Vision Festival

The Vision Festival is the world's premier festival of experimental music (typically free jazz/avant-garde jazz), art, film and dance, held annually in May/June on the Lower East Side of New York City from 1996 to 2011, in Brooklyn from 2012 to 2014, and returning to Manhattan in 2015.

[4] Inspired by the 1984 and 1988 Sound Unity Festivals, it was a direct outgrowth of the seminal but short-lived Improvisors Collective (1994–95).

In 1996, the collective's founder, dancer-choreographer Patricia Nicholson Parker, staged the first Vision Festival at the Learning Alliance on Lafayette Street, and subsequently founded the not-for-profit Arts for Art, Inc to organize the festival on an annual basis, along with other events and concert series throughout the year.

[5] The list of artists who have performed at the Vision Festival is long and varied, including David S. Ware, Cooper-Moore, Sam Rivers, Frank Lowe, Abbey Rader, Daniel Carter, William Parker, Roy Campbell, Jr., Hamid Drake, Nicole Mitchell, Rob Brown, Kidd Jordan, Henry Grimes, Marc Ribot, Chad Taylor, Rashied Ali, Joe McPhee, Jason Kao Hwang, Jayne Cortez, Fred Anderson, Matthew Shipp, Billy Bang, Eddie Gale, Whit Dickey, Amiri Baraka, Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Lacy, DJ Spooky, Yo La Tengo, Peter Kowald, Peter Brötzmann, Cat Power and Louis Moholo, among others.

Our principal activities are the presentation of cutting edge music, multi-discipline performances, and the exhibition of visual arts installations.