Make room
Pay artists for their labor, find places to gather, and shape formats around the people taking part. Time, rest, and access affect what anyone can make.
Winter / Memory
Culture needs people, time, and material support.
Future Prairie moves resources, space, and authorship toward LGBTQIA+ Oregon working-class artists, so they can make, preserve, and share the culture that shapes what the future becomes.
Founded by Liam Whitworth in January 2018, Future Prairie is an Oregon 501(c)(3) nonprofit and an artist-led cultural outpost. We work across performance, film, teaching, publishing, gatherings, and documentation. The forms change as people bring forward different needs and possibilities.
how we collaborate
An idea might arrive as a piece of a song, a feeling, or a painting that wants to become a mural. We make room for exploration before asking for a polished pitch. Rest, play, and conversation can be part of developing the work.
A plan has to respond to the people making it. Emotional, physical, spiritual, material, and political needs can change what a project asks of us. Black and neurodivergent participants have helped shape our formats and our understanding of access. We keep learning how gatherings can become safer and more accessible.
Our application prompts ask about collaborators, community knowledge, and the resources an idea needs. The community agreements protect privacy, time, labor, and intellectual property. Those conditions matter to the art itself.
Who gets room to create?
Artistic life is connected to housing, food, education, and a healthy environment. An invitation to create means little when the artist can't afford the time. We work to pay artistic labor and bring money, space, materials, relationships, and practical support closer to the people doing it.
Oregon's stories also carry histories of migration, displacement, and erasure. Who is documented, who is credited, and who gets to describe a place are questions of power. Oral histories, performances, films, and recordings let artists speak from their own knowledge and experience.
what we do
Make culture
Commission, curate, teach, perform, publish, and experiment. Artists bring their own questions, forms, and ways of knowing.
Keep a record
Document work and histories that might otherwise be missed or erased. Name the people who made them and preserve the context.
Carry it forward
Share recordings, stories, skills, and relationships so they can reach other people and become part of future work.
Flowers for Black Elders, PLAYFIGHT, Singing School, artist-led walks, the Oregon Trans Film Festival, and Radio have distinct purposes. The project pages show how each took shape; the archive holds the deeper record.
The people responsible for the work
Onry is Future Prairie's Executive Director. Our working board shares oversight, planning, fundraising, and implementation. The Team page holds current roles, biographies, and governance details. The Artists directory records a broader community of collaborators across different years and projects.
Return, repair, and what we carry forward
Our seasonal language comes from the Pacific Northwest places we share. In our cultural work, return can mean revisiting a history, sustaining a relationship, or giving an unfinished idea more time. Repair can mean paying someone whose labor has been overlooked or making room for a story that has been pushed aside. Artists give those commitments form.
