During the past year and a half, the world–and our lives–changed in ways that we never imagined. Suddenly, the familiar became strange and unfamiliar. We found ourselves living in a new reality that once seemed inconceivable, and realized the world could change in an instant.

Yet, with this instability came possibility. To navigate this new precarity, we need to move beyond simply reflecting on the world and toward crafting ways to actively shape it.

What if we look to artists for what is possible? We give ourselves space to dream and then work to make those dreams real? We collaboratively construct a world in which many worlds fit?

What if we look at the spaces we inhabit as places of experimentation and innovation? We repair the failed and build the new? We think of art as a portal to a world we can create together?

What if we asked for more than this?

Through the theme Ways of Being, the Arts Center offers alternative possibilities for being in the world. The featured visual and performing artists recontextualize our past, reorient our present, and project new, viable futures. Collectively, they ask, what if?