Special Issue: Collective Futures Fund

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SPECIAL ISSUE: COLLECTIVE FUTURES FUND

DIGITAL EDITION 2022

Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Jameson Johnson

Creative Director Julianna Sy

Senior Editor

Jacqueline Houton

Editor-at-Large Leah Triplett Harrington

Managing Editor Kaitlyn Ovett Clark

Editor & Operations Karolina Hać

Editors Maya Rubio Jessica Shearer

Copy Editor Zoë Gadegbeku

Design Assistant Victoria Wong Communications Manager Gina Lindner

Finances Sarah Valente Phil Zminda

Board of Directors

President: Jameson Johnson*

Clerk: Karolina Hać*

Secretary: Sarah Valente* Nakia Hill

Jacqueline Houton* Beau Kenyon Cher Krause Knight Gloria Sutton Gabriel Sosa

Boston Art Review is an online and print publication committed to facilitating active discourse around contemporary art in Boston and beyond. BAR seeks to bridge the gap between criticism and coverage while elevating diverse perspectives.

Contributors

Stefanie Belnavis Eliza Browning Olivia Deng Michelle Falcón Fontánez Loi Huynh Gina Lindner

Claire Ogden Matthew Akira Okazaki Sophia Paffenroth Lian Parsons-Thomason slandie prinston Jonathan Rowe L Scully Jacquinn Sinclair Martina Tanga An Uong Madison Van Wylen Lex Weaver

Contact PO Box 390003 Cambridge, MA 02139 Bostonartreview.com @bostonartreview

ISSN 2577-4557

Submissions

Visit bostonartreview.com/submit for submission guidelines. All submissions should be sent to submit@bostonartreview.com.

Inquiries

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Copyright

All content and artwork © the writers, artists, and Boston Art Review (BAR)

Foreword by Abigail Satinsky and Camila Bohan Insaurralde

Letter from the Editor by Jameson Johnson

Sustaining Practice Awardees

New Works & Ongoing Platforms Awardees

PROFILES

14 18 28 30 42

BOSSCRITT Critique & Curatorial Club by Gina Lindner

How Eli Brown Is Finding Family Through the Ages by Lian Parsons-Thomason

AgX Film Collective Fosters Community for Filmmakers by Olivia Deng

Artists and Moms Become Architects of Joy by Jacquinn Sinclair

Reimagining a Rhinoceros Womxn by Lex Weaver

Thinking in Poems, Painting with Power: In the Studio with Marlon Forrester by L Scully

Moving a Community Forward One Dance Step at a Time by Sophia Paffenroth

Three’s Company & HOT Progress: The Rise of Boston’s Mutual Aid-Driven Queer Haus by Lex Weaver

Whitney Mashburn’s Online Archive Holds Space for Artists with Disabilities by Lian Parsons-Thomason

PROFILES

Love Meets Legal Jargon: Gabriel Sosa on Parenting, Pedagogy, and Subverting Public Space through Language by Claire Ogden

We Are Feminists. We Are Futurists. by L Scully

Visibility and Growth: How the Hidden Prompt Is Reconsidering the Archive by slandie prinston

The Streets Belong to Us All: A Photo Journal by Jaypix Belmer with L Scully

CONVERSATIONS

Drawing from the Past: A Conversation with Dave Ortega by Jonathan Rowe

See You in the Future: A Promise and Request to Change the Narrative Around Mass and Cass by Matthew Akira Okazaki

Inside Out: Museum Talk with Furen Dai by Martina Tanga

On Belonging: In Conversation with Ngoc-Tran Vu by An Uong

Diagnosing Museums, Healing Ourselves: In Conversation with Emily Curran and Josephine Devanbu by Eliza Browning

Dear Collective Futures Fund past, present, and future artists,

First of all, we would like to extend our gratitude to you for making the work you do here in this place. Thank you for bringing your work to us for support, for trusting us with your visions, for letting us participate in the futures you are building. And thank you in particular to our inaugural cohort of Collective Futures Fund 2021 grantees for participating in this Boston Art Review issue, for sharing your process, thinking, and making, in all its vulnerabil ity, success, and possible failures. It is not an easy time to be an artist. It is not an easy time for anyone these days at all. We see you out there supporting each other and your neighbors, extended relations, and communities in the most creative of ways.

The Collective Futures Fund started in the fall of 2020 with an invitation from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to join their Regional Regranting program, which part ners with local arts organizations around the country to make grants to artists and collec tives for projects that chart new creative territory in their communities. Tufts University Art Galleries joined as the Boston partner when the program expanded to thirty-two cities. In our first round in 2020, we distributed $60,000 in emergency support during the coronavirus pandemic to visual artists in the region for basic needs such as food, housing, medical costs, connectivity, and child care. We were then joined by an anonymous donor, bringing our yearly total of granting to $80,000, and started funding projects at three different levels—research, new projects, and ongoing work—with grant amounts between $2,000 and $6,000.

Trust is foundational to our granting practice supporting artists whose work falls outside the scope of traditional presenting organizations and/or funding opportunities. Collaborations and experimental projects grow and stretch over the course of the process; sometimes $6,000 is critical support to realize and sustain a project, and sometimes it’s just the start. We fund artists to begin their work and lead independently, to engage publics while creat ing spaces of experimentation, joy, learning, and reflection. This can take the form of art ist spaces, exhibitions, publications, gatherings, online projects, and public research and learning—contributing to a vibrant and welcoming cultural ecosystem in Greater Boston while also critically reflecting on its challenges and struggles. We invite you to be part of our network. Please learn more about us and our next round of 2022 grantees and jurors and consider applying at our website, collectivefuturesfund.org.

A very special thank you to the Boston Art Review team for your passion and dedication to our Greater Boston arts community and for partnering on this issue. Your unflagging commit ment to documenting, archiving, and publishing artists’ work is a vital resource from which we can make our futures. And finally, thank you to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and our anonymous donors for their visionary support to make this program possible.

Satinsky, Program Director Camila Bohan Insaurralde, Program Coordinator

Warmly, Abigail

Dear friends,

I’m pleased to share with you a special issue of Boston Art Review celebrating the inaugural cohort of the Collective Futures Fund.

When our friends at Tufts University Art Galleries announced they would be overseeing the distribution of funds from a regional regranting program by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in 2020, we got excited. Ask an artist what they need to be successful in Boston and I guarantee they’ll answer one of three ways: space to make their work, space to show their work, and financial support for their work. The Collective Futures Fund thus fills a crucial funding gap in our regional arts ecosystem, particularly focusing on the work of art ists who have been historically underrepresented in institutional spaces. The grant has a very low barrier to entry and very few strings attached, and—perhaps most crucially—artists are trusted to allocate the funds wherever they are most needed.

We believe in the mission of this grant, and more importantly, we believe in the work that these artists, collectives, and organizers are doing to serve communities in Greater Boston. We want to celebrate what we hope will be a collective of artists united by this grant for years to come.

To honor the radical and experimental nature of this grant, we sought to use this issue as a site for our own experimentation. In turn, this project welcomed several firsts: It’s our first digitally accessible issue, our first free issue, and our first issue centered on a specific group of artists rather than a theme.

Unlike most of the stories we publish, many of the projects highlighted in this issue are ongoing or works-in-progress, are led by large groups, or have no permanent site. This unconventional assignment invited us to consider how arts writing, documentation, and storytelling can be responsive and additive to the experimental spirit inherent to these projects.

Naturally, collaboration was central to every step of this process. I’m so grateful to all of the writers who eagerly took on assignments to cover projects that were still largely in-progress, the photographers we sent out to locations across the region, and the artists who lent their voices every step of the way. Each and every person who contributed to this issue brought a tremendous amount of patience, tenacity, and care to this work.

With gratitude,

Jameson Johnson Founder & Editor-in-Chief

SUSTAINING PRACTICE AWARDEES

Eli Brown

Eli Brown is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, drawing, and community orga nizing. Brown explores gender through time and intergen erational dynamics. His practice revolves around learning transness as a lineage—an evolutionary phenomenon that is not always human. Both experiential and rooted in queer ecologies, Brown’s research bridges queer theory and environmental science and challenges the problem atic foundations of evolutionary biology and speciesism that continue to inform our bodily experiences.

Emily Curran and Josephine Devanbu Emily Curran is an educator and artist with decades of experience in collaboratively building communitycentered museums, cultural organizations, and creative initiatives. She is based in Boston.

Josephine Devanbu is an Indian-American artist eager to widen her view and field of play. She’s drawn to both art making and critique as fertile grounds for collective self-discovery. After running Look at Art. Get Paid. with Maia Chao for several years, she has recently downsized to carving soap.

