Art is a form of dissent. We affirm the political value of art, and its power to transform the imagination, the personal, the intellectual, the status quo1.
We embrace an expansive understanding of who is an artist and what is creative practice or work.

We believe that art should not be reserved for an elite few, and that culture-making is a fundamental human and societal experience. Art-making is much bigger and more important than the industries or institutions that frequently contain it.

At the same time, we see value in working to change contemporary creative industries. We do this by providing professional tools to people who have been historically excluded from these fields trans and cis women, nonbinary people, and people of color, to encourage them to work professionally in these fields, or to create alternative ways of making and sharing work outside of these industries.

Whoever creates things, even for a small audience, is shaping culture. We consciously leverage our privilege as an art space in Los Angeles and beyond by operating as a platform for others. By elevating the perspectives and creative work of women and trans/nonbinary artists, makers, and creative practitioners, we are challenging dominant narratives.

1 No art is neutral, it is either transforming or upholding the status quo. Overheard at Allied Media Conference in 2018. Credit to writer and activist, adrienne maree brown, for this language.

Explicitly intersectional2 & working towards a feminism prioritizing people of color; queer, trans3 and nonbinary4 people; and other marginalized communities.

We are committed to the continual process of recognizing and unlearning transphobia5, racism6, anti-Blackness7, homophobia8, classism9, ableism10, body shaming11, ageism12.

We use feminism to define the agenda of our work. Our intersectional feminism is informed by the many movements that seek change and revolution — it is not white, not just for women, and not meant to be easy or comfortable. We understand and celebrate that people come from and participate in different feminist trajectories, and we welcome many of them, with the exception of exclusionary feminism (white feminism13, TERFs14).

We are invested in challenging cis-hetero-patriarchy15; white-supremacy; and exclusionary, colonial16, capitalist, and ableist systems. Our feminism is a framework for working and fighting against the interconnected power hierarchies, structures, and systems that enact violence and inequity on all of us, in different ways.

We acknowledge our role as an art space in Los Angeles, a city that is experiencing extreme gentrification and systemic wealth inequality. We work to organize against these forces individually and organizationally, within our neighborhood, and within our arts community.

2 intersectional: Initially defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe the experiences of Black women in predominantly white spaces, intersectionality is a critical framework for analyzing multiple, overlapping identities, privileges, and oppressions.

3 trans: An umbrella term to include folks who identify as transgender, transsexual, and other identities where a person does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Used in contrast with cis or cisgender, which refers to someone whose self-identification aligns with their birth-assigned gender.

4 nonbinary: A gender identity outside the gender binary of “woman” or “man.” Also known as “genderqueer.”

5 transphobia: Dislike of, discrimination towards, or violence against transsexual or transgender people.

6 racism: A systematic ideology originating during the Atlantic slave trade, and still used by those with more power to oppress, discriminate against, or inflict violence against people they define as “other” based on their race. Racism is different from “prejudice” — while anyone can be prejudiced toward anyone else regardless of their race, any prejudices people of color could have toward white people is not racism because there is no larger system in place which oppresses white people.

7 anti-Blackness (or anti-Black racism): A term used to specifically describe the unique discrimination, violence, and harms imposed on and impacting Black people specifically. Anti-Blackness can be and is perpetuated globally by people of all races, and Black folks may experience anti-Blackness in both predominantly white spaces and in spaces shared with non-Black people of color.

8 homophobia: Negative attitudes, feelings, or aversion toward homosexuality or people who identify or are perceived as being lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, or transgender.

9 classism: Class is relative social rank in terms of income, wealth, education, status and/or power. Classism is the systematic assignment of worth based on social class; differential treatment based on social class or perceived social class; and policies and practices set up to benefit more class-privileged people at the expense of less class-privileged people.

10 ableism: Discrimination or prejudice against people who have physical, developmental, psychiatric, or emotional disabilities, illnesses, or mental differences. “Neurotypical” is a term used to describe individuals of typical developmental, intellectual, and cognitive abilities. Individuals who live with autism, are on the spectrum, or who have other developmental differences are referred to as “neurodiverse.”

11 body shaming: The act or practice of humiliating or criticizing a person (or yourself) by making critical and/or mocking statements about body shape and size, or other physical attributes of yourself and/or others.

12 ageism: Prejudice and discrimination based on a person’s perceived or actual age.

13 white feminism: Feminism that prioritizes the experiences and perspectives of cis, white, able bodied, middle class white women.

14 TERFs: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists

15 cis-hetero patriarchy: A social system under which cisgender heterosexual men hold power and women and nonbinary folx are largely excluded from it.

16 colonial: A set of conditions & experiences resulting from a history of subjugation (such as current or past colonial rule in many parts of the world, like US slavery & its aftermath) or from the experience of living under oppressive social systems (like capitalism, white supremacy, or compulsory heterosexuality). Colonialism is perpetuated today through formal (for example: schools) and informal (for example: pop culture) education that justifies and normalizes one group having power over another.

A place that offers support, care, and a sense of community to intersectional feminist creatives and the work we share. Together, we seek balance.

We respect and welcome those who participate in our community in accordance with our core values.

We care for and respect the organization (board, staff, and volunteers), its capacity (our time, our energy, our resources), the spaces we create (physical and digital space), and the community (people who are participating), and expect the same mutual care and respect in return.

