WHAT IS SPARK!?

We Value Artists - Artists are our storytellers, and their services are vital to spark our collective imagination.

We Value Diversity - A wide range of perspectives is essential to our work.

We Value Belonging - All of you is welcome here.

We Value Equity - Every person should have easy access to engage with the work that we do.

We Value Creativity - We approach challenges from a place of curiosity and imagination.

We Value Collaboration - We thrive by recognizing and learning from the strengths of our partners, audiences, and artists.

SPARK! Creative Lab employs the arts as a tool for individual and social well-being.

We envision a world where compassion is wide-spread and creative contributions are recognized as essential.

SPARK! believes the arts have the transformative power to unite, empower, and strengthen communities. By investing in local artists and collaborating directly with Oklahoma Veterans, SPARK! creates spaces where diverse people can connect, express themselves, and experience a renewed sense of belonging.

We recognize that Veterans hold essential leadership, history, and perspective within our communities. Through projects like Ditty Bops and our Connecting the Dots workshops, Veterans participate as creative partners - reclaiming narrative, shaping meaning through symbolic languages, and helping communities understand their experiences with greater care. Veterans bring the mission; artists bring the medium. Together, we spark conversations that expand understanding and reinforce community well-being.

SPARK! designs interactive, participatory experiences that encourage people to gather, reflect, and find meaning in ways that are light-hearted, imaginative, and radically inclusive. By promoting diverse artist representation and uplifting the lived perspective of Veterans, SPARK! fosters emotional connection among people who might not ordinarily interact, strengthening the civic fabric of Oklahoma.

In summary, SPARK!’s theory of change centers on the belief that creative expression, shared across communities and led alongside Veterans, can shift narratives, deepen belonging, and inspire a more equitable, compassionate, and connected world.

SPARK!’s journey began as a 2021 project by an individual artist to leverage an available creative workforce to spark community healing and cohesion in a time of isolation, pain and division. In the middle of a pandemic, a dozen OKC artists were given living wages to innovate for the common good of the Oklahoma City community, who responded with wild enthusiasm.

OUR FOUNDING ARTISTIC STATEMENT

We need spaces to heal from the trauma of isolation, division, inequity and loss brought or revealed by the past year.

Live performance is uniquely poised to foster belonging, meaning and unity. But to do so effectively, I believe we've gotta rethink and transcend both the idea of shared space and the transactional, passive entertainment we've become accustomed to.

Throughout my career as a collaborative performing artist, I have seen, time and again, that creating a performance together, in a public space, has the power to activate vibrant, light-hearted and radically inclusive engagement. In fact, studies have proven this - the evolutionary psychology concept of positivity resonace explains why our heartbeats synchronize when we gather: collaborative, shared co-experience of positive emotion is the most elemental building block of love.

I feel called at this moment in our lives to share the expertise I've honed in NYC and Europe with my hometown of OKC. Intentionally applied radical collaboration, leveraged with the beautiful diversity of the OKC community, can help us come together with curiosity, compassion, joy and play. That's what SPARK! is all about."

Nicole Poole, Artist & Founding Executive Director

SPARK! CREATIVE LAB

Founded in 2021, SPARK!’s financial information can be found below.

FY2022 (Founding year) 990
FY2023 990
FY2024 990