Affordable Artist Housing: Call to Action

On June 25th, CA for the Arts hosted the culminating event of our inaugural Grassroots Artist Advocacy Program in San Francisco. ⁠ ⁠ Over the past nine months, five inspiring artist-advocates from Oakland and San Francisco have been developing Artist Advocacy Plans rooted in their creative practice, community knowledge, and visions for systemic change.⁠⁠ Each fellow presented their plans to implement real change benefiting artists and culture bearers across the Bay Area’s cultural landscape.⁠

GAAP is a first-of-its-kind fellowship program designed to equip artists with the tools to advocate for just and equitable policies in their communities. This pilot cohort was made possible through generous support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.⁠

Multidisciplinary artist and licensed California attorney Hope Mohr (she/her) works at the intersection of art and social change as a Fellow with the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

After a professional dance career, she founded the nonprofit Hope Mohr Dance and its activist presenting program, The Bridge Project, which supported over 100 artists. In 2020, Mohr co-stewarded the organization’s transition to an equity-driven, BIPOC-led model of distributed leadership and a new name: Bridge Live Arts. Her book, ""Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance,"" was published in 2020 by the National Center for Choreography.

As an artist working across dance, theater, visual art, and writing, Mohr explores feminism, gender, and sexuality. For over thirty years, she has made multidisciplinary performance that “conveys emotional and socio-political contents that ride just underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). Her work has been presented throughout the U.S. in both theatrical contexts and also extensively in museums and galleries, from SFMOMA, to the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston, and 18th Street Arts Center in LA. She has been named to the YBCA 100 and also named as one of the ""women leaders” in dance by Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Wendy Perron. She is currently a Lucas Artist in Residence at Montalvo Arts Center.