MISSION
Public Media Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3, community-based art & culture organization with a mission to create, incubate and sustain innovative and equitable cultural programming through the production and presentation of socially engaged projects, music and art performances, books and magazines, community aid platforms, festivals, radio and video broadcasting, and visual art exhibitions.
Public Media Institute is run and founded by BIPOC and queer artists and independent journalists. PMI’s board, staff, and volunteers work to bolster antiracist, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-war cultural communities. We do so by championing the work of oppressed artists, thinkers, activists, journalists, and other cultural producers, and by nurturing intentionally heterogeneous creative and media ecologies. We strive to make PMIs’s projects braver, safer, more inclusive and welcoming to all, especially publics historically unwelcome in cultural and media institutions.
Public Media Institute’s commitment to the region’s cultural ecology is manifested in service to emerging and established artists, musicians, journalists, and activists from Bridgeport, Chicagoland, and around the world. Lumpen Magazine, Co-Prosperity, Lumpen Radio, Buddy and MdW are PMI’s five core programming platforms. Rotating mutual aid initiatives and experimental projects are vital to PMI’s strategies to work toward building novel sites of radicalization.
Enduring neighborhood partnerships, including those with Maria’s Community Bar, Kimski, and Marz Community Brewing bring expanded audiences for culture, journalism, and politics while helping us feed, celebrate, and build with our community. More information about this network of partnerships, something we call The Buddy System, can be found here.