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Creative Resilience: An artful community experience

Creative Resilience highlights

This video shows all components of the Creative Resilience experience

Creative Resilience tour

This video takes you on a narrated walk through of the gallery space

The power of cultural strategies showed brightly in LA. Spitfire partnered with the People’s Project, a Los Angeles nonprofit powered by the Los Angeles Federation of Labor to produce Creative Resilience, an artful community experience that amplified the voices of BIPOC Angeleno workers, sounded the call for economic justice and celebrated the city’s vibrant cultural history of resilience. The event took place over 10 days (October 8-16) in the heart of Los Angeles’ bustling Arts District. For the project, we transformed a 10,000-square-foot raw warehouse space into a creative gallery and community action environment focused on economic and racial justice. Spitfire commissioned work from over 70 visual artists and performers along with noted activists, celebrities and local leaders to celebrate the working people who make Los Angeles run.

The event shined a light on BIPOC Angeleno workers’ experiences of pre- and post-pandemic economic hardship and their rich history of coming together through mutual aid to care for and support one another. Creative Resilience also included a Mutual Aid Expo related to the economy and work, situated among artful depictions of solidarity, workers, challenges for workers in the past and present, and an envisioning of the future of LA labor. More than 5,000 people attended the event.

Watch the Creative Resilience highlights video: https://vimeo.com/778290539.

What this strategy did:

  • Brought client's messages to life about the essentialness of BIPOC workers in LA and the need for economic justice
  • Applied art and cultural experience to spark conversations about the future of labor
  • Celebrated resilience and community mutual aid in a memorable way
Woman of color in white shirt surrounded by flowers under the sun
Male migrant worker standing in front of floral patterned wall
Two female black youth sitting and smiling in front of a colorful art installation
Male brake dancer performing a one handed stand move
Amanda Seales speaking on a microphone
male presenting black youth taking a photo of art on white walls
Woman of color performing on stage with microphone in hand
Artwork showing woman bending over backwards and holding several flowers
Artwork on white wall featuring Starbucks cup background with worker in forefront
Land of free artwork featuring a black man wrapped in an American flag

For more background…

We planned and executed all kinds of aspects of this project. For more of a behind the scenes look, click on the ‘Case Studies’ button above for a full overview. There you’ll find background on deliverables like agigantic 50 photos display  of workers, see what and how we planned for both mutual aid and cultural workshops for all ages, and how we produced a bilingual audio guide in two weeks to expand access.

For more background and insights, have a look at our blog posts, one about two weeks out during pre-production and the other one just days before we launched.

To learn more about our creative and cultural strategies work in general, go to www.spitfirestrategies.com/services/creating.