Live in America Springdale brings together artists and communities as we break bread, collaborate in workshops, create live performance and visual arts programming, and learn from one another. This site documents our thinking, our cooking, our explorations, our art, our mishaps, our growth, and our conversations.
New Orleans Visiting Artists
Delving into play, making music, photographing The Magician. New forms of merrymaking and collaboration. Live in America Festival Facilitator, Jay Pennington, brings a crew of New Orleans artists to make magic in Northwest Arkansas.
Yard Art Celebration Los Hermanos Vega: Rooted in Springdale
With mural and portrait painting, Los Hermanos Vega: Rooted in Springdale is an ode to Virginia Vega and Eddie Vega, siblings who devoted many years to expanding and supporting the Latine community in Springdale.
Corrido Songwriting Workshop
Amalia Mondragón, a Juárez-El Paso based singer/songwriter, will share her study and practice of writing corridos, Mexican ballads that narrate historical events.
¡Sofrito!
This pop-up exhibition will feature local and visiting NWA artists who together bring art out of galleries and onto the convenience store walls for all to enjoy.
Artist Amalia Mondragón
Amalia Mondragón / Tereso Perfecto Contreras hopes to spark conversations and shift narratives around gender fluidity, xenophobia, border life, migration, the Chihuahua desert, and underrepresented narratives.
A Recipe for Night Beans, in this case vegan borracho night beans
Making night beans is an act of faith. Faith in the power of onions and garlic and jalapeño. Faith in my own ability to release, leave both time and the beans unmonitored, unwatched. Faith that my ancestors’ centuries-old culinary brujería still lives in the present, inside my fingers as I chop and inside my taste buds as I lift the spoon to my mouth and blow across the soup before sipping the bean juice. Faith that those very oldest of magics can still transform a humble dried bean.
Family Fiesta
Join Live in America, Springdale for Family Fiesta, a community event created by artists Justin Favela and Bertha Gutierrez.
Ty Defoe: Adventures in Arkansas
They were asking me to imagine a world for myself to be in.
Artist Ty Defoe
Meet our first residency artist, Ty Defoe.
Recipe for an Unanticipated Thanksgiving Casserole
This is not the recipe I intended to write for the Thanksgiving season. My intention was to write a thoughtful meditation on the culinary journey of learning to nixtamalize corn for tortillas. But thoughtful corn tortillas were not what happened on Thanksgiving.