Furen Dai Furen Dai received her BA in Russian language and literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts University. She has presented her work at the New England Triennial 2022; the National Art Center, Tokyo; and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, amongst others. Dai has participated in residencies, including the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Art Omi, and MacDowell. She received public art commissions from The Art Newspaper (2019) and the Rose Kennedy Greenway (2020). She is the recipient of the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Fellowship (2017), the ZK/U Berlin Fellowship (2021), and the SMFA Traveling Fellowship (2022).

FeministFuturists

Freedom Baird is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the interconnection between humans and nature. Her work addresses systems and society and often includes performance and viewer participation. She holds master’s degrees from the Media Lab at MIT and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has exhibited recently at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and the Fuller Craft Museum.

Christina Balch (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and technologist. Her work explores percep tions of self through digital technology and data.

Nancy Hayes was a ceramic sculptor before becoming a painter who develops forms and visual landscapes built from her imagination. Hayes creates elaborate compositions using color, line, pattern, and shape, building characters with their own texture and biology. She lives and works in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

Marjorie Kaye is a visual artist currently based in North Adams in the Berkshires. Although primarily a painter working with gouache, she has explored her wild, unruly yet precise compositions in wood as well. She is the director of Galatea Fine Art in Boston’s SoWA Art and Design District in addition to her art practice, has had extensive exhibitions, and has been awarded grants from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Anna Katharina (AK) Liesenfeld is a fashion designer and virtual reality (VR) concept artist. She has worked with Boston Fashion Week, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, creating garments and accessories that explore identity in fashion. Liesenfeld will be showing a salon made entirely using VR. With this piece, she hopes to inspire the audience to join her in the conversation around the legacy of pioneering female educator Helen Temple Cooke.

Karen Meninno is a mixed-media sculptor, digital artist, and fashion designer whose work spans many realms of futuristic visions. Currently, Meninno investigates the peculiarities of the digital (machine-based) and the analog (human or organic) in the digital spaces we inhabit and the effects of interactions between them.

Carolyn Wirth, a Boston-area sculptor and occasional installation artist, uses the figure to describe people and landscapes that have been historically underrepresented due to gender bias. Her practice inhabits the experiences of feminist-defined representation; she has been artistin-residence at several regional museums and exhibits in numerous New England galleries.

Erica Imoisi and Perla Mabel

Erica Imoisi is a Nigerian-American creative born in New York City and raised in Boston. She earned her BA in studio art at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Perla Mabel is an Afro-Caribbean multidisciplinary artist and educator. They were born in Boston and grew up there and in the Dominican Republic. They deeply identify with their Dominican heritage, channeling themes of survival and recalling historical events and figures from their culture.

Whitney Mashburn

Whitney Mashburn (she/they) is a Boston-based independent curator and writer working at the intersection of contemporary art and disability. She holds an MA in critical and curatorial studies, an MA in disability studies, and a BA in history of art and studio art. Their work aims for lasting changes in accessibility through socially engaged art projects.

Dave Ortega

Dave Ortega is a comic book writer, graphic novelist, and educator. Born in El Paso and currently residing in Somerville, Ortega has had his work published in several periodicals, anthologies, and publications, including Tales from la Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology, New Frontiers: The Many Worlds of George Takei, Irene Book 5, Beautiful/Decay Book 6, and the Illustrated PEN section of the PEN America website. His new graphic novel Días de Consuelo, about his grandmother’s childhood during the Mexican Revolution, is available from Radiator Comics.

Gabriel Sosa

Gabriel Sosa is a Cuban-American artist, linguist, educator, and curator. Raised in Miami and now based in Salem, Gabriel teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is deputy director of Essex Art Center in Lawrence.

Ngoc-Tran Vu

Ngoc-Tran Vu (she/her) is a one-and-a-half-generation Vietnamese-American multimedia artist and organizer whose socially engaged practice draws from her experience as a cultural connector, educator, and lightworker. Tran threads her social practice through photography, painting, sculpture, and audio so that her art can resonate and engage audiences with intentionality. Her work evokes discourse of familial ties, memories, and rituals amongst themes of social justice and intersectionality. Born in Vietnam, Tran came to the United States with her family as a political refugee and grew up in Boston’s Dorchester and South Boston working-class neighborhoods. She works across borders and is based in Dorchester.

NEW WORKS & ONGOING

AgX Film Collective

Stefan Grabowski is a Boston-based artist and filmmaker, film programmer, and founding member of the AgX Film Collective.

Genevieve Carmel is a filmmaker and film programmer from Cambridge who spends much of her time thinking about how we might reimagine and reshape artist support structures locally, nationally, and across borders.

JayPix Belmer

Jaypix Belmer is a Boston photographer and selfdescribed “visual communicator.” As a Black and Indigenous nonbinary creative, Belmer champions the importance of being seen and emphasizes gaining trust in the communities that the artist photographs.

BOSSCRITT Critique and Curatorial Club

Alfred Dudley III is an artist and educator who received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2018 and received the college’s Vincent J. Mielcarek Jr. Award for Photography and the Irma Giustino Weiss Prize as well as the Service to the School Award. They’re currently an MFA candidate at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of Art.

Juan Carlos Escobedo is an artist who explores his iden tity as a Brown, Mexican-American queer male, raised in a low-socioeconomic community along the US/Mexico border. His work addresses residual class and race shame that comes from living in a predominantly white-struc tured United States, which favors light-skinned individ uals and middle-class and above socioeconomic classes.

Demetri Espinosa is an artist based in Boston. Through the language of abstraction, he examines his lived experi ence growing up as a third-culture kid and the challenges inherent therein. His work deals with notions of identity, belonging, nostalgia, and otherness.

Janet Loren Hill is a New York City-based artist whose paintings, textile, and video work plays with the mallea bility of our perception and asks what’s at risk should we forget our peripheral vision, ignore the gaps, or hold too tightly to the romantic stories we tell ourselves. Her work was recently exhibited at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2022.

Diana Jean Puglisi is an artist based in the New York metropolitan area whose work explores themes of femi nism, superstition, protection, sexuality, and intimacy. Through sculpture, textiles, and drawing, she transforms and recontextualizes objects associated with women’s work to try to understand it thoroughly and in a context different from its original.

Courtney Stock is an artist based in Boston. Throughout her work, Stock explores material juxtapositions as a way of discussing duality, identity, and shared humanity. Stock draws her materials from traditional realms of painting, sculpture, textile, and craft, though approaches them intuitively and divergently, resulting in the creation of hybrid objects.

Creative Action

Callie Chapman is a graphic designer, projection designer, arts marketer, and choreographer from Boston. As a choreographer of Zoe Dance Company, Chapman incorporates projection design into her work. In addition to implementing video projection internally to the company, she has worked with Odyssey Opera, Prometheus Dance, and Tabula Rasa on projection designs in live performance settings. Chapman holds a BFA from the Boston Conservatory.

Marissa Molinar is a contemporary dancer and director of Midday Movement Series, a grassroots initiative cultivating a new generation of dance leaders. She holds a bachelor’s in environmental science from Brown University with a focus in urban conservation and environmental justice, and she holds a certificate in contemporary dance from the Professional Training Program at Gibney Dance in New York City.

Caitlin Canty makes dances for the stage and screen. She uses elements of theater, circus, and film to explore themes of intimacy, desire, fear, and the absurd. Her dances mine a private human emotional experience in an attempt to break down an illusion of loneliness and posit imaginative possibilities that make noise and glitter. Canty has had work presented by Cambridge Community Television, the Dance Complex, the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, Third Life Studio, and the Yard. She teaches for Midday Movement Series in Cambridge and at the West Concord Dance Academy in Concord, Massachusetts.

Un-ADULT-erated Black Joy Alison Croney Moses is an artist, craftsperson, educator, art administrator, mother, and Black woman. She cultivates spaces of learning, making, and sharing of art, craft, and design that are welcoming and nurturing of the diverse identities that these spaces are built from. Her professional work weaves together her values and passions. She focuses on empowering youth and adults to use their knowledge, skills, and experiences to make positive change in the world around them.

Tanya Nixon-Silberg is a Black mother, educator, artist, and radical dreamer. Her work is informed by the

intersection of all these identities. Called a “translator,” Nixon-Silberg has the ability to distill concepts of racial justice to young children in ways that help them imagine and take back a world where, with community, they have agency and can take action for change. She has been doing this work for over seven years. Nixon-Silberg’s life’s goal is to make sure that Black and Brown children recognize that racism is systemic, that educators not shy away from confronting systemic racism in the classroom, and that engaging in this work collectively helps us to heal.

