The Lewis Center for the Arts (LCA) is a home for artists, educators, staff, scholars, students, audiences and those who embrace, embody, and nurture an expansive vision of art.
We believe that art as a practice generates, significantly clarifies, and shares human experience and should not be a matter of luxury and privilege.
Since creating and engaging in art is greatly enhanced by equitable participation, we believe diversity is a foundational value.
The LCA offers radical welcome and open-ended exploration and is eager to seek out identities and practices yet unnamed.
We recognize and seek to correct past and ongoing exclusionary and discriminatory attitudes and processes in art making, education, and institutions.
We commit to:
- Serving as a resource for artmaking and appreciation in the community
- Holding power accountable and questioning hierarchies through creation, critique, activism, advocacy, and transparency
- Perpetually broadening our concepts of inclusion
- Reaching out to the overlooked and the underserved
- Learning as well as teaching
- Opening, defending, and expanding a safe space for artmaking
- Celebrating the intersectional diversity of our audiences, faculty, staff, students, and surrounding community