AS 220

AS220 YOUTH works with young people aged 14-21 through 5 crews: fashion media arts music dance and visuals. AS220 Youth operates out of 3 primary locations: the Downtown Youth Studio in our Empire Street Complex; Nowell Academy a charter school focusing on pregnant and parenting teens; and the Rhode Island Training School the state's juvenile detention center where we have been working for over 25 years. This exposure to the arts taps into often-overlooked creative potential offering a powerful learning experience for young people. In FY2023 AS220 Youth fully returned to in-person programming running 53 ongoing classes and serving 303 young people including 73 Youth apprentices.

LIVE ARTS & GALLERIES: We provide an unjuried uncensored all ages forum for the arts; every artist residing in Rhode Island has the opportunity to exhibit or perform their original work in our venues. AS220 presents an extraordinary range of activities and our unjuried and uncensored booking policy ensures that a limitless variety appears on our stages and on our walls. Live Arts venues include the Main Stage the Black Box and Psychic Readings and these venues host live music theater dance performance art poetry slams film screenings late night programming fashion shows workshops festivals and more. While still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic in fiscal year 2023 Live Arts presented over 250 performances with over 2,000 artists and attendance of over 10,000. The AS220 Galleries include the Main Gallery the Project Space the Reading Room the Resident Gallery and the Aborn Gallery and feature visual artists working in various mediums on a monthly rotating schedule. In fiscal year 2023 the galleries curated exhibitions featuring 220 visual artists including 116 first-time exhibitors with attendance of approximately 3,500. In the Aborn Gallery we also continued to intentionally curate timely exhibitions. This model is now being used to support artists and curators who otherwise would not have an opportunity to show work with a focus on projects that: engage with critical social issues relevant to and urgent in our community; present projects that bring new voices to the gallery and AS220 community; uplift artists at critical junctions in their career; and might be outside the traditional parameters of a gallery exhibition and or push against boundaries of the mainstream.