Zahirah Nur Truth is a multifaceted artist with an art practice that includes paintings, murals, jewelry, and performance. Through her work, Truth strives to create art that invokes joy, representation, empowerment, and thought. Known as a facilitator, innovator, and motivator, Truth found her true love of the arts in 2005 after taking on the artful journey of motherhood.

Marlon Forrester and Casey Curry

Marlon Forrester, born in Guyana, is an artist and educator raised in Boston. Forrester received a BA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2008 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2010. He has shown both internationally and nationally. Concerned with the corporate use of the black body, or the body as logo, Forrester’s paintings, drawings, sculptures, and multimedia works reflect meditations on the exploitation implicit through the game of basketball.

Casey Curry (Casey Can, LLC) is a writer and curator guided by the belief that the transformation our world so desperately needs can only come from deep cultural shifts sparked by visionary artists who make fundamental change irresistible. Her research is rooted in thinking creatively about arts administration to uncover what is possible when visionary artists are not just supported by administrative allies, but truly understood and valued by co-creators with complementary skills that level bureaucratic barriers to societal impact through art.

See You in the Future

Sabrina Dorsainvil is a public artist, civic designer, and illustrator. As the City of Boston’s first director of civic design, Dorsainvil has led, supported, and initiated projects and relationships aimed at improving everyday life for Boston residents. The focal point of her efforts has been recovery, public health, civic participation, care infrastructure, and the built environment. Dorsainvil’s artwork focuses on storytelling, unpacking complex ideas, and finding simple yet vibrant ways of celebrating people and their humanity.

George Halfkenny is a Boston native who works to repair the harms of incarceration and addiction in individual lives and the community. As a certified peer specialist, he serves as the director of outreach at Kiva Centers, where

he advocates for access to housing, employment, and other support systems for formerly incarcerated people. Halfkenny is the co-founder of THRIVE Communities in Lowell, has led Restorative Justice circles and workshops, and is working on a memoir.

Melissa Q. Teng is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, often working in community to explore activism, systems, and histories through stories. She is currently the participatory action research artist-in-residence with the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and a graduate student of urban planning at MIT.

Stephen Walter helps support the research, design, and project management of “See You in the Future.” He has worked at many intersections over the years, including Mass / Cass, where he was part of the original City of Boston team that helped design, program, and evaluate the Engagement Center day shelter.

Haus of Threes

Po Couto is a Boston-based queer artist and hair nerd who has specialized in and pioneered gender-affirming aesthetic work within the queer community. Couto is an artist and community organizer focused on grassroots organizing and mutual aid for queer, disabled, and BIPOC communities. They are the founder of Haus of Threes, a queer-collaborative currently based in Charlestown. Couto’s art is facilitating a social movement that creates interactive spaces designed to aid and bring focus, attention, and money to queer communities while uplifting unity and social change.

The Hidden Prompt

Adaeze Dikko is a Nigerian-American New York Citybased creative and storyteller.

Heresa Laforce is a Middlesex County native with a passion for creating and narrative building.

Powerful Pathways and Mattapan Open Streets/Open

Studios

Allentza Michel is an urban planner, artist, policy advocate, and researcher with a background in community organizing. Her seventeen years of diverse experience across community economic development, education, food security, public health, and transportation inform her current work in civic design, community and organizational development, and social equity. She is the founder and managing principal of Powerful Pathways, a public interest consultancy rooted in social practice that blends policy development, urban planning, and social impact design principles.

Words by Jonathan Rowe

Drawing from the Past: A Conversation with Dave Ortega

Dave Ortega’s work merges the personal and the historical. A native of El Paso, Texas, and current resident of Somerville, Massachusetts, Ortega is a cartoonist and graphic novelist whose work, including the comic book Battle of Juarez and zine School of the Americas, interrogates and raises awareness about the legacy of European and American colonialism in North and South America.

In his comic series Días de Consuelo, Ortega depicts his grandmother Consuelo’s upbringing in Zacatecas, Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. In the short comic River, he explores her early adult years in the United States along the Rio Grande. In both of these projects, Ortega’s intimate approach to storytelling exemplifies French historian Lucien Febvre's appeal to document and portray “history seen from below and not from above.” By looking at the past through the lives of everyday working people, Ortega shifts our understanding of history from the hands of the powerful to those on the margins who navigate the tumults of the times they live in with perseverance and love.

As books like Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus are increasingly challenged or banned in libraries and schools across the United States over their depictions of history, race, gender, and sexuality, stories that contend with our understanding of the past are more necessary than ever.

Ortega’s current graphic novel-in-progress, Potosí, which received funding from the Collective Futures Fund, is an important example of history shown from “below.” It focuses on the Spanish Empire’s presence in Bolivia between the 1500s and the 1800s as told by Indigenous peoples whose lives were upended by Spain’s pursuit of political and economic power. Writing in the tradition of speculative fiction and magical realist authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, N.K. Jemisin, and others, Ortega illuminates a world forced to confront and survive the brutal imposition of war, occupation, enslavement, and death.

I spoke with Ortega over Zoom about the current state and trajectory of Potosí, what he has discovered about himself while working on it, and what his aspirations for the project are. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Jonathan Rowe: I want to start by asking how you got into cartooning and who your influences or inspirations are?

Dave Ortega: I became more attuned to cartooning after art school. When you get in, there’s this pressure to paint, draw, do formal things, and find your place within art history and the art world. That can occupy time until you find something that really speaks to you. Cartooning did that, but it took a bit for me to figure that out. Around 2000, when I graduated from art school, people started to take graphic novels a little more seriously. I read a few, and thankfully some friends pointed me in good direc tions about what to read. After a while I was like, “Maybe I want to do this.”

It definitely wasn’t an option offered in art school, which focused on drawing and painting. To be fair to them, it’s really the only way that they knew how to funnel people. Thankfully, there are more options now for people who want to be creative.

JR: Are there any graphic novelists who have influenced your work or people you use as a reference?

DO: My graphic novel, which came out earlier this year, titled Días de Consuelo, is a memoir about my grand mother’s early life in Mexico. I looked at autobiographical comics, biographical comics, and memoirs that were in the vein of Maus by Art Spiegelman. I also looked at other biographical works like Louis Riel by Chester Brown—he did something graphically and stylistically with that work that I really appreciated at the time. Jaime Hernandez is another huge inspiration for me. He’s somebody who has been working in comics a long time and has been able to lay out this giant cast of characters who have aged with him. Every time I’m stumped by a composition or short story question, I find myself looking at his work.

JR: Let’s move to your current project, which received a grant from the Collective Futures Fund. Could you talk about what this work is about and what stage you are at in its completion?

DO: The work I got a grant for is called Potosí and is named after a town in modern-day Bolivia that was the

center of the silver trade from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The story is from a child’s point of view: a Quichua young man, whose father is deathly ill, is forced into mining, and there is a bit of magic thrown in. The story tries to bring more attention to the greed that fueled the Spanish Empire’s conquest to extract silver from the New World to finance its wars and pay off its debt and how those actions set off the period of globalization we are still living in today.

The work is currently in limbo, and I need to rework it before it’s in any sort of final state. When two administra tors from the Collective Futures Fund visited my studio, they enjoyed learning that I was making a living doing cartoons and were excited after reading my work up to now and by the direction of this project.

JR: What led you to write about Potosí?

DO: As a self-publisher and zine-maker, I’ve always been interested in the Spanish conquest. One of my zines is about Bartholomew de las Casas, a Franciscan friar who traveled with the Conquistadors and criticized their

(all images) Dave Ortega in his studio.

Photo by Michelle Falcón Fontánez for Boston Art Review

treatment of the Native peoples. Another is about the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the US trained [Augusto] Pinochet’s generals and other South American military and political leaders in kidnap ping, counter-insurgency, and torture. Thematically, it’s in tune with my other work, which raises awareness about what happens when a superpower invades a world they aren’t quite prepared for and the chain of events that it sets off.

When I first read about Potosí, I instantly knew I wanted to learn more about it. I’ve done a fair amount of research on Potosí as a place and how the Spanish used miners as fuel for its silver trade. [The Spanish] worked people until they were exhausted and drained this mountain called the Cerro Rico, which translates as “Rich Hill.” There was a time in the sixteenth or seventeenth century when the population of Potosí was greater than London or Paris and then all the silver was extracted and the glory days were over.

The goal of the book is to tell a story about that world and I feel like there’s a lot of potential with world-building to tell stories that are rooted in a horrific event. A lot of great speculative and science fiction writers are able to do that. I just finished a book by N.K. Jemisin and thematically I want to create a book in tune with that. She’s creating all of these fantastical worlds but also basing them on reallife events and traumas. Even George R. R. Martin’s series A Song of Fire and Ice does the same thing—he’s looking to history to provide examples of horrible human behavior.

