Executive Summary
America Together — A Celebration of Freedom and Democracy
America Together is a national cultural experience built around a simple idea: America needs to come together and celebrate freedom and democracy.
Planned to begin in Dallas in 2027, the proposed four-day celebration brings that idea to life through visual art, live music, a communal culinary gathering and Let’s Talk America.
America Together is being established as a nonprofit organization to bring people together through these shared experiences.
Art provokes a conversation. Music enlivens the experience. Food brings people together to share a meal and connect with their fellow citizens. Let’s Talk America brings those experiences into a conversation about freedom, democracy, citizenship and our shared future.
Dallas would establish the foundation for a proposed national series, working with museums, universities, cultural institutions and local communities. Each city would reflect its own character and voice while affirming the same conviction: freedom and democracy are strongest when America comes together.
Four Days in Dallas
Art
Art provokes a conversation. Historic American Pop explores freedom, democracy, citizenship, voting, sacrifice and the American experience. No War brings another perspective on conflict, peace and our responsibilities to one another.
The exhibitions would open the four-day experience and remain accessible throughout the celebration, complemented by artist conversations and opportunities for community participation.
As America Together travels, museums, galleries, universities and artists in each host city would be invited to contribute work reflecting their communities and experiences. Before asking people to talk about freedom, we give them something to see, feel, question and discuss.
Music
Music enlivens the experience. America Together celebrates the diversity of American sound across generations, traditions and genres, bringing audiences together through the shared experience of live performance.
The Dallas program is envisioned to feature leading performers alongside musicians whose backgrounds and musical traditions tell different parts of the American story. Performers, venues and dates would follow confirmed agreements.
As the program travels, musicians from each city and region would be invited to participate, drawing on jazz, blues, rock, country, classical, gospel, folk, Latin and other American traditions.
For a few hours, people from different backgrounds can share the same music and the energy of being together.
The American Table
Food brings people together. The American Table is the communal culinary gathering of the four-day experience, welcoming families, visitors, artists, musicians, students, civic leaders and people who might otherwise never share a meal.
Regional cuisines provided by local chefs, combined with personal stories, would celebrate Texas, the South, the borderlands, immigration, family traditions and the cultures that have shaped the way America eats.
The proposed Dallas arrangement brings six hundred guests together at sixty tables of ten. Shared tables, conversation, storytelling and food make the evening a personal expression of who we are.
Long before Americans gathered in auditoriums to discuss their differences, they gathered around tables. The American Table brings us back to that table.
Let’s Talk America
On the final evening, America Together brings the Kitchen Table to the stage. Planned for a live audience of 2,000, Let’s Talk America is an unscripted conversation about freedom, democracy, citizenship, leadership and America’s shared future.
The premiere evening begins with a major reception, followed by a Kitchen Table Conversation, bringing together citizens and civic leaders, educators, veterans, students, cultural voices, democracy advocates, former public officials and journalists to explore the common values and responsibilities that connect Americans.
Questions gathered from Kitchen Tables throughout the city and across the four-day celebration would carry the audience’s concerns and hopes into the Presidential Conversation that follows.
The proposed Dallas centerpiece brings former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama into a conversation led by filmmaker Ken Burns. Two presidents from different political traditions, guided by a storyteller whose work has deepened our understanding of the American experience, would explore the choices that test a democracy and the responsibilities of leadership and citizenship.
The format would encourage listening, personal reflection, questions and unscripted responses, with room for disagreement and common ground.
As America Together travels, Let’s Talk America would bring together national voices and people from each host community, carrying the questions and conversations of one city forward to the next.
The purpose is not to ask America to agree. It is to remind America that we can still talk to one another.