The #KeepMakingArt campaign launched on Tuesday, March 24, 2020 and in just over a week has spread around the globe.
The goal of the campaign is to inspire and support youth, parent, educators, artists, and organizations to keep making art despite the tremendous circumstances we are facing worldwide. The toolkit is available here.
We, at Creative Generation, are committed to providing timely and relevant updates to our networks, so that we may all inspire joy, catalyze action, and bring togetherness through this campaign.
Increased Accessibility
As the campaign has spread, Creative Generation is pleased to produce and release a series of campaign tools in alignment with our principle of radical inclusion.
Guides and campaign graphics are now available in Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, and Spanish.
Additionally, we have released a video in American Sign Language (and captioned) inviting communities to participate.
Participation
As of now, the campaign has garnered 200+ partners on all six continents.
The global participation has grown exponentially. In our most recent report, an average of 39,500 individuals were utilizing the hashtag daily.
Of these participants, the vast majority are women (72.8%, vs. 27.2% men), and between the ages of 25 and 34 (76.3%). Additionally, we know that one quarter (24.8%) are executive leaders of organizations, another quarter (24.2%) are educators, and, notably, 6.1% are students. The remaining half is made up primarily of creatives: artists (12.7%), writers/authors (12.1%), actors (6.7%), and musicians (6.1%).
Globally, partners hail from countries as diverse as Cyprus, Ghana, Venezuela, Canada, and New Zealand. The vast majority (78% are located within the United States, where they come from 38 states.
New Partnerships
When the campaign was first announced, we articulated the relationship with Professor Ximena Varela at American University who is leading an effort to capture the artistic response to COVID-19. Through this campaign, we hope to identify and contribute meaningful artistic responses to this data collection to effectively document this unprecedented time in history.
Today, we are pleased to announce two new partnerships:
A video series produced in collaboration with Teaching Artistry with the Courtney J. Boddie podcast, which will amplify the stories of those creatives responding to the impact of COVID-19 in their own communities.
A blog series published in collaboration with WolfBrown, which will examine, through a research-based lens, the ways in which youth-centered arts/culture programs are responding to meet the needs of their communities during this tumultuous time.
Looking Forward
We have heard from participants and anticipate this campaign to be extended into a fourth phase focusing on storytelling. See the updated Messaging Matrix here.
In collaboration with our partners above, and through a new blog series posted on the Gen C Blog, we will forward-focus on the potential opportunities this tumultuous time is illuminating for the arts/culture, education, and social action sectors. We will capture the learnings in real-time, so that we may learn and grow from this pandemic.
To date, the following blog posts have been published:
Youth Musicians Respond To Social Distancing With New Song And Music Video
Crisis As Opportunity by Eric Booth
Do We Really Want A Return To Normalcy? by Alex Sarian
Disruption and Invention: with, not For, Young Artists by Dennie Palmer Wolf, with Jeff M. Poulin
The Rise Of The Everyday Artist by Rachael Jacobs