Founded in 1996, Arts for Art is a New York City-based tax-exempt organization dedicated to the promotion and advancement of Multicultural Improvised Creative Arts — an African American indigenous art form in which improvisation is principal. This art embodies music, dance, poetry, and visual arts. It is recognized for its variety of highly developed and personalized improvisational languages.

AFA works to preserve the legacy of FreeJazz and to ensure a vital future through its re-imagination by new generations of artists. With the internationally renowned Vision Festival, AFA has spearheaded this American, creative, improvised movement placing cutting-edge, improvised music and art onto a world stage. AFA creates year-round performance opportunities for hundreds of artists throughout the year, nourishing a diverse multi-cultural, multi-generational, and gender-diverse community working in improvisation across disciplines.

These events serve a growing audience with low-cost or free events while maintaining a commitment to paying artists fairly. To further our goals of diversity and accessibility within black and brown communities we have been fostering education initiatives that address these underserved communities. Over the organization’s history, we have presented 3000 sets of music, performed by approximately 1,750 musicians.