To our community, our artists, and our friends:

 

We're writing today with an update about this year's Trash Bash Art Festival—and we want to share it directly, as the Board of Directors, and with the care this news deserves. After honest assessment of our organizational capacity and resources, we have made the decision to postpone the festival this spring. We know many of you have been looking forward to it, and we don't take this lightly.

 

Trash Bash is not just an event. It is—and has been, since 1999—one of the most genuine expressions of who this community is: creative, resourceful, and deeply committed to seeing value where others see waste. The Trashion Show, the Trash Art Gallery, Trash Tales—each of these carries the labor and vision of artists, volunteers, storytellers, designers, and neighbors who show up year after year to make something extraordinary out of nothing ordinary.

 

Heart of Cartm is in a period of transition and intentional tending. We are doing the work of building a sustainable foundation: for our programming, for our staff, and for the community relationships that make everything we do possible. Proceeding with a major multi-event festival under current conditions would have meant cutting corners we aren't willing to cut—on artist support, on community experience, on the quality of production that honors 26 years of tradition.

 

We know this is disappointing. We feel it too. And we want to be clear: postponed means postponed. The Trash Bash Arts Festival has survived before. It went quiet when CARTM lost its county contract in 2018, and it came back. It came back because this community holds it. We intend to return to it when we can do so responsibly, with the planning, resources, and bandwidth to give it what it requires.

 

To the artists who were planning to submit work, to the Trashion designers already imagining their creations, to the storytellers and the volunteers and the sponsors who show up every year: we see you, and we are grateful for you. Your participation is what makes this festival worth protecting.

 

We remain committed to Heart of Cartm's mission to reuse, repair, and reimagine—and to building an organization that can sustain the work and the celebration for years to come.

 

With gratitude and resolve,