Member Spotlight: Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange

Submitted by Carmen Graciela Díaz on August 1, 2021

For the month of August, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange.

In response to our questions for the GIA Member Spotlight, Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange (CACHE) shared the following:

At CACHE, we work with creatives, communities, and organizations to empower a more inspiring, inclusive, and equitable Northwest Arkansas. Our online creative variety show OZCast, one of 26 projects we’ve led or collaborated on in 2020 and 2021, was a great microcosm of that mission. It ran for 15 episodes that featured almost 100 artists from across the region, paying them to create new work, and in a few cases license pre-existing content that we thought begged for a broader audience.

In the process of putting the show together, our team also helped our artists and creatives with professional, technical, and creative development - everything from new video production skills to fair contract negotiation to collaborative mash-ups with peers they didn’t know before. And of course when you assist artists with a few new simple tools in their toolbox, they take those and run in all kinds of creative directions you can never predict, which is where the real beauty and joy comes into play.

This was especially important during the great pandemic pivot of mid-to-late 2020, when we were all looking for ways to stay sane, remain connected, and lift each other up in our communities with our shared creative works. But we also always aimed for OZCast to remain relevant not just in the URL universe, but when we all began to resurface IRL, too. So it still serves as a calling card our amazing Northwest Arkansas artists can be proud of, for their own work and their entire community’s. Because of them, it built that real sense of togetherness that’s manifested into all of their — and CACHE’s — other new projects in 2021 and beyond.

Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange joined Grantmakers in the Arts in 2020.

You can also visit Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange’s photo gallery on GIA’s Photo Credits page.

Image: Evan Alvarado / Kasey Hodges creates digital art and is interviewed for an Artist Conversation for Season 1 of OZCast, an online creative variety show by CACHE.