ACT Roxbury puts the cultural and artistic riches of Roxbury, Boston's premier African American and Latino neighborohod, boldly on display. A collaboration of citizens, artists, educational and cultural institutions, businesses, and community-based orgnmizations, it benefits Roxbury, the wider community of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the nation. Its activities reflect, preserve, and nurture the arts, culture and trade for the benefit of current, former and future residents. Its name ACT Roxbury was chosen to convey the decisive actions being taken to revitalize the community using the arts as a platform. Current activities include:

• The 8th Annual Roxbury Film Festival, showcasing independent films made by filmmakers of color from Boston and other major cities.
• Collaboration with a number of performance groups from Greater Boston to bring a wide range of exciting and affordable entertainment to roxbury.

100 West Second Street
Boston, MA 02127

Boston's Artists for Humanity EpiCenter is dedicated to using the arts to empower and cultivate creativity and entrepreneurship among inner city youth. As a natural outgrowth of its work in promoting civic and social responsibility among young people, the EpiCenter conforms to the nation's strictest environmental standards, and has earned the US Green Building Council's (LEED) Platinum rating for the highest level of environmentally friendly building design in the nation. The EpiCenter uses both water and energy efficiently, making use of natural light and incorporating recycled materials into the building design. Demonstrating that is is possible to achieve high levels of sustainability and environmentally friendly design even on a tight budge, the EpiCenter building is more than construction; it is art.

• Windows face south and provide natural light and solar heat
• Rainwater is harvested and stored for landscape irrigation
• The building houses art studios, a "learning laboratory," and 5,000 square feet of gallery space

Throughout the City of Boston
Boston Open Studios Coalition
P.O. Box 12003
Boston, MA 02112

A unique opportunity to explore Boston's art scene in unconventional settings, Boston's Open Studios is the largest of artistic event of its kind in the country. A coalition of twelve Boston neighborhoods sponsor a variety of annual events, allowing Bostonians and visitors to purchase art directly from artists in their own homes and studios.

• Participants enjoy art exhibitions and demonstrations as well as a variety of concerts and musical performances as they peruse Boston's historic neighborhoods and explore Boston's artistic riches
• All events are free and open to the public
• Featured neighborhoods include the South End, South Boston/Fort Point Channel, Roxbury, Charlestown, and Jamaica Plain

The Boston Cyberarts Festival is an international biennial festival of art and technology in all media including both the visual and performing arts that showcases ways in which artists throughout the world are using computer-driven technologies. In addidiotn to advancing the use of new media, a UMass Dartmouth study found that the festival generates a total economic impact of about $2.6 million for both artists and arts organizations and a range of businesses. The festival is organized by Boston Cyberarts, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to the presentation and exploration of artists working with new technologies. Components include:

• HyperArtSpace, a virtual gallery
• Faces of Tomorrow, a web site where children can submit digital self-portraits
• Initiated Artists in Residence at Technology Companies of Massachusetts (A.R.T.C.O.M.)

In an innovative effort to protect art galleries from rising rents, the Chelsea Arts Tower in West Chelsea Manhattan offers an entire modern high rise for gallery condominiums. Real Estate developer Bass Associates commissioned the building in response to a classic big city pattern: low real estate rents draw artists into a fringe district and galleries follow. Wealtheir new residents and restaurants follow, and the "artistic ambiance" increases commercial rents, forcing gallery owners to pack up and move out, taking their galleries with them. By selling gallery space as a commercial condominium, the Chelsea Arts Tower looks to reverse that trend. Gallery owners can protect themselves from the rising rents by purchasing a gallery friendly commercial condominium, thus helping to establishing a long term presence in the community.

• Features 17 foot ceilings on the first floor, and 11 foot ceilings on subsequent floors
• Twenty stories of striking design

The International Child Art Foundation (ICAF) integrates arts education with science, sports, and technology for the creative and emotional development of children in the US and across the globe. Based on knowledge and experience gained from treating child survivors of 9/11 and other disasters, ICAF developed the program to help Tsunami child survivors, and, child victims of Hurricane Katrina. The circumstances and implications of each disaster are different but knowledge gained in one tragedy helps in the diagnosis and treatment of others. The Healing Arts Program has helped children through expressive arts therapy. The program helps in the following ways:

• It encourages children not directly affected by the disaster to create "encouragement art" that provides hope to the children affected
• It offfers creative experssion and psychological intervention for the traumatized
• It helps to determine what teachers in the affected areas need, shipping them art and school supplies

The goal of The Tile Project is to unite the world through innovative art. Between 2004 and 2007, more than 100 artists will each create 22 tiles that will be installed in 22 sites around the globe--from Berlin to New York and Sarajevo to Seoul. These tiles will be installed at museums, cultural centers, parks and other public places between 2004-2006. Reaching out to and beyond the art world's hot spots, the project touches nearly every corner of the globe, allowing local artists to design unique intallations that incorperate the donated tiles and are sensitive to their site's context, resulting in remarkably strong symbols of global cooperation and artistic innovation. A few of the projects objectives are to:

• Foster a viable and non-threatening means to unite all parts of the world
• Initiate and promote collaborations between a diverse group of international artists, their communities, non-profit art institutions and the educational sector
• Provide related global educational programs, talks and panel discussions, tolerance and international cooperation at each of the project's global sites