“CREATive WEst,” written and performed by Hakim Bellamy, Inaugural Albuquerque Poet Laureate, ELC Alumnus (2010, Cohort 1).
2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the Western States Arts Federation. A half-century of history is a lot to celebrate — and we’ve been hard at work reflecting on the past and planning for the future.
So much has changed – for WESTAF, and for the world – since our founding in 1974. With the launch of our 50th Anniversary Archive project earlier this year, we’ve been taking a look back at how we got here. Soon, we’ll be debuting a new Three-Year Adaptive Bridge Plan, connecting what’s come before to what’s next for our organization.
Today, we’re announcing a new, inclusive identity to reflect who we are now, five decades later: Creative West.
This is just a first step towards a larger intention: speaking in a clear, consistent, and representative voice. As we worked toward this goal, we reimagined our understandings of the work, and of our role in the larger arts, culture and creativity landscape. Along the way, we refined many words into a few important ideas:
- The West contains multitudes. Its people are connected and remote, practical and imaginative, and at the forefront of both cultural preservation and cultural transformation, often simultaneously. Creative West is strengthened by this complexity. It connects, challenges, and changes us — much like creativity itself.
- 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.
- Creative West offers direct, practical support to arts agencies, artists, culture bearers, and creative organizations, serving a region that stretches from the Arctic Coast to the Desert Southwest, and from the Great Plains to the Pacific Islands.
- By building systems that change systems, we advance equity, justice, and regenerative action — seeing these values as essential as creativity itself.
Our new name – Creative West – frames the work of artists and culture-bearers broadly and inclusively, and underscores our founding belief that place matters to the creative process. Our logo then expands on these ideas – representing our region’s interconnected multitudes, and expressing collective themes of intertwinement, imperfection, openness and transformation. Together, they form an identity that reflects deep optimism – for our communities, for our region, for our work, and for our next 50 years.
We couldn’t be more excited about this next chapter as Creative West, and we’re so delighted to share it with you. Here’s to the next half-century!
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