Our Founding Story

PCCCArts was born from a chance encounter at a downtown Chicago bus stop in May of 2019. Daniel, a Mexican-born musician and music education graduate newly arrived from Oregon, struck up a conversation about salsa music with Kat, a former middle school teacher, principal, dance studio owner, photographer, and arts professional who had also just moved to Chicago. They boarded the same bus from Union Station and—by coincidence—stepped off at the same stop in Pilsen. During that ride they shared their artistic journeys, their personal connections to culture, and their shared belief that the arts have the power to transform people’s lives. That single conversation planted the seed for what would become the People’s Center for Cultural & Contemporary Arts. Less than a year later, on February 21, 2020, Daniel and Kat officially launched PCCCArts together with founding board members Maya Bauer and Gabriel Lopez.

Only one month after launching, the pandemic began—but instead of halting their work, it strengthened their purpose. In the first year, PCCCArts stepped up to support teachers nationwide with virtual arts learning, offering breakout-room facilitation and online masterclasses across Afro-Caribbean music (Víctor “Junito” Gonzalez), Latin jazz improvisation (Roy McGrath), Mexican music history (Juan Díes of GRAMMY-winning Sones de México), and Indian classical music (Anthony Camarota). Through the challenges of COVID-19, Daniel and Kat realized their mission with even greater clarity: to close the opportunity gap in arts education, uplift student voices across Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods, and ensure every young person has access to the cultural and contemporary arts that shaped their own lives.

In Summer 2021, as the city reopened, PCCCArts offered its first in-person programming: socially distanced outdoor classes in dance, photography, and beginner music for K–8 students. These early programs were made possible through partnerships with Dvorak Park, Pilsen Food Pantry, and Something Good in Englewood, which helped ground the organization in community from the very beginning. As trust and visibility grew, PCCCArts expanded to host additional workshops and masterclasses at Blue Door Neighborhood Center—featuring artists such as Victor García, Denita Inez, Maria Luisa, Jacki Almaguer, Alex Puryear, and Kalyan Pathak—and launched its first after-school programs in 2021–22 through America SCORES Chicago and Pilsen Community Academy. These foundational partnerships paved the way for ongoing collaborations with Orozco Academy, Hamline Elementary, and many more Chicago schools.

Since then, PCCCArts has grown into a citywide arts organization serving over 2,000 students annually through in-school residencies, after-school classes, workshops, and masterclasses across dance, music, digital media, visual arts, and STEAM. To this day, PCCCArts does not have a building of its own—yet this has become one of our greatest strengths. Instead of being tied to a single location, we have built deep partnerships across neighborhoods that need arts education most, bringing high-quality cultural programming directly into schools, parks, and community spaces throughout Chicago. We hope to have a building one day, but until then, we remain rooted in our mission: to close the opportunity gap wherever we can through strong community partnerships.

In addition to year-round programming, PCCCArts hosts community events such as El Futuro, neighborhood jam sessions, public art showcases, and the Emerging Music Showcase at the Chicago International Salsa Congress—an initiative that elevates youth ensembles onto a global stage and connects them with networks of artists across disciplines. What began as a conversation at a bus stop has now become a thriving movement to empower people through the transformative power of the arts.