JR: This makes me think about Octavia Butler as another example of a speculative writer who takes events from the present or from history and builds them into this imagi nary but not quite imaginary world.

DO: Yeah, that’s true. I feel like a decade ago, and certainly two decades ago when I finished art school, you were made to feel ashamed if these were your sources of inspiration. I think that there’s this pluralism happening now where all influences are on the table and you won’t be shunned for saying science fiction and comics are sources of inspiration for your work.

JR: You mentioned earlier that your novel is in a limbo state and still in the same form it was pitched in. Even though the novel is not yet complete, what has the process of writing it been like? Has there been anything challenging or exciting about this process?

DO: The whole process has definitely been challenging and exciting. I’m writing out a full script, which I typically didn’t do. Usually sketchbooks are my hub for any project. I would sit and lay out scenes and if a certain visual strikes me, then I knew that I would need to capture that within a scene. I’d then write a scene around that visual and see

where it fit within the main story. Setting up an outline and writing out a script was a good first step for me.

I currently have three giant sketchbooks filled with the entire book from start to finish. That’s the project I pitched to various people. Now it’s a matter of taking the feedback I've received and honing it into something better. But I have to say, the process has been good and informative; it informs the rest of my work and can only make for better writing.

JR: What have you discovered about yourself as an artist as you’ve worked on this novel so far?

DO: What I discovered is that for the longest time I didn’t trust my voice. I think you get in these modes where you feel like you can only have a certain kind of success. Part of that has to do with the work that everyone has to do for money, particularly in a city as expensive as Boston.

It’s through a series of really fortunate events that I was able to quit my full-time job, work part time at Lesley [University], and take on freelance jobs. I finally see, now that I’m in my mid-forties, that this is why people do this—it makes your work better. That’s not to say anything against people who do have day jobs. Días de Consuelo was made when I had a full-time job and worked nights and weekends on it. The hustle really helped to shape that book, and I have tremendous respect for anybody’s hustle and whatever they need to make it all happen because there’s not a lot of monetary support out there like other countries that provide for artists.

It’s sad that there’s not more support on a federal level for artists. I think Massachusetts as a state has been really helpful but could do more. They’re limited by the money they get federally. If our lawmakers see how important artists are culturally to this country, then that’ll be a good day, but it’s tough out there for working artists. Not just in the city of Boston, but in every major city. It’s just tough. So what I learned is the true value of my work. I don't take a minute for granted during the day to work on this.

JR: Who have been the main partners or supporters in this project?

DO: The main supporter of all my work is my partner Ken. He’s a food stylist and gets where I’m coming from. We’re both art school rejects, and I say that to refer to what I said earlier in that we never received much encour agement while in art school. We’re that support network for each other now and actively seeking all sorts of new inspirations, whether it be a film at the Brattle [Theatre] or visiting a museum if we happen to be in a city.

Other support networks I have are friends who are cartoonists in the area and just people that you get to

know, like comic book shop owners, small business owners, or people who run nonprofits. It’s about being in a community; you can’t do this alone. I could sit at my desk all day, but you need to make some actual face-toface time with people so that they think of you first when there’s some project they need help with. So even though Union Square in Somerville is ground zero for develop ment and gentrification, it’s a nice community and I hope it stays that way for as long as I'm here.

JR: Looking into the future, what do you hope the novel you are creating will accomplish?

DO: I hope that it will be a young adult novel and get the right publisher who’s able to see the potential in the story and how it might appeal to young people. The great thing about writing comics for young people is that they get it— you don’t need to sell them comics. That’s exciting and makes the narrative potential a little more open in some ways. In other ways, because you have the gatekeepers of the publishing industry and their entire framework, my experience is that they do tend to want you to work within a certain formula, and that’s where I am with this book. I’ll do all the tweaking I need to in order to make it happen. I don’t say that like I’m compromising my vision. It’s like, I get where they’re coming from. I understand all of it and I hope that it’s something that will lead to better work, an ideal version of the book I hope to see some time soon. //

Jonathan Rowe is a writer and MLIS student at Simmons University raised between Boston, Massachusetts, and Johannesburg, South Africa. His work is published or forthcoming in Callaloo Journal, Boston Art Review, Good Cop/Bad Cop: An Anthology by FlowerSong Press, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and elsewhere.

“What I discovered is that for the longest time I didn’t trust my voice. I think you get in these modes where you feel like you can only have a certain kind of success

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BOSSCRITT CRITIQUE CURATORIAL CLUB

“How long have YOU been looking to experience a positive and uplifting critique?” This was the question we posed to the community of artists who make up the critique and curatorial club BOSSCRITT. For this feature, artists submitted their responses with the detail images of their in-progress artwork. Their words echo the ongoing frustration and fatigue of many art students and artists: Why are we so strapped to find a productive, nonviolent, and inspiring critique? How can we demand more out of our crit experiences for both ourselves and for our peers?

Words by Gina Lindner

Artwork by BOSSCRITT artists. From left to right, Row 1: Alfred Dudley III, Kelly Knight, Leslie Fandrich, Juan Carlos Escobedo, Anna Fubini, Damon Campagna, Janet Loren Hill, and Suzi Grossman. Row 2: Claudine Metrick, Elizabeth Thach, Will Suglia, Claire WeaverZeman, Rachel Morrissey, Claire Weaver-Zeman, Demetri Espinosa, and Arden Klemmer. Row 3: Aja Johnson, Jessica Tawczynski, Juan Carlos Escobedo, Courtney Stock, M E Klesse, Diana Jean Puglisi, Alfred Dudley III, and Barbara Ishikura. Images courtesy of the artists.

After the already vulnerable practice of gestating an artwork and presenting it to your peers, there’s nothing worse than feeling torn apart, misunderstood, invisible, and lost by the end of it. Often, the artist is expected to translate offhand, empty comments into something of substance; to explain and defend their identity; or devote their crit time to educating others on the histories or tensions motivating the work. Often, there’s reluctance or fear to engage deeply with issues of race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, accessibility, and other power and social hierarchies, creating critique spaces that are frequently unwelcoming, unsafe, and othering for BIPOC artists, queer artists, and artists with disabil ities. BOSSCRITT is asking: How can we disrupt the Euro-American-centric, white supremacist, elitist, and formalist frameworks that dominate critique and approach the process instead from inclusive, decolonial, feminist, queer, and antiracist perspectives? Despite its defectiveness, critique is crucial to any artist’s develop ment and confidence. Just like a bad crit experience can cut deep and haunt you long afterward, so can a really good crit: leaving you feeling challenged, supported, encouraged, and inspired to run back to the studio.

Craving the peer-to-peer engagement and dialogue she had experienced as an MFA student, BOSSCRITT founder and co-director Courtney Stock began inviting artist friends to her Hyde Park studio in 2019 for playful, exper imental sessions of looking at and talking about each other’s work. More and more artists joined the party, expressing the same frustrations with academic-style critiques and seeking a community of learning and support. As the club grew in size and ambition, longtime BOSSCRITTers Diana Jean Puglisi, Janet Loren Hill, and Demetri Espinosa stepped up as co-directors in 2020–2021, and for the Collective Futures Fund grant invited Alfred Dudley III and Juan Carlos Escobedo as collabora tors and advisors. Since 2019, the group has led forty-five critiques, curated three virtual exhibitions, and cultivated an artistic community not only in Boston but across New England, New York, New Jersey, Texas, and beyond.

With BOSSCRITT, community doesn’t come at a price: No fee or commitment is required to join, only an invest ment in critique and the process. Since the pandemic, the group has been meeting via Zoom multiple times a month, critiquing two to three artists’ work per sixtyto-ninety-minute session. There’s always a mix of new faces and longtime attendees joining, able to offer fresh takes and more nuanced perspectives that come from growing alongside another artist and seeing their practice develop over time. “The fact that we’ve had relationships with each other for a while and we keep showing up for critique is part of that intimacy and privileged insight we have into each other’s work. In this way, I think critique becomes a more powerful, relational, and interpersonal

“I’d like to think BOSSCRITT has made me a better critic. Listening to how a single sentiment can be expressed in a myriad of ways has definitely made me more attentive to my own observations. Now I take a breath and slow down so I can really think about the most constructive way to express an idea.”

—Damon Campagna

“BOSSCRITT has been a great source of community support, and I appreciate that there’s a focus on growing together and uplifting other artists in the community through explorative modes of critical thinking.”

—Jessica Tawczynski

“Before BOSSCRITT I did not feel safe entering a critique. I was scarred from school and nervous to get my work out there. BOSSCRITT is a wonderful, inclusive, and energizing space where artists can really connect and learn from one another. We build each other up. BOSSCRITT gave me the courage and confidence I needed to put my work out into the world again… and even participate in critiques that I originally deemed as scary.”

