Upcoming meetings:

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Interested in being added to our email list? Reach out to our community organizer and Artist Meetup facilitator Jacob: [email protected]

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The Story

In 2023, SOAC began an in-depth survey of the arts and culture landscape of Atlantic City and found that many of the communities that flourish here do so independently and without comprehensive knowledge of one another’s existence. We envisioned a way to help, and took a leap of faith.

Click here to read more about how we thought up the Artist Meetups!

Held monthly, our Artist Meetups seek to invite communication between the communities of AC artists, as well as to act as a bridge into the AC arts culture for artists of the greater South Jersey area who are interested in developing artistic relationships in the city.

To holistically approach the cross-pollination of these disparate groups, we will always prioritize non-transparent and community-led workshop-strategies: SOAC facilitates the Artist Meetups by holding space, distributing flyers, providing food and resources, and gathering feedback for how meetings should operate, but these meetings are catalyzed by the community members whose regular presence activates an otherwise empty room.

We do not seek to use these meetings as spaces of instruction. We do not hold the knowledge necessary to teach our artists any one thing, but rather we can guide practice together. These meetups should be held separate from any other desires to facilitate spaces of learning/training/teaching.

We believe that a regular meeting space for artists to gather, experience and enjoy one another, and exchange ideas is crucial to a successful civic landscape.

In January 2024, we began a complement to the in-person meetups: our artist meetup blog! There, we share recaps on each season, extra notes taken during meetings, and thoughts about how we draw from each other, scholars, and ancestors to build community.

Click here to read the Artist Meetup Blog!

On July 18th 2024, we celebrated our first year of meetups by hosting our Celebration of Expression at the Noyes Arts Garage of Stockton University, an event showcasing local vendors, exhibiting visual artists, and performing artists of all kinds.

As we move into the next year of programming, we are centering conversations, community-led practice, and critiques around ethical art community-building in Atlantic City.

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Meeting Design

At present, the design strategy for our meetings’ scaffolding is a series of three consecutive monthly meetings, each building on the previous meeting but not requiring commitment to all.

*We choose to use the word scaffolding to describe/remind that we as organizers of these events are only ever designing the most basic framework, and that we remain cognizant that the true creators of the meetings are those community members in attendance.

1: Forum

This first session will always be centered in discussion and feedback, asking for our members to discuss what they dream Atlantic City’s art scene could and should look like—we as SOAC organizers position ourselves during these sessions as question-guides and data-collectors so that we can learn as much from our attendees as possible about the ways in which we should guide the following meetings.

2: Deep Learning

This is an exploration of self in relation to community.
For the first deep learning session, this looked like a group exploration of history, needs, and contributions through the creation of a Tree of Knowledge, followed by a mocktail hour of chatting and decompressing. For the second season’s deep learning session, we held an art-sharing meeting in which the majority of our members present brought something to show, and then we discussed their process, the ideas that made their process possible, the histories that made those ideas possible, etc.

3: Trading Post

This is a culmination of our prior meetings, an intimate and multi-faceted discussion of self-worth through the practice trading, altruistic sharing, non-transactional offerings, etc.

This session seeks to put into practice the work we’ve conducted in-meeting in ways that will allow our members to take the practice outside the boundaries of our meeting-space.

Our Artist Meetup series is supported by New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a nonprofit that funds initiatives to benefit the State’s civic life and meet the evolving information needs of New Jersey’s communities. A first-in-the-nation project, the Consortium reimagines how public funding can be used to address the growing problem of news deserts, misinformation, and support more informed communities.