A message to visual artists, performing artists, writers, composers, and everyone who has ever believed that what creators do actually matters.
Who Showed Up First
Some of you found Res Creativa through Substack. Some through a friend. Some through social media on a Tuesday when the news was bad again.
You are sculptors, playwrights, directors, musicians working across traditions that don’t have clean names. Poets writing at the edge of politics and spirit. Writers who quip that they’re dilettantes but whose sentences give them away.
One of you makes protest puppets. One of you said, simply: the concept is magnificent.
One of you said you have no talent for making art but have spent a lifetime supporting the people who do. And then asked, without hesitation: Tell me what to do next.
That last one stopped me.
The Creative Constituency Is Wider Than We Think
Res Creativa is not only for people who make things with their hands or their voices or their instruments. It is for everyone who understands, in their bones, that a community’s soul is expressed in the arts.
Those people are part of the creative constituency too. They always have been. We just haven’t had a name for what we are together.
Nobody Showed Up to Debate the Premise
Here is what I notice in these early voices: nobody is waiting to be convinced.
The questions are already about what comes next. What’s possible? Where does this go? What do we create together?
We don’t have time for anything else.
We are not yet large. The founding list is still short enough that every name on it means something.
If Res Creativa is going to become what it can become, a constitutional body of imagination, a force that democracies actually need, it starts with the people who show up before there is proof.
You are those people.
If you haven’t added your name yet, the door is open.
Editor’s Note (2026): This essay was written during the earliest days of Res Creativa, when the project was first being imagined. It remains here as part of the organization’s founding story.
A version of this post was originally published on Substack, Apr 9, 2026
Banner image: Detail from image of Anna Pavlova on the program cover for the Feb. 28, 1921, Ballet Russe performance at Chicago’s Medinah Temple, National Endowment for the Arts Millennium Project, The New York Public Library, Public Domain.
