A Worldwide Home for the Creative Spirit
Why the International Association of Creative and Performing Artists Matters Now
The International Association of Creative and Performing Artists (IACPA) was founded on a simple but increasingly radical premise: that creative and performing artists are not marginal figures in human life but central ones, and that they deserve a worldwide home equal to the importance of the work they do.
Writers, painters, actors, musicians, dancers, craftspeople, arts organizations, and art patrons are not ornaments at the edge of civilization. They are among civilization’s primary builders, interpreters, healers, and truth-tellers. At no time in modern history has this needed to be said more clearly—or more insistently—than now.
We are living through a convergence of crises: social fragmentation, technological acceleration, political instability, ecological precariousness, economic uncertainty, and a growing sense of meaninglessness that cuts across nations, classes, and generations. Many institutions that once provided coherence and orientation—religion, shared civic narratives, stable communities, reliable career paths—have weakened or fractured. At the same time, artists everywhere are being asked to do more with less: to create, respond, witness, inspire, and console while often struggling to survive materially and psychologically.
In this context, the need for a worldwide home for creative and performing artists is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
Art as a Meaning-Making Practice
Human beings are meaning-making creatures. When meaning collapses, or when it becomes brittle, imposed, or hollow, psychological distress rises. Anxiety, depression, alienation, rage, and despair flourish in meaning-poor environments. Art, at its best, is one of humanity’s most reliable ways of restoring, revising, and renewing meaning.
Artists do not merely entertain. They ask the questions that have no easy answers. They give form to grief, longing, joy, outrage, and hope. They remind us what it feels like to be alive in a body, in a place, in a moment in history. They translate the unsayable into image, sound, movement, story, and gesture. In doing so, they help individuals and cultures metabolize experience rather than be overwhelmed by it.
At this precise moment in human history—when algorithms increasingly shape attention, when synthetic content blurs the line between the made and the manufactured, and when speed threatens depth—the deliberate, human, value-driven act of creation matters more than ever. The IACPA exists to protect and elevate that act.
A Global Community in a Fragmented World
Artists often work in isolation, even when they appear publicly visible. A poet in Buenos Aires, a dancer in Lagos, a painter in Warsaw, a songwriter in Nashville, a ceramicist in Kyoto may share deep concerns and struggles while remaining unaware of one another’s existence. Meanwhile, national borders, funding systems, and cultural silos limit collaboration and mutual support.
The IACPA offers something rare: a truly international, cross-disciplinary home where artists and arts organizations can encounter one another not as competitors for scarce resources, but as fellow practitioners engaged in a shared human endeavor. It is a space for exchange rather than extraction, for dialogue rather than noise.
In a time when many online spaces reward outrage, performance, and simplification, the IACPA is committed to fostering thoughtful conversation, ethical engagement, and respect for difference—cultural, aesthetic, political, and philosophical. It recognizes that the arts thrive not when voices are flattened into consensus, but when they are held in generative tension.
Supporting the Artist as a Whole Human Being
One of the quiet crises of our era is the romanticizing of artistic suffering alongside the neglect of artistic well-being. Too many artists are expected to endure chronic financial instability, social marginalization, and psychological strain as if these were prerequisites for authenticity. The result is burnout, abandonment of creative paths, and unnecessary suffering.
The IACPA rejects the idea that artists must be broken to be brilliant. It understands artists as whole human beings—individuals with inner lives, responsibilities, bodies, relationships, and futures. Supporting creative work means supporting the conditions under which that work can be sustained over a lifetime.
This includes attention to mental health, ethical livelihood, professional development, community connection, and the cultivation of meaning. It includes advocacy for artists’ dignity and the recognition that a healthy artistic ecosystem benefits everyone, not only those who identify as artists.
Arts Organizations and Patrons as Essential Partners
The creative ecosystem is larger than individual makers. Arts organizations provide platforms, continuity, education, and cultural memory. Art patrons—whether individuals, foundations, or institutions—play a crucial role in enabling work that might otherwise never come into being.
The IACPA explicitly embraces this broader ecology. It understands that meaningful art emerges from relationships: between creators and audiences, institutions and communities, tradition and innovation. By bringing artists, organizations, and patrons into conversation, the association helps align resources with values and encourages stewardship rather than consumption.
At a moment when funding priorities are shifting and arts support is often precarious, this kind of alignment is both practical and moral.
Why Now, Not Later
It would be comforting to believe that we can wait—that when things settle down, when technology stabilizes, when politics calm, when economies recover, we can turn our attention back to the arts. But history suggests the opposite: that it is precisely during periods of upheaval that the arts do their most necessary work.
The question is not whether art will continue to be made. It always will. The question is whether artists will be supported, connected, and taken seriously as contributors to humanity’s ongoing effort to understand itself. The International Association of Creative and Performing Artists is an answer to that question. It is a declaration that the creative spirit deserves a home that is as expansive as the challenges we face and as durable as the human need for meaning and purpose.
In offering a worldwide home for writers, painters, actors, musicians, dancers, craftspeople, arts organizations, and art patrons—for all creative and performing artists, no matter what their genre or discipline—for all who love them, and for all bohemian spirits everywhere, the IACPA affirms something quietly radical: that art is not a side project of civilization, but one of its core survival strategies.
At this moment in human history, that affirmation is not optional. It is essential.
Eric Maisel, President
International Association of Creative and Performing Artists
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