Recently, Youth Corps Manager, Bev Vega, became cynical about art as a tool that motivates people to build a better future. With extreme cuts to public arts funding, creative spaces becoming vacuums for a single thought, and art being presented within institutions who don’t fully align with the values of liberation, she started to believe that it’s become increasingly difficult and maybe impossible to create work that gets a wide range of audiences to make this world better. It feels instead like a big messed up soup of consumption and aestheticization. Because of this, for the Fall 2026 Armory Art Together, over the three weeks, inspired by the Armory’s Public Program, Now is the Time - Artists Go to Work, she asked Youth Corps to prove her wrong. Interns created work through different disciplines that engaged audiences and had them follow through on building a better future for each other. Youth Corps asked themselves, can art truly bring about civic engagement?
Each week Youth Corps created through a different discipline (Visual Art, Performance, and Written Word) to develop a piece of art with one intention; get people to do something to make this world a better place. Each week they received examples with the prompt of different civic actions that people could be encouraged to do. Alternatively, they also had the option to come up with their own action.