Pomegranate Center

Pomegranate Center was founded in 1986 by artist and community organizer Milenko Matanovic.

Milenko began his career as an experimental artist in the late ’60s in his native Slovenia, exhibiting all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of the artist collective OHO. At the age of 24, feeling like his art career was no longer helping to push art-making into everyday life – it was living in museums and private collections – Milenko left the artist collective and began learning how art could serve community better.

When Milenko moved to the United States in 1973, he saw growing suburban neighborhoods filled with traffic, waste and lack of imagination. It is from this concern for the isolating direction of modern communities that Pomegranate Center was founded – to bring the creative process to community problem solving.

Today, Pomegranate Center has developed an effective model for helping communities prepare for the future using collective creativity, meaningful engagement and powerful collaboration. Milenko’s intuition has grown into a vibrant organization working on dozens of projects each year  to bring people together to build better communities throughout the US and around the globe.

Learn more about programs that Build Community, Build Places and Build Leaders.