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Cattywampus Puppet Council is a community-based arts nonprofit in Knoxville, TN. Over the past 8 years, we have been bringing interactive parades, theater, play, and giant puppets to communities across East Tennessee and the South, utilizing the arts as a vehicle for helping communities tell their stories, build relationships with one another and cultivate power, joy, creativity, and justice together.
Perhaps you learned about us when we threw our first community arts parade in 2017 down Magnolia Ave? Saw one of our performances at the Knox County Library? Gave our Giant Dolly Parton puppet a hug during the Knox Pride Parade? Danced with our community brass band, the Knox Honkers & Bangers? Had a child participate in one of our free afterschool art programs? Or maybe you just met us this spring when we collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma as part of the Our Common Nature concert?
Cattywampus is all this and so much more. And it's time for us to grow with your support!
For years, Cattywampus has been a primarily volunteer-run organization, bringing giant puppets and innovative community-based art programming to Knoxville and beyond on a shoestring. While we've accomplished so much, we realize that in order to keep expanding our work and achieve long-term sustainability as an organization, it's time to hire our first full-time staff member and fundraise a more robust operating budget for ourselves. Funds raised will directly support 2024 programming, such as:
Our spring Cattywampus Parade & Street Party
Now in its 7th year, Cattywampus’s people-powered Parade & Street Party has become an annual tradition in Knoxville. It brings together diverse and intergenerational cross-sections of our community to play, create, and build relationships with one another, while using the visual and performing arts as tools to help tell our stories and vision what futures we might create together. Community members of all ages are invited to make giant puppets, masks, costumes, and other art and come together to parade as one!
10 Parade Youth Art Residencies
As part of our parade programming, Cattywampus hosts 8-week long art residencies at afterschool partner sites in Knoxville, such as Centro Hispano, the Boys & Girls Club, Canvas Can Do Miracles, Knox County Schools and others. These residencies are completely free to our community partners. Cattywampus teaching artists and youth interns meet weekly with students to support them in designing and creating their own original giant puppets and other parade art. Each residency culminates in students forming their own parade crew and sharing their original art with the community at the Cattywampus Parade & Street Party!
Our Youth Intern Squad
Each winter/spring, Cattywampus hires local high school art students to work at our Parade Youth Art Residencies. Through this paid workforce development program, students have an opportunity to explore teaching careers in the arts, learn leadership skills, and so much more.
The Knox Honkers & Bangers
Birthed from the Cattywampus ethos that everyone is an artist and that bringing joy & magic to public spaces can transform them, this raucous, hot-pink community brass band is open to everyone. Since its inception in January 2023, we've grown to nearly 50 members of honkers, bangers, flag twirlers, dancers, and more. We've performed at the Big Ears Festival, the Dogwood Arts Festival, Open Streets, SoKnoPride, the Old City Performing Arts Center, and other community events. And we're just getting started!
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