Community Arts in our Time of Crises

Abstract: This article reflects on multiple crises being negotiated by community arts practitioners in the contemporary moment. Based on reflections on/about the International Community Arts Festival (ICAF) that took place in Rotterdam in March 2026, as well as some of the productions staged under its umbrella, the article contextualises the emergence of the festival as a legacy of Rotterdam’s term as European City of Culture. Acknowledging the comparatively recent arrival of the term ‘community arts’ to the Netherlands, the paper also considers how such arts practices simultaneously function as a mode of societal critique and expressive self-organisation and as a policy projection tied to social programmes that are tasked with delivering impact in ‘disadvantaged’ communities. Discussions at ICAF 2026 highlighted community arts’ possible ‘crisis of confidence’ in the face of funders’ managerialist expectations and the rise of the far right globally. The former has led to the increasing normalisation of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Logic Models in determining purpose and value in the field, while the latter relates to some key tensions inherent to doing participatory, community-led arts work in these populist times. Conversely, this paper also discusses how community arts can be a powerful aesthetic and political vehicle for critically interrogating profound societal questions such as the implications of the climate crisis; inequalities shaping assumptions about the ‘migration crisis’; and the crisis of legitimacy impacting on the state and professional agencies in different contexts.