Community Supported Art

Rhizome DC and Guilded Freelancers Cooperative announce the Inaugural Season of Community Supported Art (CSA)!

You get:
Original works of art from 9 selected local artists at 3 pick-ups this Summer and Fall. Works will include visual art, music, poetry, and interactive experiences.

The artists get:
A stipend to support their work, as well as health benefits and tax prep.

Purchase a share HERE, or email us ( dcartcsa@gmail.com ) to avoid the service fees!

Now for all of the details…..

Over the last 20 years, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) has become a popular way for consumers to buy seasonal food directly from local farms. With the same buy-local spirit in mind, we are pleased to bring Community Supported Art to our community, to support local art, artists and collectors.

Our 9 selected artists will receive a commission to create 50 “shares” for the program:

Jorge E. Bañales
Katie Macyshyn
Julia Marks
Xena Ni
Peter Redgrave
Lucas J Rougeux
Nate Scheible
SIFU SUN
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

Interested members of the public will purchase a share to fund stipends for these artists. In return they will receive 9 works of locally produced artwork (one from each artist) at intervals this summer/fall. Featured works could include items such as: a limited-edition CD/cassette/vinyl 7", screenprint, or framed photograph; an invitation to a subscriber-only performance; a small painting; a letterpress edition of a poem; etc.

The goals of the CSA program are: to support artists and to create an engaged community of local arts supporters. This CSA supports artists in the creation of new work, establishes relationships with local collectors and patrons, and represents the launch of an exciting new model of art support and distribution. CSA Share member benefits include multiple works of art from local emerging and mid-career artists at a fantastic value! Additionally, CSA Members have the opportunity to develop relationships with the local artists and art community, discover new artists, explore a variety of disciplines and support artists’ careers and a vibrant community.

Sliding-scale shares are on sale NOW: tinyurl.com/dcartcsa (If you would like to avoid service fees, you can pay by check or by Venmo - please just email us!)

Email dcartcsa@gmail.com with any questions.

Check out coverage in the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, DCist, Petworth News, and East City Art!

Please read about our 9 selected artists below!

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Jorge E. Bañales currently lives and works in the Washington, DC area. "I make photographs, video, and music that depict places as they are, without a narrative. I explore the stochastic and generative nature of modular synthesizers via noise, drones, loops and randomness to create works of sound free of Western’s music harmonic and melodic constraints. This music is often paired with abstract video pieces space in which the images interact with sounds to emphasize the relationship between color and space. I am interested in art made by a system of things working together as parts of a mechanism or network, or as a set of principles or procedures, set in motion and beyond human control."

Katie Macyshyn’s performative works explore isolation, mental health, and self-discovery. Traversing micro and macrocosm, individual and collective, accepted and forbidden, Macyshyn’s work implores us to reexamine our place in relation to ourselves, each other, and the unknown. By bringing focus to our collective somatic experience, the work opens portals through the widespread egoism of Western media hegemony to a future as stewards of the Earth and the cosmos. Macyshyn designs interactive multimedia rituals that invite participants to open their bodies, voices, and minds; unveiling vulnerability as vitality. "As an art educator who focuses on therapeutic benefits of creative play, I have longtime interests in mindfulness, restorative justice, and equity. This training has informed my interactive performance practice, which focuses on sensory integration in pursuit of wellness."

Julia Marks is a writer, actor, and theatre-maker currently based in Washington, DC. "As a theatre-maker, I aim to make theatre in which this audience-work relationship is unique and vital to each piece, and in which the audience can be made active but not performative. I like to look at the creation of work as a comprehensive practice of making, one that is experimental and form-twisting and joyful in process as well as performance. I like finding layers of meaning and unexpected pairings that fuse psychological exploration, historical understanding, and pop culture references, like Prufrock’s isolation paired with Cardi B, or luxurious French dining rituals set atop of human swamps. I explore how internal life interacts with the outer world. As such, I don’t usually go in for simplicity. When the world is exploding with it’s own chaos, how can artistic work do any less? So I make broad use of spectacle, love the deliciousness and tangibility of objects. I love characters that exist between real and imagined worlds, and finding what their language sounds like. I try to map the way an emotion feels in words, to express the thoughts that are always inexpressible."

Xena Ni is a multimedia artist based in Washington, DC. "I run The Time Travel Agency, which transports travelers to their possible future lives. In 2020, I traveled 100 years into DC’s future with my fellow Ward 1 Mutual Aid organizer, Gabrielle Newell. I turned her vision of DC into an illustrated story for Dispatches from 2120, a 730DC publication. I’m a designer and artist who believes in public institutions that work for everybody. To that end, I’m the Director of Design at Alloy, a nonprofit building technology for progressive campaigns. Previously, I was a Design Manager and Senior Designer at Nava, a Code for America Fellow, and Founding Designer at Propel."

Peter Redgrave is a cultural worker, an artist, and educator, based in Baltimore, Maryland. "The world of the imagination is not a separate world, it is woven through our bodies and draws us into the possibilities each moment offers. My work begins with the body and seeks to nourish embodied wonder with absurd potentials. I aspire to be the clown, the fool, the bumbler who speaks in riddles at the feet of authority. I work to facilitate experiences for people through performances, recordings, videos, and text based work that refract our complicated contaminated world. May we find wonder and humor in the patterns that arise. In the face of a climate emergency and the great reckoning with global capitalism’s desire for complete control of life, we are offered little room to make meaningful choices. And yet we go on. Let us fill our bodies with visions of adaptation and resilience that persevere as they are marked."

Lucas J Rougeux, born in Niagara Falls, NY in 1995, is an interdisciplinary artist currently living and working in Washington DC. Through his practice, Lucas explores themes of sexuality, queerness, spirituality, light, and the intangible unknown. His work has been inspired by geometry, light, sensation of the body, the queerness of identity, gay history, and myth. True to his interdisciplinary education, Lucas utilizes a multitude of media including oil and watercolor paint, ink, charcoal and graphite, performance art, installation sculpture, textiles, and printmaking. "Energy is the main force of life and the drive of all things. My work showcases the manifestation of energy as prismatic light; fractured, moving, and both ordered and chaotic. Using geometric and linear aesthetics, I capture energy as something uncontained while acknowledging a sense of order and the radiance of light. Through myth and the spirituality of the soul, my work touches on the essence of an individual both in everyday uniqueness and the interconnected divine. My work peaks the intrigue and mystery of the unknown, the void, to be both fearful of it and comforted by it."

Nate Scheible is a DC-based drummer and composer who has performed and recorded in a variety of bands and ensembles spanning multiple genres over the past 25 years. "Collaborators in recent years include Sarah Hughes, Layne Garrett, Nik Francis, the Nancy Havlik Dance Performance Group, and the band Mock Identity. While my background is largely based in improvisation, my recent solo work has focused on the process of analog sound materials. Specifically, this involves manipulation of magnetic audio tape, featured prominently in releases by the labels ACR (Fairfax, 2017), Never Anything (Indices, 2019), and Unifactor (Prions and Scrapie, 2020). My album Fairfax will be getting a vinyl reissue by Warm Winters Ltd. in fall, 2021."

SIFU SUN (Maya Sun) is an experimental artist, who focuses on painting, movement, and sound. In her practices, intention is key. Honing in on spiritual and ancestral release, SIFU acts as a vessel to promote introspection in order to discover healing with grace. "With much of my work, the inspirations rise directly from the lands surrounding us. The trees, wind, animals, and human experiences melded into a space of exploration, hopefully will grant moments of mediation, reflection, happiness, and so much more. Bearing the essences of locality, my work speaks about a personal connection with the land, and how this time here has motivated so many healing and freeing lessons."

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a queer Palestinian-American performance artist and writer. "I am a poet and performance artist whose work is focused on queer, anticolonial, liberatory worldmaking through language and the body. My work exists both on the page and in performance, as a spiritual practice of bending language until it breaks and allows us to glimpse a better world through the breakage. I make solo and collaborative performances, moving from community-engaged performance to autoethnographic solo work to puppetry and traditional theatrical work. My poetry is oriented towards critique and invested in a liberatory spiritual poetics for Palestinians, those who love us, and those we love."

This local project is modeled in part on Community Supported Art in Minnesota, created by mnartists.org and Springboard for the Arts.