MAPP

Organizationally, across the years, the MAPP decisively resisted formalization, choosing to remain as a volunteer-run, non-hierarchical experiment of community-engaged art happenings. Today, the MAPP has produced over 75 neighborhood-level arts festivals, involving many hundreds of artists and many thousands of attendees. It poignantly demonstrates how an array of individuals, from different cultural communities and artistic disciplines, can catalyze a multi-dimensional arts festival that does not rely on formal institutions, funding support, or commercial marketing. Most significantly, what makes it different from the art walks that are now so popular across the nation, is its activation of the private home (living rooms, garages, yards, studios) within a residential community, such that transform the private sphere into a networked quasi-public cultural commons for creative expression and discourse. It is our way of redeeming ourselves from the over-privatization and commodification of our lives and communities that so often leaves many of us feeling isolated or disconnected and returning a felt sense of community and collective sharing to the neighborhood and city of which we are a part.