Dear A4A comrades and community,

It is with heavy hearts that we announce that after four years of offering political education and community events, Anticapitalism for Artists (A4A) is ending all offerings and operations. The two current members of our coordinating committee appointed themselves with unilateral decision-making power and chose to disband A4A without the input or consent of the rest of the team. In an effort to honor our work together as a collective, we are engaging in an internal process to address harm and to close our organization with dignity.

Ending an organizing project is a common, though not inevitable, occurrence within the hard work of liberation struggles. We want to offer clarity around how and why A4A is ending, with the hope that sharing our experience can help future movement work. In the beginning stages of our organization, because we felt such high levels of interpersonal trust, we made the mistake of not establishing codified conflict resolution or decision-making practices. We have learned that no matter how strong organizational culture is, creating structure and boundaries to prevent the misuse of power are acts of care that allow us to show up with intention and integrity. Throughout this difficult ending process — a process that has spanned 3+ months and many conversations, meetings, and collaborative work sessions — we have been committed to moving deliberately and recentering care for one another out of deep respect for the work we’ve accomplished over the past four years.

We are proud to say that within the broader landscape of the anticapitalist movement, A4A facilitated numerous political education and community building opportunities for artists as workers. Through our virtual and in-person events, we reached over 1,700 comrades and created a space for cross-disciplinary, self-identified artists to learn together so that we could contextualize our own artistic practices and lives within the greater struggle for collective liberation. Since our origins during the George Floyd uprisings and the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve put on events with numerous creatives and movement leaders including panels, community discussions, interviews, somatic workshops, movie nights, and artmaking sessions. We facilitated courses, participated in direct actions, developed printed and digital works, and inaugurated a self-publishing arm of the organization. We brought artists together for Palestine and provided a container within which artists could integrate their practices with liberation work. From its beginnings to its sunset, A4A has consistently centered the notion that art is always political.

As an entirely volunteer group, we understand the dedication required to study and organize. We are indebted to the collective of artists that contributed their time, energy, and creativity towards keeping this organization running for the past four years.  We thank our community for building something truly special with us and hope that our work together can be a seed for your future fights – and wins – against capitalism. We look forward to witnessing how the ideas, values, and pedagogy we’ve all cultivated together will transform as A4A moves beyond this iteration.

If you would like to stay in the loop about future efforts created by former members of Anticapitalism for Artists, please head to bit.ly/a4aform. We will be deleting our current email list out of respect for your privacy and our discord will close on December 31, 2024. The resources on our website, social media, and YouTube will remain available through the end of 2025.  

Thank you and onwards,

The A4A Team