About Creative West
Creativity interrupts our patterns of understanding, startling us into a richer awareness of the world. This is essential work — and it needs to be supported and amplified in our communities.
Photo credit Renee Aguilar
Photo Credit Mia Crivello
At Creative West, supporting creativity is what we do. We build equitable technology, funding, advocacy, and policy systems to generate creative capacity in the West and beyond.
Photo Credit Jennifer Chaparro
Established in 1974 as a nonprofit U.S. Regional Arts Organization (USRAO), Creative West was founded on the belief that place matters to the creative process. Fifty years later, communities of place, practice, experience, and identity remain fundamental to our work, framing our understanding of how culture is creatively produced and collectively experienced.
Northern Mariana Islands Workshop
We serve a broad and diverse region that stretches from the Arctic Coast to the Desert Southwest and from the Great Plains to the Pacific Islands. This is where we focus our efforts supporting artists, arts agencies, and arts organizations to build healthy, creative communities.
Look West for Direct Support
We offer direct, practical support to artists, culture bearers, state and jurisdictional arts agencies, and creative organizations, aiming to work distributively in support of community-defined goals.
Look West for Systemic Innovation
We build systems that change systems to advance equity, justice, and regenerative action—seeing these values as essential as creativity itself.
Look West for Cultural Impact
Through funding, technology, advocacy, research, leadership development, convenings and other programming, we move arts and cultural policy forward.
Looking West By the Numbers
Meetings with state arts agencies in our region since 2021
Meetings with advocacy groups & lobbyists since 2021 in our region
Active artists and organizations (CaFÉ and ZAPP) nationwide
Creative opportunities facilitated by CaFÉ this past year nationwide
Creativity is essential — for all of us.
We know creativity is socially valuable and essential to us all. We support the people and organizations who make it happen, in the US West and beyond.
Photo Credit Deann Armes
Web Services powered by
Creative West
CaFÉ is an online application submission system that strives to make art opportunities available to all by offering arts organizations an affordable submission platform and artists an easy way to apply.
GO Smart is an affordable grants management software that offers pre- and post-application forms, panel reviewing, and data reporting for grantmakers.
The Public Art Archive (PAA) is a free, searchable, and continually growing online database of completed public artworks throughout the U.S. and abroad, with a suite of resources and tools built for managing public art collections.
ZAPP provides art fair and festival administrators with a suite of tools to digitally collect and jury applications, manage booth payments, and communicate with applicants all in one easy-to-use digital platform. Artists can apply to hundreds of shows nationwide through a central website.