Travel from Memphis into North Mississippi for an immersive exploration of the people, places, and cultural traditions that continue to shape the Mississippi Delta. Through visits with local cultural organizations, artists, and community leaders, participants will experience how blues, land, storytelling, and cultural memory remain living forces that sustain communities today. Together, we'll explore the connections between place, history, and cultural stewardship while considering what these enduring traditions can teach us about supporting vibrant cultural ecosystems.

Specific locations and participating partners will be shared in advance of the preconference.

Memphis’ civil rights landmarks are not simply monuments to a completed past. They remain living places where culture, memory, labor, faith, and collective action continue to shape the city. Led by writer, producer, and cultural strategist Anasa Troutman and The BIG We, this tour will guide participants through Memphis’ civil rights landscape while examining how the city’s cultural identity has been formed through the intertwined histories of Black organizing, artistic expression, sacred space, labor, and resistance.

Through the places visited and the stories held within them, participants will look beyond commemoration to consider how the values embodied by these sites continue to inform Memphis’ civic life and its efforts to build a more just and imaginative future. This tour offers an essential grounding in Memphis as a living text: a city where historic struggles remain visible in the landscape and where culture continues to serve as an instrument of dignity, belonging, and collective transformation.

Memphis boasts cultural richness that extends far beyond traditional museums and galleries. This tour reveals art and history tucked into unexpected places: a basketball team's locker room, a music promoter's personal archive, a mixed-use building's hallways, and a riverfront park. Participants will experience how culture thrives outside institutional walls when passionate individuals and organizations weave art into everyday spaces. They'll see how private collectors, music obsessives, and craftspeople become cultural stewards, and how a city's creative identity lives in locker rooms, office buildings, and workshops. This tour invites reflection on how accessible, unexpected encounters with art can be more powerful than traditional museum experiences, and how communities can activate culture in the places where people already gather, work, and play.

This workshop carries forward the urgency, questions, and commitments of GIA’s 2025 Collective Action workshops, grounding them in Memphis as a place of practice, reflection, and shared responsibility.

In 2025, participants were invited to consider what collective action requires from arts grantmakers in a moment of escalating political threat, institutional fragility, and attacks on creative freedom. In Memphis, those questions take on new texture. The city grounds this program as a place where artists, cultural organizers, and community leaders have long used culture to build power, sustain memory, support community self-determination, and practice democratic possibility through conditions of chronic underinvestment.

From this Memphis grounding, the program will also look regionally across the South, inviting participants to consider what Southern cultural ecosystems can teach the field about shared risk, co-governance, accountability, and the infrastructure needed to move together.

Alongside an invitation into Memphis' cultural power-building practice, the program includes two participatory components: Culture & Community Power Building in the South and Developing Power: Co-Governance through Cyanotype. Together, these sessions will help participants consider what it means to build power with artists, organizers, and communities at the center.

Sunday’s program also helps prepare participants for Wednesday’s conference-wide Collective Action Assembly by seeding the questions, relationships, and practices that will carry into the larger gathering.

How do communities build the relationships, culture, and organizing capacity needed to create lasting democratic change?

Grounded in Memphis and drawing from organizing traditions across the South, this interactive preconference explores cultural organizing as a practice of building collective power. Participants will examine how communities move from shared experience to shared analysis, from political education to collective action, and from local organizing to durable civic infrastructure.

Developed through Grantmakers in the Arts' Cultural Organizing Community of Practice (COCoP), this workshop combines organizing frameworks, historical grounding, case studies, and hands-on exercises to explore how culture strengthens organizing, how organizing builds democratic power, and how grantmakers can better support the ecosystems that sustain this work.

Together, participants will learn from organizers, artists, historians, and cultural leaders working at the intersection of movement-building, cultural stewardship, and democratic participation. Through examples from Memphis and across the South, the workshop invites grantmakers to rethink how they recognize, resource, and partner with the cultural infrastructure that makes collective action possible.

Participants will leave with new frameworks, practical tools, and deeper relationships to inform grantmaking that supports long-term community power and civic life.

Memphis is home to cultural treasures that are unmatched in Tennessee, the South, and across the nation. From its legendary music scene to world-class museums and performing arts, the city pulses with both historic significance and modern creativity rooted in the heart of the Delta.

