Mission Overview

TransCultural Exchange’s mission to bridge cultural, geographic, political and linguistic divides by bringing people together through the arts in order to foster a greater understanding of world cultures. At the same time, TransCultural Exchange seeks to further artistic innovation by creating large-scale, cross-discipline, global art projects and programming. In this way, TransCultural Exchange provides those in the arts with the necessary tools to become active participants in today’s increasingly interdependent society.

In 2007, in addition to its global art projects and artist exchanges, TransCultural Exchange launched a biennial Conference on International Opportunities in the Arts - the only forum that brings artists directly into contact with renowned international critics, curators and artist-in-residency directors. These biennial conferences provide America’s creative workforce - artists, teachers, students and others in the arts-related fields - with the means to engage with their international peers, gain greater cultural awareness, and transmit their new-found knowledge of what it means to be a global citizen through their work and, in many cases, teaching.

At the end of 2008 TransCultural Exchange will have completed its current project The Tile Project, Destination: The World for which over 100 artists, from over 40 countries, donated tiles to 22 world sites to create 22 site specific, permanent art works. Their resulting multicultural structures now dot the world landscape from Berlin to Boston, Manila to Mumbai, Toronto to Taipei and 16 other sites in between. The Tile Project has achieved something that few others have: it has brought together people from vastly different backgrounds and cultures to create lasting testimonies of international respect and cooperation—and not just in one geographic location or art world hot spot, but in 22 sites throughout the world. As a testament that global cooperation is possible in this increasingly fractured world, this project is indeed it.

In conjunction with the 2009 Conference, TransCultural Exchange also is asking artists to work with individuals from other countries (in all fields of endeavor) to create new collaborative art works for a series of global exhibitions entitled Here, There and Everywhere: Anticipating the Art of the Future. The aim of these exhibits is to encourage out-of-the-box thinking and, through the display of the works created, celebrate the rich cross-fertilization of ideas and friendships that result from artists and others of different disciplines, backgrounds and cultures working together.

From 1989 to 2001 TransCultural Exchange functioned as a grass-roots arts organization, umbrella-ed by other non-profit organizations. In September 2002, working with the legal offices of Palmer and Dodge, LLP, TransCultural Exchange was incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in Massachusetts.

In April 2004 UNESCO honored TransCultural Exchange with sponsorship. TransCultural Exchange also has received support from many well respected institutions including: The LEF Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Open Society Institute/Soros Foundation Network, MIT’s Office of the Art, and the Asian Cultural Council. Additionally, in 2002 the Northeast Chapter of the International Art Critics Association honored the organization with a first place award for “Best Show in An Alternative Space” at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts, also announced at the National Chapter of the International Art Critics’ annual award ceremony at the New Museum in New York in 2002.