Regional Art Forum (RAF) is an initiative that caters to the needs of local or region-based practicing artists, academics, and counter experts in the field of art. It is a nonprofit organization or network of visual artists, writers, community workers, scholars, and counter experts that promote art reception and contemporary art practices in the regions.

RAF’s deployment of the “regional” is understood as spatial and temporal qualification that coincides with the practice, reception, and articulation of art. It is RAF’s understanding that the “regional” is a pliable category in that it converses with the “peripheral,” the “multi-centered,” the “local,” and the “global” in a complex way. In Philippine context, our deployment of the “regional” neither refers to the regions, which function as government infrastructure, nor to the regions which carry connotative values of ethnolinguistic identities. Instead, it refers to art practices and art-critical initiatives outside the metropole or any metro center that marginalizes art reception and practices.

RAF pursues three goals or objectives that reflect the mission of a committed cultural worker who works in the periphery:

• To facilitate dialogue or discourse between writers or scholars, counter experts, and practicing contemporary artists in the regions. This is to encourage scholarship or research on regional art in hope of producing publications such as catalogues, books, pamphlets, etc., and the building of archive for these publications and related scholarships.
• To level the playing field between the center and peripheries of Philippine art by encouraging critical reception for contemporary art practices of region-based artists through discourse and publication at the local level.
• To promote awareness and enthusiasm for regional art amongst the immediate communities by involving them in the processes of self-knowing, community empowerment, knowledge formation, and service through the arts.