—Rachel Morrissey

“The BOSSCRITT community is by far the most supportive, encouraging, and fun critique space I have ever been in. Yes, fun. The discussions are both serious and playful, and I am always left feeling inspired and excited. It is a special group of artists who are thinking deeply about how to do this right.”

—Leslie Fandrich

dynamic between artists that’s only possible over time and by revisiting,” says Stock. Immediately upon entering the Zoom room, you are struck by the group’s warm, welcoming vibe, opening a safe space to be vulnerable, lean into tough conversations, fail, learn, heal, and have fun, all in good company.

In addition to critique sessions, at the core of BOSSCRITT’s work are two open-source, multi-use, and freely accessible resources to help artists find and personalize their own paths to critique. Both are guided by the core values of safety, compassion, and expansiveness. First, the Critique Menu offers a platter of pre-crit, in-crit, and post-crit questions and practices that “center the artist as the person who’s guiding the conversation, rather than being this passive entity like in the old-school way of receiving feedback,” as Escobedo describes. Instead of feeding you a premade, overcooked meal, the Menu empowers artists to craft their own recipe and experiment with alternate possibilities. For example, instead of verbal feedback, maybe you ask reviewers to sit with their thoughts through writing, or share feelings the work evokes for them through a bodily or auditory response. By leading with questions like “How do YOU want to introduce your work?” and “How do YOU want to receive feedback?” the Menu champions techniques that claim space for ourselves, our safety, and our needs as artists. “We’re definitely privileging the artist’s intention over whatever pedagogical or institutional experiences that they’ve had prior to the moment,” says Dudley. “Not everybody knows what they need from critique, and a lot of people are still figuring that out, given that they’ve mostly been learning all the ways they don’t like it. Instead of experiencing it from the negative, they’re experiencing the opportunity and support to find that newness, to find that intention.”

“There aren’t enough resources out there to help artists lead productive discussions about their work,” says Espinosa. “It’s not something that’s really taught as part of a formal art education.” In many educators’ and artists’ search for a shared language towards better critique prac tices, BOSSCRITT’s Questionnaire is asking the good, hard questions. From “What are the tools you feel you or others lack that are needed to have an expansive critique with substance?” to “In what ways can critique spaces be more accessible for people who have different learning styles?” the questions defy method and rigidity in favor of fluidity, inclusivity, and open-mindedness. As part of their research process, BOSSCRITT has invited artists, educators, and others from the field to contribute their answers, insights, and questions to the Questionnaire and compensates everyone for their labor. “We hope that this will be a model for how institutions could pay the people who are already doing this work unpaid/underpaid,” says Hill. “Not only are we paying people for their contribu tions, but we’re also giving them a support system so they

know that—even if they’re alone at their institution— there is a whole interwoven web of us doing this work at other places that they can lean on.”

As artists who can feel siloed in our studios or at our institutions, stuck ever so often—and especially coming out of the isolation of the pandemic—communities like BOSSCRITT are absolutely essential. “What we're doing is more than just critique to me,” says Puglisi. “We’re also talking about the love we have for each other’s work. It's about the care involved in seeing someone’s work move forward. The more you know someone, the farther you can reach into who they are, their practice, and so on.”

By being in community—by being part of a vision larger than itself—BOSSCRITT is making a lasting, evolving impact on the local and broader arts ecosystems. Hopefully, these living, breathing resources will be part of a ripple effect in shifting the way people are thinking about critique: not just good or bad, not confronta tional or violent, but as a place of community, growth, and encouragement. //

To access the BOSSCRITT Critique Menu and Questionnaire responses, or to get involved, please visit www.bosscritt.com/collective-futures-fund

Gina Lindner is a writer, arts administrator, and inter disciplinary artist based between Boston and New York. Her writing has been featured in Boston Art Review, Art New England, Boston Hassle, and various projects by independent artists.

“Leaving grad school was a shock—much of the community there dropped away, and there was no place to go for information on the art scene, crits, and advice when lost in an artistic funk.

BOSSCRITT has been a lifeline and introduced me to many wonderful working artists, been a model for learning how to support other artists, and has just been fun and rewarding.”

—Cynthia Zeman

“Having a supportive community that cares about exploring ideas and art is a wonderful resource for an artist. This group is doing great work to be a support system for its members and share and create opportunities while being understanding of the time and energy that goes into fostering a creative life.”

—Will Suglia

How Eli Brown Is

Finding Family Through the Ages

Words by Lian Parsons-Thomason

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Eli Brown was looking for community—but not just any community. The thirty-six-year-old artist was in search of intergenerational connections between fellow trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people.

He reached out to two Boston-based nonprofits, BAGLY (the Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth) and the LBGTQIA+ Aging Project, focused on programming for LGBTQ youth and elders, respectively. Out of this collaboration, Trans Family Archives was born.

Originally funded by a grant through the Boston Foundation, Trans Family Archives hosted a series of free dinners over the course of a year in 2018. The dinners offered a space for trans and gender nonconforming people of all ages to share stories and build relationships with one another.

“This project began because I didn’t have those people in my life and I really wanted to find older people who were trans that I could spend time with,” said Brown.

During the dinners, participants were offered prompts and icebreakers for getting to know their fellow diners. These prompts included topics such as the language each individual used to talk about themselves and their gender, how that language has changed over time, what friendship looks and feels like, and brainstorming ideas for how to create sustainable connections with those from different age groups.

In one particularly memorable icebreaker activity, diners lined up in order of biological age, then rearranged themselves to reflect their “age” (length of time) since coming out; some had been out for decades, while others were at the beginning of their journey.

“The purpose was to encourage people to think about age as a concept that’s fluid,” said Brown. “To consider an internal age that’s separate from how we appear to others.”

Trans Family Archives is on hiatus while Brown takes time to reflect on what comes next and to focus on their own art

A Trans Family Archives event at Flux Factory in Queens, NY in summer of 2021.

Photo by Sarah Dahlinger.

practice. The artist recently completed a Now + There Public Art Accelerator project, which resulted in the creation of a large UFO-like object called Beam Me Down. Installed in LoPresti Park in East Boston and on view until January 2023, it challenges visitors to consider how queer ecologies could be acts of resistance and resilience against climate change.

Ultimately, it was the pandemic that threw a wrench in the plans for Trans Family Archives; while the online format allowed for greater accessibility, meeting over Zoom didn’t have the same energy as meeting in person.

Brown is looking for collaborators who can help them generate new and diverse ideas, keep up momentum, and ensure that the project is sustainable. Ideally, the team would be intergenerational to reflect the overall goal of Trans Family Archives.

“I need to really get clear on paper, ‘What is this project?’” said Brown. “It’s something I want to commit to, but it’s a lot for one person.”

Improvements going forward could include making the dinners potluck-style affairs rather than catered ones, developing a core group of participants who continue to show up each time, and setting up clear ground rules for engagement so everyone feels heard and respected.

“Dinner as the focal point creates this sort of one-off situation,” said Brown. “Even though the dinners felt like they were going really, really well, we didn’t have a ton of

ELI BROWN

overlap in who was coming. I think the relationships I was trying to build would require more commitment on the part of other folks.”

Brown said they want everyone in the room to feel that they have agency during the event. They also want to include more strategizing and pathways toward addressing generational stigmas.

“There’s still the same isolation and the same violence, all the telltale signs that I experienced when I was coming up,” they said. “I relearn that all that pain is still present for the young people. Even though they might have more of each other and get to see each other in a virtual space, I don’t know how much has shifted or changed for them.”

Brown invited Cat Graffam, a fellow artist and—at the time—exhibitions director at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, to one of the dinners. At first, she was anxious about attending. But when she arrived, she realized that she’d never been in a room with so many other trans people at once.

“You maybe get to see a trans person out in the wild or if you’re in a social situation as part of a larger group, but you don’t get the opportunity to exist with many other trans people in a shared space,” she said. “That’s very comforting because you feel less judged—there’s a barrier removed via the commonality between you and other people.”

An intentionally intergenerational space offers the opportunity to honor one another’s experiences and share what’s changed over time, what hasn’t, and what’s possible.

“One of the benefits for me in talking to older trans people is getting to see that you can have a future,” said Graffam. “Before I turned eighteen, I just really didn’t think I would make it. I never thought I’d make it to thirty. Seeing somebody who is in their fifties and sixties and is trans is a reminder that life doesn’t end when you’re young. Getting to see that as a mirror for your future self is really impactful.”

