MAP360/ KRESS ON DEXTER COMMUNITY ROOM
our history​
A LEGACY OF PUBLIC ART
MAP360 stands in a long tradition of programs that have recognized artists as essential workers and art as an essential public good. That tradition — stretching from the New Deal through the civil rights era to the present — provides both historical grounding and strategic context for MAP360’s work today.
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Works Progress Administration (WPA): Federal Project No. One > ​
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Federal Art Project (1935–1943) >
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The South Was Central to the WPA’s Legacy >
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Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1974–1981) >
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Mexican Muralist Movement >
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Community Arts Movement of the 1960s–70s >
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National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Placemaking (est. 1965) > ​
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MAP360 is the thread that connects
All of these programs — and MAP360 — share a common belief: that art is a public good, that artists are essential workers, and that the communities most overlooked by mainstream cultural institutions often carry the stories with the most to offer the world.
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Created under President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) as both a relief measure and a Democratic cultural vision, The Federal Art Project (FAP) called it integrating art with the daily life of the community. The National Endowment for the Arts calls it "creative placemaking." MAP360 calls it "inspiring a community renaissance."
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MAP360 is the next chapter of this legacy — rooted in Montgomery, AL, one of the most historically significant cities in America, carrying forward a tradition of art in the public square that stretches back nearly a century, and reaching outward to a world that needs the unifying, humanizing power of art more than ever.
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MAP360'S ROOTS
MAP360 was born at the intersection of a building, a city, and a belief — that art has the power to transform communities from the inside out.
Its home is the 54-mile corridor between Montgomery and Selma, AL where the march for voting rights began in 1965, and one of the most philanthropically underinvested corridors in the country. Its story begins on Dexter Avenue in downtown Montgomery: the telegraph ordering the first shots of the Civil War was sent from here; Rosa Parks boarded her bus here; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of marchers walked the final steps of the Selma to Montgomery Freedom March here; and at 39 Dexter Avenue — the old S.H. Kress & Co. building — a once-grand Art Deco department store, which sat vacant for decades after closing in the mid-1990s and falling into disrepair … until 2015 when the building’s revitalization began.
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Four years later, the “Kress on Dexter” was reborn. The original terra cotta façade, terrazzo tile flooring, and brass-inlaid marble were lovingly preserved. Even the marble stones marking the building’s old segregation-era water fountains — inscribed “Colored” and “White” — were kept in place, a deliberate act of historical honesty in a city learning to reckon with its past. Kress on Dexter opened in 2018 and quickly became a hub for art, culture, creativity, and community. It was within these walls, and inspired by this spirit, that MAP360 took root.
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Today, MAP360 is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, built on the conviction that arts-based programming can accomplish what historic preservation reparative capital alone cannot reach: bringing people together across divides, revitalizing public spaces, expanding opportunities for artists, and sparking a genuine community renaissance.
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"Behind the storm of daily conflict... the poet, the artist, the musician, continues the quiet work of centuries, building bridges of experience between peoples, reminding man of the universality of his feelings and desires and despairs."
​-- John F. Kennedy, US President, from 1962 speech at Amherst College
"Art is a universal language and through it each nation makes its own unique contribution to the culture of mankind."
— Republican President Dwight D Eisenhower (signed the national cultural center act on September 2, 1958. The center was officially renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the performing arts on January 23, 1964 after the assassination of Kennedy.)