History

LA Arts began in 1973 as LPL Plus, a program established by the trustees of the Lewiston Public Library to fill gaps in the region’s arts and cultural offerings. The Auburn Public Library soon joined, forming LPL Plus APL.

In the early years, volunteers and library staff presented an impressive series of arts and humanities programs including concerts, foreign films, art lectures and public policy discussions. Gradually, the organization developed programs to bring artists into the schools in the two cities.

In 1988 the renamed LA Arts was designated by the two city governments as the local arts agency of the Twin Cities. As the number of arts and cultural venues in LA has grown over time, LA Arts has shifted focus to supporting our arts and cultural partners in the region and presenting the arts of local artists, makers and performers in the LA Arts Gallery, the Downstage, and in our community. LA Arts aims to increase opportunities for all Lewiston and Auburn residents to make and experience the arts. We are especially committed to providing artistic opportunities for community members with limited access to the arts.

Our Values

As an organization, LA Arts commits itself to values-driven decisionmaking. We understand this to mean intentionally defining our values as an organization, and making decisions about our priorities and activities based on how closely they align with these values.

We acknowledge how easy it is to allow a sense of urgency, our own limited capacity, and the specific skill sets of our individual members to guide our work, and commit ourselves to pushing back against these tendencies. We acknowledge that we will err in these attempts, and commit ourselves to ongoing, intentional, and lovingly critical self-evaluation as we strive to improve.

Our guiding values are as follows:

We exist in community, work for community, and are responsible to our community.

• We affirm our love and respect for the community of Lewiston Auburn.
• We commit ourselves to intentional listening and community responsiveness.
• We acknowledge the arts can be a vehicle for gentrification, and commit to examining our work through an anti-classist, anti-gentrification lens.
• We celebrate the arts as a means of building community and expressing community identity.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.

• We acknowledge the historical whiteness of LA Arts as an institution.
• We recognize that we do not currently reflect the diversity of our community.
• We commit ourselves to actively diversifying our board and staff.
• We commit ourselves to creating an organizational culture that rejects white supremacy and creates a space of equity and inclusion.

The arts are transformative, and the arts are for everyone to experience and create.

• We uphold the arts as a vehicle for social change, a conduit to joy, and a means of self-expression.
• We believe the arts are a springboard for learning, dialogue, and personal development.
• We celebrate everyone’s artistic nature and commit to creating opportunities for all in our community to create, learn, and experience the arts.

We define the arts, art-making, and artist expansively.

• We celebrate all who engage in creative self-expression as artists.
• We dedicate ourselves to supporting artists of all kinds in our community.
• We commit to challenging our own biases about what constitutes art.

Board of Directors