Causes: Art Museums, Arts & Culture, Museums, Visual Arts

Mission: Artrain?s mission is to enrich lives and build communities through the arts. We believe that the arts should be available to everyone everywhere. Artrain brings enjoyment, understanding, and awareness of visual art and other cultural exhibitions to a diverse audience across the United States. It encourages the development of local cultural programs and organizations, provides educational programming to schools and increases participation in and support for the arts. The impact of Artrain programs is proven through its nearly 40-year legacy as the catalyst that has started or strengthened hundreds of cultural organizations. It has provided life-changing experiences for participants who have gone on to become artists, museum professionals, cultural volunteers and life-long art enthusiasts.

Programs: 1.Creative voice - artrain is the project manager and producer of creative voice (formerly criticcar detroit). Creative voice is a media-based arts journalism project that produces and posts video stories about arts and cultural events in detroit and southeast mi on social media. Creative voice highlight reels, in addition to being made and shared free to arts and cultural organizations for promotional use, are posted immediately to youtube and other social media sites for sharing. Creative voice's overarching goals are to: 1) add an important resource to diminishing arts and cultural criticism in the media; 2) cover the creative sector of detroit and southeast michigan, especially the newly innovative offerings; 3) promote the region as a thriving creative center; 4) encourage audiences to try new experiences. Artrain hires emerging videographers and journalists to work with conlin and the creative voice team of producers and editors. Armed with an artrain commissioned creative voice app for the ipad, the team attends cultural events ranging from the experimental to the traditional. In addition to the stories, creative voice video highlight reels add "person-on-the-street" audience commentary to offer authentic views on events. These highlight reels as well as individual audience critiques are posted within 24-hours for viewing and sharing on sites such as youtube - creative voice and facebook-creative voice. Creative voice has covered more than 150 events including: dlectricity, the detroit institute of arts, museum of contemporary art in detroit, detroit design festival, hilberry theatre, the detroit historical museum, mural on the dequindre cut, cinetopia, the ark's storytelling festival, funhouse gallery and art lab j. Detroit public television (dptv) has featured creative voice on its detroit performs program. To date there have been more than almost 40,000 views of more than 1,000 creative voice videos. 2.Strengthening nonprofits, building capacity and making creative dreams come true - artrain is taking its long-term commitment to strengthening local nonprofits to a new level. Since 2012 artrain has been contracted by the arts alliance of washtenaw county to provide administrative and project management services. The organizations share office space, resources and staff. The arts alliance, a young organization, benefits from artrain's administrative expertise and artrain gains an intimate knowledge of local arts agency challenges that enhances its national organizational capacity- building work. Encouraged by this success, artrain resolved to assist other like-minded projects and is offering fiscal sponsorships for worthwhile but vulnerable artistic or cultural programs that are not or may not need to be an independent nonprofit. To date, artrain has helped the selma caf, wonderfool productions producers of festifools and the ypsilanti 24-hour film shoot out. Artrain is presently working with individual artists and visionaries (i. E. Jennifer conlin with criticcar and mark braun of mr. B's joybox express) to help them bring their artistic goals to fruition. 3.An epic journey mr. B's joybox express mississippi river road ride 2014 - 1,840 miles, 80 days in as many towns, more than 23,000 people and hundreds of children were reached during this epic piano-touting, bike- pedaling and music-playing journey. Starting in lake itasca, minnesota on september 1st and ending in new orleans, louisiana on november 18,2014, mr. B's joybox express, founded and fronted by renowned ann arbor, michigan jazz and blues pianist mark "mr. B" braun, spread the joy of music and movement along every mile. Mr. B teamed up with sam genson, marty stano, jules cunningham and tour manager and artrain program director, shoshana hurand. Motivated by his own involvement with music and sports, braun dreamed of putting a piano on a bike and riding it across the country to spread the joy of music and encourage physical activity. After trial runs in michigan, braun set his sights on the mississippi river corridor. Every obstacle was met including a few wayward armadillos and alligators. Performances at the dakota in minneapolis and preservation hall in new orleans were two of the many, many highlights. The pinnacle of this adventure was the people met on the way, as it is with every artrain touring project. All along the way the team was successful in raising interest in and awareness of blues, jazz, cycling and pursuing personal dreams.