Ann Arbor is burning — art and culture for whom?

I meet Petals Sandcastle (they/them) on the grass in the Diag-State-Hill triangle of Ann Arbor. It’s familiar grounds for Petals who studied at the University of Michigan.

A stone’s throw away is Now Studios run by the Express Your Yes Foundation, a 501(c)3 creative nonprofit fusing activism with art. NOW studios is home base for the foundation. It’s an underground art and performance venue, political playhouse and more, full of “creative disruptors and thought leaders”. It’s also a safe space for people to express themselves as they are, away from the heat of the neutral gaze — one that is “passively active, indifferent.”

The people running the studio, among them founder and headlight Petals, have arranged over a hundred free events in the city last year. Most recent is a series of events under the project Ann Arbor is Burning — a celebration of radical queer imagination, as part of the Ann Arbor Summer Festival.

Through these events Petals and their fellow artivists advocate for the city’s abundant resources to go to the homeless, queer, Black, immigrant, disabled, and other marginalized communities, who actually keep the city in business.

“I keep coming back to this place thinking, certainly it doesn’t want to be a soulless playground, and if only normative society could really see us in our fullness, they’d want to share and support us, but it seems very, very few actually want to leverage even an inch of their privilege to megaphone the margins &…