Brown gathered Graffam, Jessica Mink, and theater artist Mal Malme for conversations about different facets of trans experiences at their respective ages. The intergen erational dialogue was recorded and turned into a sound installation for Brown’s installation Greenhouse and shaped Trans Family Archives going forward.

Though Malme didn’t attend one of the formal dinners, their perspective was formative to the project both through their own personal experiences and because of their educational initiative The Pineapple Project, which performs short plays at schools, libraries, and children’s museums to teach young children about the impor tance of acceptance and being themselves. The value of initiatives like The Pineapple Project and Trans Family Archives is storytelling, said Malme.

Cecilia Gentili, who facilitated the Fall 2020 event at Parallel Project Space in Brooklyn, NY. Image courtesy of the artist.

“It’s about sharing stories that I didn’t hear when I was a kid and generating those stories with each other,” they said. “It’s the simplest and most profound form of community and art. I think people hear themselves when someone shares their story, and that brings us closer together.”

As with any community, there have been sticking points and challenges along the way, including those involving language, which can be difficult to navigate in an inter generational space, as vocabulary has shifted over time.

“When I first started figuring out my gender identity, we didn’t even have the words ‘gender identity,’” said Malme. The fifty-six-year-old said they have encountered older LGBTQ people who struggle with understanding nonbinary identities, primarily because there was very limited knowledge around the topic when they came of age.

“Finding space for folks to talk about that is important. Language is going to keep evolving, so we have to find what words fit for the time being. And there might be better words down the road,” said Malme.

They added that listening to others’ stories and finding the connective tissue between one another is a way to be supportive within the community, regardless of the various terms individuals may use.

Graffam, who is twenty-nine years old, said she felt “a little old” among some of the younger attendees, many of whom were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Talking to younger trans people helped to highlight the resources and representation that are more accessible now than when she was growing up.

“It’s frustrating sometimes that [they seem to] get things so much easier than even ten years ago when I came out, but I’m glad they have resources and education and representation,” she said.

Although she is grateful for the positive changes in culture, the emotions are sometimes bittersweet.

“I think it’s a sense of grief—grief for your younger self,” she said. “How would my life have been different if I was fifteen and knew what being trans was? How would my life have played out?”

Brown has found fulfillment in mentoring younger trans and nonbinary people, providing guidance and support.

“That’s such a pleasure for me because I get to hold space for them and ask them about themselves,” they said. “That’s something I just did not have in my life when I was a teenager and in my twenties.”

Graffam said what Brown has accomplished through Trans Family Archives has set an example for the younger generation, showing that it’s possible to be multifaceted and live a full life.

“The conversation around being trans is often so focused around our pain and hurt and being harmed that getting to share trans joy and positivity is refreshing,” said Graffam. “You don’t get to do that often, which I think is one of Eli’s goals with it, too.”

Brown added that they didn’t have close relationships with their grandparents and feel like they missed out on those connections. Projects like Trans Family Archives have helped them facilitate building new relationships with elders in the community.

“I really value my conversations with these elders. It’s special to have a conversation with an older trans person,” said Brown. “It’s heartwarming learning how full people’s lives are and how much energy they have. Being able to live the way they want to live is pretty powerful for me—I never thought I would live this.”

Similarly, Graffam emphasized the importance of honoring those who paved the way for others, such as the generation who lived through the AIDS epidemic from the 1980s through the mid–90s.

“I think really understanding their perspective and acknowledging the extreme hardships that they went through, listening to their experiences about how they were treated and where and how they found community, is so valuable,” she said. “Even if there’s a difference in opinion and respectability politics, it’s important to push that aside to honor the older trans people who have been around the block and know how to survive.”

Thriving as a trans, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming person can be an uphill battle for personal, societal, and political reasons, but projects like Trans Family Archives show that there is nothing more powerful than community.

“Being in a room with people who get it—who understand, who have figured out ways that they’re resilient, every day entering the world that doesn’t see you as you see you—being in community with that is very grounding,” said Malme. “If there’s struggle there, there’s going to be someone who’s going to hold you up.” //

Lian Parsons-Thomason is a Boston-based writer and journalist. Her bylines can be found at iPondr, the Harvard Gazette, and Experience Magazine

See You in the Future:

A Promise and Request to Change the Narrative Around Mass and Cass

Words by Matthew Akira Okazaki

Group portrait of artists: (left to right) George Halfkenny, Melissa Q. Teng, Sabrina Dorsainvil, and Stephen Walter. Image by Loi Huynh.

Most Bostonians are familiar with the area known as “Mass and Cass.” The area is still pejoratively referred to as “Methadone Mile” by some media reporters, as well as “Recovery Road” or “Miracle Mile.” The territory now gets its name from the major intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard. Yet no matter its name, the dominant narrative around this area today remains one of crisis, trauma, anger, and hopelessness. What would it be if it were told by its own community members of survivors, visitors, and caretakers? Artists Sabrina Dorsainvil, George Halfkenny, Melissa Q. Teng, and Stephen Walter are exploring these questions through a storytelling and public art project called “See You in the Future.”

Their work highlights how the public imagination has entangled Mass and Cass with over fifty years of racialized anti-drug and anti-poverty campaigns. Together, they are collecting honest stories of care, resilience, and hope in the communities of Mass and Cass that don’t make the news, but speak to a more humane world that already exists. This year, they have received several grants to fund their work, which include support from the Collective Futures Fund, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Sasaki Foundation Design Grant.

On a hot and humid Sunday, with no clouds or shade in sight, surrounded by speeding cars and endless pavement, Teng and I spent a few hours walking in and around the area designated as Mass and Cass to talk more about this place and the work she and her team are conducting here. Feeling the need to be present on our walk, we chose to keep the conversation to ourselves and with those we met along the way. The following is a condensed version of a conversation that took place a few days later, where we reflected on our afternoon walk.

Matthew Okazaki: Thank you for bringing me out and taking me on that walk last week. It was such a good idea, and a powerful experience. It was a lot to take in. But I think it was important to be there to truly see it. To see how hot it was, the lack of shade, the overwhelming noise, the speeding cars, the tiny sidewalks, the relent less asphalt.

Melissa Teng: It’s a lot different than driving through it. My teammates introduced me to Mass and Cass by walking through it as well.

MO: You mentioned that the original idea for this project, “See You in the Future,” was to run a series of identity, wellness, and photography workshops at the Engagement Center (a low-barrier safe space that provides medical care, snacks, drinks, and access to recovery services), but it’s changed since, right?

MT: Yeah, there were just a whole bunch of assumptions that were made in our initial proposal. Some were things we knew would change after talking with more people living and working here, like the medium of photog raphy or our workshop curriculum. We knew that sched uling would be hard because folks don’t necessarily have a predictable schedule. They may not have phones to

call or text, or money for transportation if something falls through.

The reason why we wanted to work with the Engagement Center was because this was one of the spots where people gather. It was a community anchor point for people to just go get water or use the Wi-Fi, computers, bath rooms. It was also a place where people would just show up, because that’s where their friends would show up. At one point, there were folks giving haircuts and massages.

But then, and we did not expect it, although it’s not all that surprising, the Engagement Center was shut down in the spring and then only allowed to operate on a limited basis.

MO: What happened?

MT: Unfortunately, this follows a pattern of overcorrection as a response to “Mass and Cass.” The Boston Globe reported some knife-related incidents there. Some people were arguing that the Engagement Center was a place where people could go to make drug deals, or where people would be preyed on or attacked, but it’s more nuanced than that. People are fighting for their lives and conflicts are bound to happen, especially

On the left, a collage depicting Southampton St., showing the men’s shelter across from the fenced-off Fire Dept. Headquarters. The images on the right depict the intersection of Atkinson St. and Southampton St., where people who lived in the Mass and Cass area have been herded after tents were forcefully taken down in January 2022. These images have been compiled by the See You in the Future Collective.

ABOUT THIS PROCESS:

We lined up photos taken by our teammate Stephen Walter in September 2022 with photos taken by Google’s Street View cars, which are archived on Google Maps (adding more blur to faces). Unhoused and recovery communities are often blamed for causing “dirty,” “unsafe,” and “crowded” streets. These photos tell a different story of disinvestment in public space.

Bus stations are removed (first the bus shelter seat goes, then the station itself), street banners are replaced by cameras, and green spaces are neglected and disappear. When elements of public infrastructure (e.g., street lights, trash cans, trees, and signs) are damaged, they are removed, not mended, leading to more barren landscapes. We see an increase in fences, surveillance tech, and police vehicles, pointing to a public realm designed for control. To break the stigma, we need to understand: What really leads to unsafe, dirty, and crowded streets?

now that everyone’s been pushed onto one block [after tents were cleared and over 150 unhoused people were offered spaces in shelters in January of 2022]. But there’s this tension of actual violence that harms community members and reported crimes. And it’s important to make that distinction, that some of this is fear-response-based reporting from outsiders versus what is truly dangerous for people who are living there. And this ultimately leads to an overcorrection.

