most Visionary,” explains AFA in an online press release. “We think of artists like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Jayne Cortez, and Amiri Baraka, and consider what our role must be to carry their legacy forward. How do we keep alive in the hearts and minds of a new generation, all of the idealism, integrity and sense of responsibility that lay at the heart of those creative movements?”
This year’s festival has already begun. On July 5, the festival opened with special events such as film screenings and keynote speakers who spoke about social activism and using art as a catalyst for change. The festival continues through July 12 with visual art, performances in dance, and of course, life changing music. Yoshiko Chuma School of Hard Knocks, Urban Bush Women, Jo Wood-Brown, Maura Sheehan, Yuko Otomo, Amir Bey, Robert Janz, Raymond King, Jorgo Schafer, Joseph Jarman, Nathaniel Mackey, Sun Ra Arkestra, Joe McPhee, Milford Graves and many more artists will be featured.
For more information about Vision Festival, visit their website. There you will find a full schedule of events. For updates about the festival, follow Arts for Art on Facebook and Twitter. To support the festival, visit the store, where limited edition posters, music and t-shirts are available. Donations also help keep this innovative and “crucial” festival going. For more information on how to help Arts for Art keep hosting festivals, ongoing events, and educational programs, visit their donation page.

*originally published on AXS.