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This weekend, Philadelphia launches a monthlong arts festival that aims less to wave a flag than to hold up a mirror.

“What Now: 2026,” a citywide series featuring 34 world premieres in visual and performing arts, arrives as the nation ramps up its celebrations of the country’s 250th birthday.

“We see the project as an interrogation of 2026, not, in particular, a celebration,” said co-organizer Bill Adair. “There is obviously a lot to celebrate, but there’s obviously a lot to interrogate as well about our country and its history. Artists, we think, are some of the best people to do that.”

“What Now” includes a modern reimagining of choreographer Martha Graham’s 1932 response to the rise of fascism before World War II; a community-led production by Theater in the X, based in West Philadelphia’s Malcolm X Park, built from residents’ personal reflections on the meaning of the nation’s 250th anniversary; and the premiere of actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith’s “Basil Biggs,” a play about her ancestor’s job burying the dead after the Battle of Gettysburg.

Four years ago, Adair, along with curator and philanthropist Katherine Sachs, began looking forward to the semiquincentennial summer and how the city’s artists would be included in the marquee event.

They discovered nothing on a large scale was being planned for the arts sector.

“We didn’t see it happening out there,” Adair said. “So, you know what Philadelphians do? We created our own thing. Let’s put on a show.”

Like the concurrent, citywide exhibition of craft art “Radical Americana,” spearheaded by the Clay Studio, Adair and Sachs created the organization ArtPhilly to give artists a platform to reflect on the nation’s anniversary.

Adair said more than 20 curators were involved in programming “What Now” to give the festival a wide breadth of perspectives. ArtPhilly has designated five neighborhood zones to spread its programs around Philadelphia: Center City, Old City, Kensington, West Philadelphia and Germantown.

Not all 34 programs in the festival are directly oriented to American history. The films of Walé Oyéjidé about diasporic journeys in Italy, West Africa and Philadelphia will be screened with live music performed by saxophonist Immanuel Wilkinson and his quartet as a “spiritual homage” to John Coltrane. Classical music composer Andrea Clearfield and drag performer Cookie Diorio have created “Long Live the Queen,” a performative history of drag queens.

“Root Song,” a choral work by the Massachusetts-based ensemble Roomful of Teeth, is based on the collective intelligence of trees.

Jazimina Creamer-MacNeil, director of “Root Song,” said the work is inspired by the way trees communicate with each other through fungal networks in a forest floor, as described in the memoir “Searching for the Mother Tree” by ecologist Suzanne Simard.

“Suzanne Simard uses all of these musical metaphors, like the forest being a symphony orchestra, and she first discovered that carbon was moving between trees through the mycorrhizal network using sound — a Geiger counter — to hear carbon moving from tree to tree,” she said. “So, I thought this just needs to be a musical performance.”

Adair said the prompt “What Now: 2026” gives artists rich ground to explore.

“It could involve reflection back to the history of the country, or history of the city. But also you could ask ‘What Now?’ very in a very present-day way,” Adair said. “What now are we dealing with?”

Adair and Sachs plan to make the “What Now?” festival a biannual event, with future festivals asking artists to respond to different thematic prompts.

ArtPhilly’s “What Now: 2026” runs in various locations until June 30.