MO: I see the work that you and your team are pursuing. It’s that you’re really trying to tip the scales or start to balance against that kind of mainstream representation.

MT: Yeah. But part of what we were dealing with going in was this question of like, is this even helpful? And is this work even art? We don’t want to go in and be like, yeah art makes everything better, or okay everyone, let’s make a mural. Really that’s all great. And there’s definitely a place for that, and a need for beautiful spaces here. But it feels self-serving if there are all these structural things and compounding injustices that aren’t being addressed or understood.

The conversations really need to happen first, and the art will come. First, we just want to be there.

MO: These conversations, this rethinking of what the actual “project” is, the just being there and sitting with it, I think you were talking about it as this kind of “pre-work” for the work.

MT: It reminds me of the conversation around humancentered design. This is a popular methodology that centers people’s needs as opposed to designing prod ucts. But there’s an inherent problem with a frame work like that, because it forgets that so many people in our communities have already been dehumanized. For example, anyone with a criminal record is immedi ately treated as less-than. They have rights, needs, and privileges stripped away.

There’s actually a lot of pre-work needed before we even think about “centering” design around a certain human experience. It makes this pretty linear and methodical framework a lot more reflective.

MO: I imagine it’s met with some resistance though. How does that work when you get grants or receive funding for this? These kinds of groups and organizations tend to want something in return, a measurable outcome, a report, a mural, a sculpture; don’t they expect “something”?

MT: Yeah. Honestly, tangible outcomes are good for my mental health too [laughs]. But I’ve honestly been surprised by how much our funders get that this presence

and research is also part of it, even if it’s not easily measurable. It’s amazing to meet funders who are inter ested in reframing the question, which for us is, what really is Mass and Cass?

It’s not a formal neighborhood. The shape and size of Mass and Cass changes based on who you ask. It’s one community, but it’s multiple communities. This isn’t a group easily defined by a language, race, language, class, or even housing and recovery status.

MO: The boundaries of the community, they’re fuzzy.

MT: And this one feels especially fuzzy. We wonder what the effects are on this “community” when the social and geographic boundaries of Mass and Cass are being drawn and enforced externally. For us, we’re asking, how would folks who are part of the stable and intermittent commu nities on the streets define their own community?

We think we can get at these questions through conver sations and sharing stories. This storytelling component, that’s what’s really needed, and something we can do as artists.

MO: Again, to tip the scales, or alter the narrative—the alter-narrative.

MT: Right.

MO: So where are your thoughts on this identity or story telling piece? Any idea of where that might take you?

MT: One of our teammates, George Halfkenny, has years of experience facilitating restorative justice circles. We’re planning a few and thinking about workshops focused on other acts of collaboration.

We’re also looking at doing things with audio. Maybe a radio station? There’s such an intense soundscape around Mass and Cass; it’s so jarring and loud. What’s it like to be surrounded by that level of stereo, all day and night? We’re recording audio conversations starting with folks George has known over the years. And in those, we’ll be dealing with that soundscape, capturing people’s voices with the sounds of all those cars and the traffic. We’re looking for archival audio to see if we can bring in some of Boston’s rich social-movement history. My team mate Steve [Stephen Walter] has been building a fasci nating archive of photos and videos from different media sources over time.

There’s a certain level of privacy that audio provides, more than shooting video or photography. It lends itself better when dealing with Mass and Cass because the image and spectacle of it has been so often used in a negative light.

Finally, we’re thinking about pamphlets and printed material that offer certain messages, which is kind of like doubling down on the billboard idea.

MO: Yes! Let’s talk about the billboard idea.

MT: We’re not sure if we can afford it, but it’s been exciting to look into. We’re thinking about renting out a billboard to display an undeter mined message that will specifically target these two different constituents: the people in and around Mass and Cass, and others who are driving through it. It’s cool to think about a message for these two groups who are entering and moving through the area at such different speeds.

MO: So what’s going on the billboard? Is it a message, a story, a phrase?

MT: There are common phrases that people in recovery communities say to each other. Other people might hear them and think it’s just a nice saying, but it means something different to those in recovery. There’s something nice about this double reading, and double meaning, all in plain sight. I like the idea of having something that can create a feeling of belonging, and for folks in recovery to say, “Oh, that’s for me!”

In many ways, our project is really about creating and supporting a public campaign. But it’s important to point out that the narratives we’re trying to amplify are not our own; they are stories that people who work every day on the streets, or who belong to this community have been saying for years, even decades. As artists, our hope and task is to support these narratives and help them reach who they need to reach.

MO: And when is this new chapter of your project—this campaign of sorts—starting up?

MT: We’re working on it now, but you can follow our progress on our website at seeyouinthefuture. org. It’s currently a little quiet, but we are excited to share news soon. //

Matthew Akira Okazaki is an assistant teaching professor at Northeastern University’s School of Architecture, a practicing artist, and founder of the design practice Field Office LLC. He is currently based in Boston.

Group portrait of artists: (left to right) Stephen Walter, Melissa Q. Teng, George Halfkenny, and Sabrina Dorsainvil. Image by Loi Huynh.

The shape and size of Mass and Cass changes based on who you ask. It’s one community, but it’s multiple communities. This isn’t a group easily defined by a language, race, language, class, or even housing and recovery status.”

AgX Film Collective Fosters Community for Filmmakers

Words by Olivia Deng

Stepping into AgX Film Collective in Waltham feels like being transported to a different era—discontinued Bolex cameras, flatbed editors, manuals from the 1970s, a dark room for developing film and a screening area to show films, occupy the space. Established in January 2015 with about thirty members, AgX is equipped with everything you need for photochemical filmmaking. “There are so many schools in the city that teach film, but I found when you graduate, you lose access to those resources, you lose access to the community, and things feel very fractured,” said Stefan Grabowski, founding member of AgX. To fill the void in the Boston filmmaking community, Grabowski hosted a meeting of local filmmakers to discuss formal izing a film collective where members could pool their knowledge and resources.

Today, AgX hosts skillshares and screenings all while keeping their expansive, workshop-like space open for members to work on their projects. While the COVID-19 pandemic initially put a halt on their public screenings and the events that supplement their income, AgX is now in a position to ramp up programming, thanks in large part to the Collective Futures Fund grant they received. Grabowski said that the studio at 144 Moody Street in Waltham is crucial to AgX’s success, and the grant helped them keep the space and fund other operating expenses. While Grabowski said that the collective could potentially

exist without a physical space, it would come at a great loss to the AgX and filmmaking community.

“We could exist without a physical space in a much looser way, but we would lose a lot to not have that space, because it allows for the community to come together, and it allows for us to have a greater number of phys ical resources,” Grabowski said. “We were able to put [the Collective Futures Fund grant] toward these kinds of operating expenses. Space is so essential for the commu nity to come together and for us to house the physical resources that we have, which are open to our members and the public when we do workshops.”

Being a filmmaker comes with unique challenges, according to Grabowski. “Not everyone has the projector to play it, so sharing a film print isn’t feasible in the way that a fine artist might be able to sell a painting. It’s a very nonprofitable medium in the financial sense,” he said. “Filmmakers, especially those making personal artistic work, are making their art at a financial loss for themselves. Success is reliant on people coming out to an organized event to actually see the work.”

In this sense, AgX’s screening area is just as pertinent as the equipment. “People can come watch things that are more marginal or fringe that you definitely would never

(both) Inside the AgX Film Collective space in Waltham where gear and equipment are available for members to use.

Photo by Olivia Deng.

see at a multiplex, and you’re less likely to see at the smaller arthouse type venues. We can open up our space for the public to come watch things for free or donation.”

For example, the collective recently hosted Los Angelesbased Sri Lankan filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe at their space for a screening. “I’ve been starting to program some screenings of friends of mine who are filmmakers as they’re coming through,” said filmmaker and AgX member Kyle J. Petty. “Especially after we’ve had two years of all watching films on a laptop screen, or, you know, isolated in our houses, we can bring people in here and show stuff on film.”

Anyone who is interested in joining the collective is invited to AgX’s events: monthly meetings, workshops, work-inprogress screenings, and public screenings. “You can kind of come and get a feel for the group. And if it feels right for you, then you just say, ‘Yeah, I want to be a member.’” AgX members pay dues on a sliding scale to keep it accessible. “It’s very community focused, and everyone is contributing what they can, in this sort of mutual aid support network,” Grabowski said.

