The Art Cheerleaders: A Living Lineage

This site preserves the project’s history while inviting future contributors to extend it. The archive documents the original SMFA Art School Cheerleaders, the Richmond Art Cheerleaders, press coverage, photographs, videos, cheers, uniforms, performances, and ephemera. The living project invites new cheers, chapters, performances, and reinterpretations that carry the work forward with proper attribution and a shared sense of purpose.

The Art Cheerleaders are a tradition, not a template. New contributors are encouraged to make the project their own, but not to erase where it came from.

Make Art! Support Artists! Cheer Loudly!

Why We Cheer

Cheerleading is usually understood as support from the sidelines. The Art Cheerleaders move it to the center.

We cheer because art needs advocates. We cheer because artists are often expected to be grateful, underpaid, silent, professional, and endlessly resilient. We cheer because art schools teach ambition while preparing students for precarity. We cheer because institutions love creativity but often neglect the people who produce it. We cheer because public funding, experimental practice, and cultural dissent are always vulnerable. We cheer because the art world is ridiculous and necessary at the same time.

The Art Cheerleaders use cheerleading as a contradiction. Cheerleading is sincere and artificial, athletic and theatrical, communal and conformist, powerful and decorative, disciplined and absurd. Those contradictions make it an ideal language for talking about art.

A cheer can be a joke. It can also be a demand.

A uniform can be a costume. It can also be a critique.

A pep rally can be ridiculous. It can also make people show up.

The Art Cheerleaders do not solve the art world’s problems. They make them visible, chantable, performable, and shared.