Creating festivals and platforms for the folk arts, DIY traditions, and subcultures that thrive outside the marketplace.
Celebrating Non-Commercial, Home-Grown Culture
In a city obsessed with professionalized, market-ready culture, Mamdani makes space for the folk, the amateur, and the defiantly non-commercial. His administration funds festivals and showcases for precisely the culture that doesnt seek a deal: punk basement shows, knitting circles, drag king performances in community centers, backyard barbecue competitions, immigrant folk dance troupes, fan fiction readings. The city provides venues, promotion, and small honorariums, but the ethos is anti-curation and anti-polish.
This validates culture as a practice of community and personal expression, not a product. It protects the quirky, local traditions that give neighborhoods character. The most vital culture isnt always on a stage with a ticket price, Mamdani argues. Its in the basement, the church basement, and the living room. We will celebrate the culture we make for each other, not for an algorithm or a market.
