COSACOSA engages people of differing backgrounds to work together toward a common goal through participatory art-making. Since 1990, COSACOSA has brought together thousands of citizens from over thirty Philadelphia neighborhoods to learn about art, about each other, and about how to work together.
Each project identifies a community issue to explore through one of many possible artistic disciplines – from mosaics to music, from painting to poetry, from interactive theater to an intercommunity art garden. Collaborating with professional artists, city residents strategize, design, and create new works of, by and for their communities.
COSACOSA Goals
Art can honor our past, inspire our present, and challenge us to create the future we'd like to see. COSACOSA's goal is the education of our citizenry and the empowerment of our city's neighborhoods – that the project participants will continue to work together for a better future, within and without the boundaries of their own cultures and communities.
COSACOSA constituents work together to achieve shared objectives, including
• originating new community-specific art, collaboratively conceived and created by individuals of differing backgrounds and abilities working together with professional artists;
• ensuring the permanence of a high quality, accessible arts
program providing all of our city's residents with meaningful opportunities to create art;.
• lessening the physical, social, and economic barriers that often limit the audience for art and art-making;.
• exposing our project participants to artist-leaders who represent new ways of working and thinking from those role models they may have previously encountered;.
• initiating dialogues on art, health and community that include a multiplicity of voices, abilities, cultural visions and values; and
• building a sense of community ownership and participation among the project participants.
