The Braswell Arts Center (BAC) is the home of a growing community with a vision of a bubbling and creative arts center, open to all shapes, sizes, and incomes.

The BAC was founded in 2017 with a goal to bridge the gap between the arts and the community. Over the last 4 years, we have offered dance classes, arts camps, performances, concerts, exhibitions and much more to every person, from every background.

Since our founding, we have grown significantly – widening our audience, developing new programs for children and young pre-professionals, creating jobs for dancers in transition, providing space for choreographers to explore and develop, as well as collaborating with some of the biggest arts institutions here in Basel such as Kunstmuseum Basel, Fondation Beyeler and Theater Basel.

These last years of working closely with the Basel community has provided us with a solid experience and clear focus on what it needs from us going forward. Our ambitions for developing the BAC stems from the success of these experiences and after such a difficult period of isolation and confinement due to the Coronavirus pandemic, our goal is to use our resources and experience to sustain education and creativity through all art forms, especially dance, and directly help children and adults through arts programming and community support.

Since the beginning, our plans to continuously expand and increase the reach and range of what we offer to the community has always been at the forefront of our minds.

With the help of the community and sponsors, we are working on providing a larger, fully-equipped new space. A new home for the programs of the Braswell Arts Association, as well as a nurturing and creative place to grow for the Basel.

With your support, the new BAC will offer:

• 3 fully-equipped dance studios
• A fitness room
• Dressing rooms, showers, and secure lockers
• A chill-out area for students and staff to relax and work
• A café and pop-up store area for local entrepreneurs
• A shop with dance merchandise and equipment to purchase and sample

The newly designed space aims to be fully transformable to accommodate high-quality dance classes, live performances, exhibitions, workshops, pop-ups and other inspiring events.

community.

Since 2017, we have grown to offer nearly 50 classes per week to a community ranging from 4 to 70 years old and recently, with the end of our current rental lease approaching, we were faced with difficult decisions about the future of the BAC.

Prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, we began to explore what growing the BAC could mean. And with only one studio to work with, a full schedule 50 weeks of the year, and very, very little square meters for anything else, we quickly realized that staying at our current location on Austrasse limited our options.

When the world changed with the pandemic in March 2020, so did a lot of our plans. And even though we are still working on stabilizing after such a difficult period, we realized that the only way out of the hole the Coronavirus pandemic created, is to open the possibility to expand.

More importantly, we truly do believe in the mission of the BAC and the potential for growth, and so we have decided to move forward with this next phase. This means the 2021/2022 school year will be our final year on Austrasse, and in August 2022 we will open our doors at our new home on Aeschenvorstadt.

With the new space, also comes a lot of work and some serious fundraising to do, but we are extremely excited to make this next space the starting point for new dreams ahead.

At the new BAC, we will continue to deepen our connections and relationships with the Basel community, schools, sponsors, and other institutions in order to provide fresh and high-quality arts programming. In addition to expanding our class offerings as well as continuing with all of our usual programming such as arts camps for children and quality education for our pre-professional students, Braswell Arts will strive to offer free movement and performance classes for those in need as well as development and performance opportunities for artists worldwide.

We look forward to welcoming our students, members of the community, and creative souls in a comfortable and nurturing space, easily accessible in the center of Basel.

The energy of the BAC as well as the people in it constantly pushes us to be better, dream bigger, and is the sole reason we do what we do.

After such a difficult time following the Coronavirus pandemic, taking on such a huge financial investment is tough, and your support will go directly into helping us make a difference in the Basel community! As a donor investing in us, we would love you to hear from you as we work towards this next step.

Support the construction and get your name up there with ours as an implicated member of the new BAC! Your support will directly contribute to:

• Design service fees
• Dance floors
• Mirrors and barres
• Shower installation
• Lights, plants, and other construction materials
• Sound equipment
• Fitness equipment

If you’d like to be actively involved, we will be organizing informal meetings to collect your suggestions, ideas, contacts for resources, motivational triggers — the goal being that this new Center becomes ours, with you our contributors.

For those who prefer to take a more “backstage” approach and simply donate, that’s of course also wonderful and greatly appreciated! Every donor will have a choice of awesome rewards!

As a token of our appreciation, we have organized some exciting rewards for our wonderful donors, such as:

• tickets to a chosen performance at Theater Basel
• Various memberships to the BAC
• Vouchers for one week of Arts Camp at the BAC for your children
• 1-year unlimited access to our Online Library
• Free entrance to our Virtual Gala

We have so many exciting ideas to build the Braswell Arts Center into a state-of-the-art cultural hub in Basel for the next generation of artists growing up in our local community, but also open to professional artists around the world.

Tremendous appreciation for you all. Let’s get started!

Armando and Lisa Braswell and the Braswell Arts Center team