After over 100 productions across the past 22 years, West Philly-based art organization Intercultural Journeys has reinvented itself as Journey Arts. The new name and branding, the team explained, will align with more ambitious projects as well as additional funding and extended development periods for artists.
“We wanted to create something that would take us into the next hopefully 10,15, 20 years as an organization with this new type of work we’re attempting to do,” Nia Benjamin, director of creative projects, told Billy Penn.
Founded in 2002 with an initial focus on music, Intercultural Journeys — now Journey Arts — has evolved into a multi-genre producing organization realizing the visions of creators working in increasingly varied mediums.
“We help artists who come to us with the seed of an idea, imagine what the end result might look like, and help take them along that journey,” explained Carly Rapaport-Stein, executive director of the non-profit.
Assistance takes various forms, from finding funding and securing performance venues, to providing creative development and increasing exposure — essentially, stepping in when “the skills of an organization could [provide] support in a way that you might not have the capacity to do as a solo artist,” said artistic director Marla Burkholder.
Recent productions include “Esto No Tiene Nombre,” a collaboration between poet Denice Frohman and theater artist Alex Torra depicting, through a series of vignettes, oral histories of Latina lesbian elders collected over several years of interviews. It was followed by the organization’s most ambitious project to date, “The Re-Emancipation of Social Dance,” with Philadelphia Poet Laureate Yolanda Wisher and choreographer Raja Feather Kelly merging multimedia and live performances, in a house party-styled setting, to explore the history and cultural impact of social dance.
With the rebranding and a commitment to mounting even more complex productions, the Journey Arts team hopes to “not only honor the scale of the work that we’re stepping into,” said Benjamin, director of creative projects, but to also “connect more authentically” with an audience growing in size and diversity. Developed by design group The Devoted, the nonprofit’s new visual identity serves as “a bit of a facelift,” Benjamin said, “to see if we can tailor the way our external communications look to audiences who are naturally finding their way to our productions.”
A change to the name — conceived before search algorithms were a concern and noticeably lacking any mention of ‘art’ — was also deemed practical. “If somebody’s looking up our organization [online], Intercultural Journeys — more often people thought it was a travel agency,” said artistic director Burkholder. “We needed to be a little more clear about what it is that we do.”
The new name resulted from a series of discussions on “what is core to us, which is the idea of journeys,” said executive director Rapaport-Stein. “It’s the audience coming to us and journeying with us throughout the show. It’s the artists as they journey with us, sometimes for years, in producing the work — and we felt like it was really sort of the perfect encapsulation of our ethos.”
Journey Arts’ upcoming season will consist of three productions, starting in December with “Make Ready Again,” a dance theater piece by performance artist Marguerite Hemmings, staged at South Philly’s Theater Exile. It’ll be followed in April by “Eight Eight Time” at the Mandell Theater, featuring the first collaboration between a quartet of pianists, and, in June, the continuation of the organization’s Table Session dinner series, with this edition curated by cellist and composer Daniel de Jesús.
More details are available at the organization’s newly launched website, journey-arts.org
