The Thriving Artist Cooperative was started with a dream that began in 2010 with Raven Carswell and Shayna Farber, and has struggled to come to fruition through multiple incarnations resurrected recently by Raven Carswell founding administrative member.
​
It has only been since November of 2022, in the ashes of the COVID pandemic that the roots of this project were strong enough to take hold and grow rapidly in the rural community of Newport Tennessee which had been lacking a thriving arts community for decades.
It was with dreams of providing a community space for arts and culture in the area that the foundation was laid with an administration of six individual women artists.
The Thriving Artist Cooperative administration is focused on changing the economic status of individual small artists by offering a gallery space to display their art while simultaneously being able to involve the community at large in artist-led classes. These are not only classes one might typically think of as art, such as fine art, but also folk art and homesteading culture that we might consider fading rural arts, such as gardening, carding, spinning wool into yarn, home brewing, fermentation and more.
The community interest and participation in the Thriving Artist Cooperative validates the immense need for this type of interaction within the community on multiple levels, one offering is a community space for other nonprofits to meet, a space for community education, socialization, and interaction.
The goal of having a space to bring the community back to the community is being realized by this unique grassroots cooperative.