The air was thick with resistance as the city’s streets pulsed with protests. Thousands of people in Philly joined the nationwide “No Kings Day” actions on June 14th, 2025.
Just a mile from the protest in the Spring Garden section of the city, another kind of gathering was unfolding: Sketch 2025, a public preview of ArtPhilly’s “What Now: 2026” festival. Nearly 200 artists, elders, funders, and culture keepers entered a space deliberately designed to honor multidisciplinary arts practices and invite imagination. The event was part brunch, part performance, and part living museum, anchoring the arts community in the midst of national chaos and conflict.
“Artists can’t help but tell the truth. That’s what we do as artists, right? We respond to the moment, and we interpret it as we see it… We really do believe, as a truth-telling organization, that we act as a vehicle for protest, because we’re in this era in which lies seem to be dominating the press and the culture, and we’re an antidote to that,” said Bill Adair, ArtPhilly’s Executive Director.
From the first notes of Dr. Kendrah Butler-Waters’ all-woman jazz ensemble, Sketch 2025 became a sanctuary. The music rose, full of longing and defiance, echoing the struggles and beauty of those who have carved out space for themselves in a world determined to silence them.
Dancer Shavon Norris and vocalist Elle Morris stitched together a collaboration of vulnerability, humor, fear, and transformation, inviting all to be present with their own becoming, even as bodies and stories age. Shavonne reflected on her performance, “It’s about the pleasures and challenges and all of the nuances of aging as a middle-aged black woman, and what it means for my body culturally, socially, and politically. So I did a little portion of that today.”
Cookie Diorio’s drag opera, accompanied by Aurelian Eulert’s piano, broke the sensationalized mold of reality televisions lip synched pop song performance style as Cookie delivered a classical vocal performance, reminding everyone present that Black, queer, and trans brilliance has always belonged on the world’s grandest stages.
Food at the event was both art and ceremony. With brunch provided by Kampar, the audience was gifted with the story of the Malaysian food served and its cultural significance, prior to enjoying it. Chef Laquanda Dobson, however, didn’t cook. She presented an exhibit with growing collard greens, okra, peanuts, and other greens that served as a garden of ancestral memory and African American ancestry.
BalletX dancers, with bare vulnerability, gave shape to the inner battles of intimacy and trust, reflecting a country at war with itself yet longing for peace.
Philadelphia’s former poet laureate, Yolanda Wisher, offered new, unshared work – her own sketch in progress, breathing life into the voices of enslaved women whose resistance was never documented but whose power endures.
Other performers and artists included Laurin Talese, Glenn Holston, Tommie Waheed-Evans, Eric Battle, Colette Fu, Walé Oyéjidé, Pete Angevine, Emily Schreiner, and Liz Yohlin Baill.
Tania Isaac, the Curatorial and Deputy Director of ArtPhilly, offered, “The artists that I have encountered in my time in Philadelphia are incredibly thoughtful people who are looking to do things that are transformative. Whether they’re transformative on a small scale in terms of conversations and small interactions, whether they’re transformative in terms of huge performances and exhibits that shift the way we think about the world, I think it’s important to make art right now because that’s the capacity. It’s our capacity to remind people that we are sensitive, creative, intelligent beings, capable of more than just this reactive, closed way of engaging with what’s happening around us.”
Sketch 2025 was about art, but it was also about presence and holding space. The layout was carefully designed to encourage wandering, dialogue, and discovery. Artists and guests mingled, sharing dreams and fears, breaking bread, and planting the seeds of new collaborations.
As government funding withers and cultures are threatened by erasure, gathering at Sketch 2025 was a way of being heard and held, an act of self-preservation and resistance. Here, art became a call to action, a witness to truth, and a practice of joy.
So it seems as if next year’s festival may already have its answer. What now? Art now.
Jos Duncan Asé is the Founder, Executive Producer and Publisher with Love Now Media, an empathy-centered media company that uses storytelling to amplify acts of love at the intersection of social justice, wellness, and equity. She uses her voice and her platforms to empower diverse communities to create and tell their own stories. She holds a Masters of Fine Art (MFA) from the City College of New York and a Bachelors of Business Administration (BBA), with a concentration in Information Technology, from the Fox School of Business at Temple University.
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