We invite respectful collaboration and, especially in digital space, we lead with generosity and curiosity that centers the people in our second value. We ask everyone who engages with us to consider what they’re giving and taking, to step back to make room for others, and to be mindful of where they fit into the ecology of our community.

A space for active engagement. This is an elastic, evolving, collective project where self-determined17 participation is encouraged.

There are many avenues for participation and engagement at FCCW, including: employment, event staffing, leading programs or workshops, volunteering, the artist-in-residence program, contributing to or purchasing publications, creating media for digital platforms, funding through membership and donations, and attending events. We view all of these as valid and necessary for FCCW’s continued existence.

We ask that everyone participates in the ways that suit their needs and interests, asks for the tools or assistance to participate more comfortably, and steps away if and when their availability changes.

We value generative conflict18 within our community, and in the context of working together, toward shared, mutual goals. We do not believe online confrontations or harassment is a form of generative conflict. We understand that conflict has the potential to be generative to our evolution, and aim to handle it directly and respectfully, informed by concepts from restorative justice20. There may be cases when it’s necessary for FCCW to bring in an outside mediator to facilitate generative outcomes from a conflict.

We appreciate proposing solutions alongside critiques in response to any oversights, gaps, absences, or blind spots. In the words of Octavia Butler, “It’s always easier to oppose than to propose.”

We are invested in the idea that through experiences shared by each participant, the larger work of building communities and reframing creative conversations unfolds.

17 self-determined: The process by which a person controls, takes action, or has agency over their own life. In this context we mean we encourage and expect our community to determine their involvement and help us continue to work towards our goals.

18 generative conflict: When we engage in generative conflict, it’s with the assumption that we are working towards the same liberatory goals (whether short term or long term), but may not agree on how to get there. These conflicts are engaged to enhance creativity and lead to constructive change; to generate more possibilities, greater connection, and fuller expression, instead of seeking blame, disconnection, and punishment.

19 Restorative Justice: A practice that emphasizes repairing the harm caused by crime and conflict and de-emphasizes punishment. Restorative responses repair harm by rebuilding broken relationships and addressing the underlying reasons for the offense, and emphasizes collective accountability by addressing the needs of the victim, the offender, and the surrounding community equally. Learn more through the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Creative Interventions Toolkit, and Fumbling Towards Repair.

A platform for creative support and the redistribution of resources, where we consciously leverage our privilege20, as an art space based in Los Angeles by creating, producing, circulating, and distributing resources to our interconnected network.

Through the support of exhibitions, programming, publishing, businesses, and other artistic and creative projects, we are intently invested in creating value around cultural production21 by people who have been historically excluded from credit and compensation for their work.

As an organization, staff, and community with varied and intersecting privileges around race, class, education, and access, we view it as our duty to consciously leverage that privilege and access to share and provide resources, especially in the form of space, information, money, tools, education, skill-shares, connections/relationships, and opportunities.

We acknowledge that capitalism is the inequitable economic system under which we currently exist. Within that system, we work to increase our access to capital in order to improve the material conditions of ourselves and others, develop collective and communal power, and redistribute our resources.

We actively engage in the creation, production, distribution, and circulation of tools to take down the white-supremacist-capitalist-cis-hetero-patriarchy, within ourselves, our community, our city, and beyond.

We measure our success by how much we are able to compensate programmers, artists, contributors, and our staff every year. We work to build new models for running a feminist organization as well as for the creation and distribution of printed and digital work, which challenge existing institutional practices and offer fair payment/ownership to artists.

20 leverage our privilege: Using our collective social advantages (privileges) to give access, visibility, and power to more marginalized groups and individuals.

21 cultural production: The creation of all forms of art and ideas.

An organization that values experimentation, failure, and process.
FCCW is a thoughtful evolution; we are collectively and collaboratively working towards22.

As individuals, a community, and an organization, we support non-linear learning and development. We accept that living a feminist life and deconstructing oppressions is a life-long process, and that we are all learning together.

We understand feminism and creative production as processes that embrace learning through experimentation, missteps, and iteration. We see failure as a tool to recalibrate our expectations and reveal new opportunities to move toward.

We challenge the notions of success, professionalism, and perfectionism, which are byproducts of capitalism and white supremacy. By emphasizing experimentation and process, we challenge capitalist organizational values that prioritize speed, efficiency, and quantity over quality.

22 working towards: While acknowledging that perfection and ideological purity are constructions of white supremacy culture, we challenge ourselves to grow and evolve and expect that there will always be room to improve

Modeling a world we wish to live in by creating space for imagining23 and visioning.

Through our work at FCCW, we are reclaiming our labor. In response to legal and political structures designed to serve only the powerful, we use our collective labor to meet our own collective needs (for example: administering the Emergency Health Care grant or creating our own feminist HR Policies). Reclaiming our labor also means working to build new systems for payment, health care, and long-term thriving at FCCW.

We actively contest for power as a resource to redistribute. We were introduced to the concept of Resilience Based Organizing at our staff & board retreat with AORTA (Anti-Oppressive Resource Training Alliance) in 2018. RBO calls for organizers to reclaim our labor, contest for power, and transform the dominant narrative24.

23 Imagining: Through imagination we envision more just, more equitable futures — even beyond what seems possible today — and map out ways to create those futures.

24 dominant narrative: This culture’s dominant narratives function as propaganda for the status quo. Transforming the dominant narrative means that we actively envision and articulate alternatives — alternative ways of doing things, alternative ways of relating to each other, and alternative, more just, more equitable futures.