Mapping, sharing, and resourcing art centers outside New York City and Los Angeles since 2022.
The Post-Center Art Center identifies, connects, and resources the art spaces in the United States outside of New York City and Los Angeles.
Founded in 2022, our first initiative is to build an accessible, searchable map of 1,000 art spaces across the Midwest, South, West, Noncontiguous, Native Nations, and U.S. Territories. We've been featured by the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture and Common Field—and now we want your help to map 1,000 spaces.
Why do this now?
Arts and culture in the United States is a 1.10 trillion dollar industry—yet artists beyond the traditional centers of New York City and Los Angeles have unequal access to these funds for their creative work. From Miami to Seattle to Detroit, creatives struggle to pay rent, seek healthcare, and compete for grants and residencies in their own backyard.
That's why we believe if the system is not working for those outside the center, we have to rebuild it from the outside in.
Our first initiative: the PCAC Map
One way to rebuild is through visibility and data. Connection across regions, disciplines, and lived experiences keeps us together; websites, maps, and in-person meetups help us tell that story of collective connection. They demonstrate our size, our diversity, and our impact, better ensuring fair representation for remote, rural, tribal, urban, exurban, and suburban art communities who demand a larger share of the art world's platforms and profits. If Google can map our communities, why can't we?
PCAC believes the resources artists and the spaces that support them already exist—we just simply need to find and allocate them better. We're asking you to help us find them, whether it’s mapping art spaces across the U.S. outside of NYC and LA on our site or hosting a mapathon. This way, communities can see their own power, connection, and community; visitors have an accessible map to view local art; and those with resources know where to go and who else to support.
How it works
As of 2024, PCAC currently defines our geographic region of interest as anywhere within the United States, its territories, and sovereign Native/Indigenous/First Nation tribes that are outside of New York City's five boroughs and Los Angeles County.
Anyone can submit a center here, which will be reviewed and approved by a PCAC Moderator. You're also welcome to host an in-person PCAC Mapathon here, which teaches your community about best practices when collecting data, adds spaces to our collective map, and takes just a few hours.
The spaces we are currently interested in must exist as a physical location. Submitted spaces that fall outside these categories—such as a performance space in Canada or a gallery in Pomona—are welcome, but PCAC cannot guarantee your submission will appear publicly in our archive.
We continue to assess the efficacy of our current geographic sites of interest, so your submission regardless of its location will help inform how, why, and what we define as our regions of interest.
Keep our work going
PCAC is seeking grants and individual donor opportunities to expand our team and run free mapathons. If you're interested in supporting this work and scaling our team, reach out to Daniel Sharp, Executive Director, at daniel@pcac.team With your help, we can collectively demonstrate the impact art spaces have across the traditional art centers in the United States. Join us.
Privacy and data
When you submit a new center to us, the PCAC team can view the information you input; however, private information such as your name and email is not publicly visible on our map and is encrypted in our Vercel database. We will never sell your data to anyone. We do not collect any site analytics data. We do not set tracking cookies, store IP addresses, or any other personal data when you browse our website. If you have any additional questions or data inquiries on retrieving or deleting your data, email Daniel Sharp, Executive Director of PCAC, at daniel@pcac.team.
Head to the homepage to find your region—
or discover another.
