Finches is a multimedia community project exploring the tension created when we are conflicted about something we love, whether that is a family member, a leader, or a place. “How do I love a thing I know is flawed?” A team of four artists, Melissa Yes, Tyler Jones, Fen Kennedy, and Todd Slaughter invite artists, neighbors, and citizens to navigate this question together. This project takes its name from Atticus Finch, a character in Harper Lee’s novels, To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set A Watchman, and is inspired by the seemingly irreconcilable differences between the two versions of Finch portrayed in these stories.

"Revolution with Sycamore" is a video-dance-essay made through a collaboration between dance/video artist Rhea Speights (lead artist) and dance artist Sycamore Sylvia Toffel. The project incorporates dance film aesthetics into essay film structures and focuses on the research question, “What do we lose when our most experienced dance artists are discarded because of ageism?” In the tradition of the essay film form, explorations will meander through related topics of intergenerational collaboration, being lesbian and queer in the South, and the knowledge that accumulates in the body over time.

"Montgomery Drag" is a short documentary media project by John Haley exploring the transformation of space through the eyes of Victoria Jewelle, a Black drag queen in Montgomery, Alabama. This visual project will meld documentary film with drag performance art while utilizing intentional public exhibitions. Guided by a minimalist approach to filmmaking, John Haley aims to emphasize the reality of his characters’ experiences through handheld cinematography, carefully structured landscapes, and vivid, layered soundscapes.

This photography project by Orran Scruggs will feature people who have interesting stories and have great impact on their community, the “Baptist Bottom” in Dothan, Alabama. Orran Scruggs is a visual artist who has practiced various mediums of art for over 30 years. His work consists of paintings (oil, acrylic, and watercolor), ceramics, photography, film making, jewelry making, screen printing and wood working. He is also a Master Gardener and Community Activist.

The Searcy Hospital Project seeks to examine the modern-day effects of historical racial injustice within the Alabama mental healthcare system. Using a combination of archive materials, eye-witness interviews, and modern photographs, Charity Rachelle explores the hospital's secretive past, highlighting the erasure of the asylum patients, many of whom are buried behind the hospital in a massive graveyard marked only with their (recently removed) patient numbers.

This project is a weekend-long multidisciplinary event honoring the work of Sun Ra, the influential American artist, musician, and defining figure in the genre of Afrofuturism, and his connection to Huntsville, AL. Artists John Jahni Moore and Willoughby Lucas Hastings will organize a cross-disciplinary event, coinciding with Sun Ra’s birthday, that echoes his aesthetic and ideology while encouraging creativity and daydreaming about what we can make of the future.

By publicly bringing attention to "outside" art and creative endeavors, this project by artist Brian Tan hopes to create a space for cultivating productive conversations and give opportunities for the local population of Fairhope, AL, and surrounding areas to enlighten and expand their preconceived notions of art. The project will aim to represent and engage communities of local and rural BIPOC, LGBTQ+, women, and people with disabilities. The project should be accessible to all regardless of barriers and invite all members to share in its planning and outcomes.

VibRaNtake presents a multimedia experience combining music, fashion, art, short film and performance pieces all while putting literature at the forefront of cool in the minds of those who subscribe to Hip-Hop culture. The aim is to present the Black experience, in all its variants, in a regal light. It will be a mix of hip-hop inspired music, spoken word, dance and short film. With the completion of every volume, there will be a showing consisting of: the original artwork featured in the magazine, performances of the songs, poems, and dances featured in the links, as well as a screening of the short film that is shot. The hope is to provide a "living literary" experience for all those involved.

Artist Conz8000 will create an immersive and interactive FKiT graphic novel and interactive mural, based off FKiT, a story young girl (Zalie) in a post apocalyptic Mobile, AL. Through the years, the story has been told through a series of art and installations, including paintings and murals, at museums, galleries, and building walls. With every new work exhibited, a new piece of her story is revealed. The FKiT graphic novel with be released to the public at a FKiT event at The Shoppes at Bel Air Mall. The cover of FKiT and some pages will be immersive, coded in augmented reality. The release will also be accompanied by 3 interactive limited edition posters and mural.

Indigenous artist Alex Alvarez will create a medicine cup from the Lightning Whelk shell, used during ceremonies to ingest and wash off with herbal elixirs. This shell is only found in the Gulf of Mexico. Like this shell, the people of the Gulf region shared a bond far beyond locality.

Douglas Pierre Baulos is a queer artist living in Irondale Alabama. They will create a series of 7 cloth narratives and an accompanying catalog/workbook that would navigate their interests in book narratives, Alabama biodiversity, extinction of species, and vulnerability and suicide risks among the LGBTQI community.

Multi-disciplinary artist Tony M. Bingham explores the tradition of black baptisms in Hurricane and Big Sandy Creeks also sites on the Black Warrior river. Shadow Stories at the Riverside School, Northport, Alabama is a two-part exhibition, leading to the creation of a permanent site-specific Public Art work.

Jasmine Cannon is an award-winning filmmaker and documentarian from Alabama. Black Southern Woman is a multimedia documentary project featuring Black women based in the deep South. This project takes audiences through a journey of the lives of these women whose stories would likely otherwise go untold.

Wendy DesChene is a Canadian-born artist of indigenous Métis heritage working in Alabama. This project will visually represent the reclamation of indigenous artwork and identities through a new series of digital paintings, animations, and oil paintings that narrate the story of repossession after colonialism.

The Black Cherry Tree Project aims to address racial reconciliation through the memorialization of the 33 African-Americans who were lynched in Jefferson County between the mid-to-late 1800s and the mid 1900s. Artist Carey Fountain is organizing monthly series of community conversations and 33 black cherry tree saplings to be planted to honor each respective victim and create productive dialogue around race and justice in the spirit of community unification.

A team of artists, Karen Brummund, Allison Grant, and Holland Hopson propose to use the Verdant Grant to mount a multi-part public installation in our neighborhood of downtown Tuscaloosa that examines air quality and the experience of breathing as a place where the individual body interfaces with it’s surroundings.

Tyler Jones is a filmmaker and founding member of 1504, a narrative studio. This short film will chronicle the making of a sculpture and its connection to the place, while asking: How might art be part of the healing process? How do artists work in complex spaces like this?

Chintia Kirana is a a Chinese-Indonesian-American artist and educator (occasional curator). Temporal Spectra is a project where art, music, science, and our humanities intertwine with one another. This work explores our inner being and our connectivity with one another. Kirana will record the brainwaves of Montgomery's people under the prompts "what does hope mean to you?" and "what do you hope for?". to create color and sound waves: video art, musical composition.