The Creative Response Network (CRN) is an emergent and collaborative effort led by a consortium of local arts leaders representing diverse, critical, and justice-focused arts-organizing efforts in New Orleans. Meeting monthly since the start of the pandemic, CRN serves as a resource and advocacy hub. CRN’s approach seeks to reimagine the region’s arts landscape to one that centers on equity, justice, accountability, and sustainable livelihoods through the production, presentation, preservation, advocacy, and cultivation of art. The Network works to address immediate and long-standing forms of inequality and exploitation within the arts through working groups. CRN work focuses on the complicated relationships between place, race, gender, disciplinary practices, and leadership inequality that continues to plague New Orleans’ cultural economy.

Creative Response Network is a New Orleans-based initiative for art, movement building, and radical possibilities. Initiated by Antenna at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020 and led initially by Antenna, Ashe Cultural Arts Center, and Junebug Projection, CRN provides direct support to artists while engaging a network of 70+ arts and cultural organizations, projects, collectives, and individuals to advance a more just and transformative ecology of equity and sustainability within the arts and cultural sectors of New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana.