CNC Member Spotlight - Everything you've wanted to know about MULTICULTURAL ARTS CENTER

A performer at the Multicultural Arts Center

What are the Multicultural Arts Center's guiding principles and values?
We present visual and performing arts to foster cultural and creative equity. Our mission is to present multicultural visual and performing arts programs to educate the community about diversity, and make our facility available to artists or groups that might not otherwise have access to a professionally equipped facility or the cultural mainstream.

What are the ongoing services or programs that you provide?
We hold a season of visual and performing arts exhibitions, performances, and shows, as well as many community arts events throughout each year.

Are there any upcoming projects, initiatives, or events that your organization would like others to know about?
Our Summer Series! The Multicultural Arts Center Summer Series is a multi-day performance showcase that takes place in the Centanni courtyard, a city park that is adjacent to the Multicultural Arts Center facilities.

The Summer Series brings our residential neighbors, our business community, our audience, and our artists together to enjoy all that the outdoors of Cambridge has to offer: the opportunity to build community, to access free and inclusive arts programming, and to safely and joyfully support the creative sector of Cambridge. Summer Series concerts and performances are always free and inclusive events.

Coming up, we have 3 more events in our series:

Latin Music in the Park
Friday, July 28th at 6:30pm
An evening of celebrating the beauty of Latin music to the sounds of Samba and Forró. Featuring the incredible Receita de Samba and Trio Let’s Vamos, don’t forget your dancing shoes!

Jazz in the Park
Friday, August 4th at 6:30pm
Enjoy the sounds of live jazz by dancing the night away with us. Featuring the music of the Tyson Jackson Trio and New Orleans style jazz band Midnight BBQ.

MAC Block Party
Friday, September 1st at 6:30pm
Celebrate the end of summer with us as the Multicultural Arts Center throws a lively, old school, block party. This day will feature many community performances, music, food, and dance.

​More information here.

What do you think we should know about Multicultural Arts Center?
We serve artists and audiences who are people of color, disabled, emergent, or otherwise underrepresented or under-resourced. We maintain over 50% of performing and visual arts programming free or donation based in order to keep the arts accessible to student, low-income and culturally diverse populations. Many of our programs provide ways for these works to foster conversation around issues of race and equity. We invite artists and performers of color to tell their stories through music, dance, poetry, theater and the visual arts. These stories reflect and elevate the artists’ diverse lived experiences through their cultural identities as well as their genders, religions, sexualities, abilities and intersectional identities.

In a typical year, over 9,000 people enter our Arts Center, or join us virtually. They are artists, audience members and community members, visiting to view our gallery, host an event, hold a community meeting, perform a dance, theater or musical production, or simply stop in to say hello. They are public school students, Cambridge residents, visitors from out of town, patrons of the arts, gospel singers, artists with disabilities, graduate students, organizers, and so many others. The Multicultural Arts Center is a place that is welcoming, inclusive and nondiscriminatory to all artists and audiences.

Salsa in the Park