This tour visits several of Memphis' one-of-a-kind cultural sites, with brief presentations from local arts organizations that showcase what makes them special. Participants will discover how Memphis serves as a living laboratory for cultural innovation and preservation. Through these visits, they'll see how a city can honor its groundbreaking past while fostering new creative voices. They'll be invited to consider how "first, best, and only" institutions emerge from authentic cultural roots rather than manufactured initiatives, and how Memphis' model of community-centered arts can inspire cultural leadership in their own cities.

Memphis has shaped the sound of American music through the artists, studios, radio stations, gathering places, and neighborhoods where blues, soul, rock and roll, gospel, hip-hop, and other musical traditions continue to evolve. This cultural tour will move through several of these iconic spaces, exploring how Memphis musicians and cultural institutions have built a creative legacy with influence far beyond the city. Stops will include historic recording studios, all of which are still actively recording today, and contemporary spaces carrying Memphis’s musical culture forward.

Experience Memphis through a perspective that is rarely seen—but impossible to forget.

Join Cultural Curator Carolyn Michael-Banks, founder of A Tour of Possibilities (ATOP), for a 3-hour immersive journey into the people, places, and stories that shaped Memphis and influenced our nation. More than a sightseeing tour, this experience invites you to connect with the city's rich African American history, culture, and enduring legacy.

As you travel through historic neighborhoods and significant landmarks, you'll discover the vision, resilience, creativity, and leadership of individuals whose contributions continue to shape Memphis today. Along the way, you'll explore the intersections of history, music, education, entrepreneurship, faith, community, and social change. Whether this is your first visit to Memphis or you've been here many times before, you'll leave with a deeper understanding of the city, meaningful conversations, and a new appreciation for the stories that make Memphis unlike any other place.

This isn't just a tour—it's A Tour of Possibilities.

This afternoon excursion offers two connected perspectives on the past, present, and future of Memphis’s visual arts landscape. The visit begins with MAM in the Mid-South, a conversation with Memphis Art Museum Executive Director Zoe Kahr about the museum’s evolving role in the region, its relationship to the city’s artistic community, and the possibilities emerging as the institution prepares for its next chapter.

Participants will then join Memphis artist, Memphis College of Art alumna, and museum docent Adrienne Kornelson for a guided tour of Memphis College of Art, 1936–2020: An Enduring Legacy. Although the college closed in 2020 after 84 years, its influence remains deeply embedded in Memphis and extends far beyond the region through the artists, educators, and creative networks it helped shape.

Featuring work by 90 faculty members, administrators, and graduates across a wide range of media, the exhibition reflects on the college’s role in the cultural and economic life of Memphis and its close historical relationship with the museum. Presented as the final exhibition in the museum’s original Overton Park home, it offers an especially meaningful opportunity to consider how cultural institutions carry forward the legacies of the communities they have helped form.

The afternoon concludes with time for independent exploration and a private happy hour in the museum’s Terrace Room. Tea, soft drinks, and reception refreshments are included.

What does it take to imagine a shuttered industrial building as the foundation for a new kind of community? Led by Todd Richardson, this two-hour tour of Crosstown Concourse and Crosstown Arts explores how a former Sears distribution center was transformed into a home for artists, residents, educators, health providers, entrepreneurs, broadcasters, and neighbors.

Participants will move through a mixed-use campus that includes arts spaces, a theatre, a radio station, community health services, housing, education, food, and gathering places, learning how these parts work together to create a living civic ecosystem. The tour will also highlight Crosstown Arts and its role in cultivating artists, presenting new work, and building the cultural life that animates the larger development.

Communities across the country are working to reimagine former industrial buildings and other underused spaces as centers of cultural and civic life. Crosstown offers a distinctive Memphis model from which others can learn: one that places arts and culture at the center of community development, not as an amenity added after the fact, but as infrastructure for connection, belonging, health, and shared life. In keeping with the conference’s broader invitation to learn from Memphis, the tour asks what Crosstown’s experience can teach us about building community around the assets, imagination, and relationships already present in a place.

Led by the UrbanArt Commission, this cultural tour follows public art across Memphis, from the broad horizon of the Mississippi River to the historic streets and gathering places of Orange Mound. Along the way, participants will encounter works that carry neighborhood histories, celebrate community identity, and make visible the people and stories that shape the city.

Grounded in the belief that every Memphis community should have access to meaningful public art, UrbanArt Commission works with artists, residents, and civic partners across the city’s districts to create places of connection and belonging. Through visits and conversation, the tour will explore how public art can weave communities together across geography, reflect the distinct character of each neighborhood, and contribute to a shared sense of Memphis as a city shaped by its river, its creativity, and its people.