2025 Epicenter Spring Summit

Please mark your calendars for Epicenter’s next Spring Summit: April 24-27, 2025. The Summit is primarily invite-only, but be on the look out for open spots, volunteer opportunities, and more via our social media and this blog.

Epicenter’s Summits

Since 2013, the Summit has convened over 130 artists to collaboratively produce site-specific work and engage in dialogue that pushes contextually embedded practice toward experimental and critical interventions. Epicenter’s Summit events invite experts in their field —artists, writers, designers, administrators— to come together in Green River for several days to participate in activities focused on creative professional practice, community design, art making, collaboration, ethics, and much more. Activities, which are often held in non-traditional venues, include intimate peer-run workshops, panel discussions, art projects and installations, performances, storytelling, communal meals, hikes, and both formal and informal conversations that allow for a horizontal exchange of ideas. Artists have led pigment workshops using local materials, performed campfire stories, broken the ice by “speed dating,” given Pecha Kucha talks, visited Epicenter projects, worked on community service projects, and lead storytelling hikes. Participants exchange ideas, lessons learned, and current research.

The Summit provides a platform for artists to expand their creative practice, commission additional work, gain professional documentation of their work, and develop connections with communities. The convening offers artists opportunities to take creative risks with their practice and join in dialogue and critique with other practitioners, scholars, and community members. As a result of the Summits, new artist collaboratives have formed, artists have been recruited to execute works at partner organizations, and Summit artists have been invited back to Epicenter as Frontier Fellows and Board Members.

Summits are intentionally not held annually in order to prevent community fatigue and to ensure eager anticipation. The last Summit was held in 2022. A video of the 2022 Spring Summit by Chris Merchant can be viewed here.

Located in Green River, Utah, Epicenter provides the opportunity to study and make work about the land, its history, and its inhabitants. Since its founding in 2009, Epicenter has brought hundreds of artists, designers, architects, and creative thinkers to the town of Green River for residencies and curated gatherings that seed new projects in and about its rural context. In doing so, the organization hopes to upend stereotypes about small towns and offer new perspectives on instigating change in the Mountain West.