The sense of community AgX provides compelled Petty to join the collective. “I was looking for a community of artists that I could join or get to know that would offer the camaraderie to keep making work, as well as the tech nical knowledge of shooting films on film, and AgX was the thing that would come up in my searches. I was very quickly welcomed into the group and have been a part of it ever since,” Petty said.

AgX has everything a filmmaker needs, with cameras, editing equipment, production equipment, and postproduction equipment, much of which has been donated from film schools that have shifted to digital-focused programs. “People were just abandoning this equipment, and then they saw that there was a group like us and there are a lot of groups actually around the world that are sort of similar, like part of this big network of artist-run film labs and collectives,” Grabowski said. An important task for the collective is maintaining their cameras, which can be a difficult task due to their age. “We mainly use these Bolexes, which are very rugged cameras. They don't require batteries because they have spring motors. And you can do a lot with these cameras. They are very well made, but they’re just waning in supply because they haven't been produced in mass since the ‘70s.”

David Bendiksen, professor at Emerson College and University of Massachusetts Amherst, recently led a workshop on how to repair Bolex cameras. Bendiksen is a new member who joined earlier in 2022, intrigued by AgX after seeing a member’s work. “I love this space. It's wild. I’ve never seen this many sixteen-millimeter film editors in the same place in my life,” Bendiksen said. “It’s an

extremely well-equipped place. It feels like the creative possibilities are just burgeoning. They’re saturating the place. Show up and something will happen.”

For Petty, joining AgX encouraged him to experiment with different formats, like sixteen-millimeter film making. In addition to sixteen-millimeter filmmaking workshops, AgX has also hosted workshops on camera less filmmaking and DIY film preservation. “I wanted to get more into this medium, specifically, by joining AgX. And it has really made me more comfortable using it. This past summer, I’ve shot a lot of film that I need to come here and edit. And that's been a fun change of my film making practice. Because before I primarily just stayed in the realm of video. But recently, I’ve been enjoying working with my hands more, and the tactile quality of film is really appealing to me.”

AgX enables filmmakers to work with film in a very hands-on manner. “We have the full means in the space to make a finished work from start to end. It’s unheard of, in a lot of ways, for artists to have access to all of this without needing to farm it out to technicians at a lab and spend crazy amounts of money on it. You can do it at a much more affordable and reasonable cost,” Grabowski said. “It opens up a lot of creative possibilities that you wouldn’t have if you're just like sending it to a commer cial lab and expecting really professional results but not having that kind of freedom to experiment and have these discoveries.”

With the CFF grant providing AgX the stability it needed, the film collective can continue its tradition of preserving historical filmmaking practices while empowering film makers with everything they need for novel experimenta tion. Amid all the arcane equipment, AgX is a community space at its core, and filmmakers can bond with one another over their craft. //

Olivia Deng is an arts and culture writer who also covers politics and social movements. Her work has appeared in DigBoston, Boston Magazine, The Atlantic, Boston Art Review, and more. She is also an illustrator and painter.

AgX member Davey Bendiksen leading

a Bolex camera repair skillshare. Photo

courtesy of AgX Film Collective.

Artists and Moms Become Architects of Joy

Words by Jacquinn Sinclair

Un-ADULT-erated Black Joy Collective at JP Open Studios, Eliot School of Fine & Applied Arts, September 2022. Left to right: Alison Croney Moses, Zahirah Nur Truth, and Tanya Nixon-Silberg. Image by Tess Scheflan.

Local artists and entrepreneurs Alison Croney Moses, Zahirah Nur Truth, and Tanya Nixon-Silberg are chasing after and intentionally cultivating joy. The trio, all Black mothers who spent time during the height of the pandemic meeting online (and later in person) to discuss what was on their hearts in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and others, realized that happiness is something they wanted more of. And something they wanted to share.

Since then, the women have worked together to create spaces for themselves and other Black moms and their children to experience joy. Over the summer, they hosted a series of events called “un-ADULT-erated Black Joy,” centering play. There was Hula-Hooping on the grass, double Dutch and bracelet making at the Boston Art and Music Soul Festival (BAMS), roller-skating at Chez Vous in Dorchester, and tackling aerial circus moves at Commonwealth Circus Center, an activity that challenged the mind and body. Next May at the Piano Factory, a culmination of their collaborative work (these joy-filled activations), individual pieces from the trio, and the work of two other creatives, Ekua Holmes and L’Merchie Frazier, will be on display.

Nixon-Silberg, the founder of Little Uprisings, an organization that uses a creative approach to achieving social justice, has been “focusing a lot on the bodily remembrances of our joy,” she says. Little Uprisings centers on young people and works in partnership with “school systems and community partners that have a commitment to making racial justice an everyday occurrence.” According to the site, the work, anchored in play, is “actively anti-racist, brave, and Black-affirming.”

Nixon-Silberg, Croney Moses, who works in wood and is the associate director of the Eliot School of Fine & Applied Arts in Jamaica Plain, and Truth—an educator, jewelry designer, and visual and performance artist—came to know one another through their individual projects in the same educational spaces. Truth is the founder of ZNT Arts, an organization that creates safe spaces for healing, inspiration, and education through art-making. ZNT Arts also aims to “uplift BIPOC, raise funds for social justice, and educate our communities towards freedom.”

When the three finally connected, Nixon-Silberg says, “We went deep really quickly.”

Nixon-Silberg says during those early talks in 2021, amid anger and protests, they talked about serious issues but laughed and had a good time. “When Black women get

together, we’re there in community with each other,” she explains.

Croney Moses’s work in and outside the Eliot School centers on community. The Rhode Island School of Design graduate and 2022 United States Artist Fellow strives to serve and cultivate community in whatever she does. In her artist statement, Croney Moses writes that she “finds the moment in time, space, and community where there is balance, and in that balance, we find the critical moment of transformation—of wood, of a person, of an organization, of the field of craft, and ultimately, of a society.”

Through convening, Truth, Nixon-Silberg, and Croney Moses aspire to spur joyful transformation and empow erment among Black mothers. Croney Moses started the Black and Brown Moms group in Jamaica Plain on Facebook several years ago after giving birth to her son, and she was keen to ensure he, and later her daughter, were around people who looked like them. In March 2021, she re-engaged the assemblage and renamed it Moms of Color because it felt more “expansive,” she says.

She explains that she wanted to provide members with a safe space to process their lived experiences during that time of crisis. She acknowledges that there’s an ongoing crisis, but during that time, it was heightened. She thought to herself, “Black moms are grieving. So, how do we build community? How do we make sure we’re providing a support system for each other, for these moms?”

As the pandemic continued and protests reached a fever pitch, she started working to build community for and in

Sequoria Dickerson teaching her son to Hula-Hoop at Black Mama Playdate at BAMSFEST, Franklin Park Playstead, June 2022. Photo by Tess Scheflan.

support of Black moms specifically and recruited from the larger group using Facebook and a text message chain to keep in touch. Truth adds that notifications were also sent in her newsletter as well as Croney Moses’s.

Every two weeks, the women met to “build connection, trust, and develop embodiment practices.” Their time together concluded with a weekend city retreat that occurred for three hours in June. The retreat was led by Bintu Conté, one of the mothers. Ten Black moms participated in meditation, dance, and yoga to process their lived experiences and cultivate practices to sustain physical, emotional, and spiritual care and wellness. The last gathering was documented through video.

They also discussed their children, their personal struggles, and their motherhood journey. “We talked a lot about holding space for all of those things,” Croney Moses says. “It’s like this idea of creating a vessel together as a group. And what do we want; what are we holding in that vessel?” she explains.

Nixon-Silberg adds that the group tapped into play with games and questions about what they did when they

were children. “I think what Bintu [Conté] unlocked with us is that we can actually step into that joy again,” NixonSilberg shares. “We don’t because we’re parents. We don’t need to throw it aside. We can actually step into it.”

There are photos of the women posing for pictures at the retreat. The second pose cue, Nixon-Silberg says, was to pose as your seven-year-old self. That pose, Nixon Silberg adds, “it’s markedly different and markedly joyful, right?”

That experience of Conté urging them to step into joy helped inform what would become their “Un-ADULT erated Joy” project with its happinesscentered events. Some might say reclaiming or cultivating joy, especially for Black moms, is radical. With dire statistics for Black women, from healthcare to earning potential, this reaching for happiness feels necessary.

At the height of the pandemic, Black and Hispanic people died of COVID-19 more often than others, according to Kaiser Family Foundation statistics. A 2021 study in the Journal of General Medicine led by a Harvard University doctor found that Black women in Georgia and Michigan “died at more than three times the rates of white men

Black Mama Playdate at BAMSFEST, Franklin Park Playstead, June 2022. Photo by Tess Scheflan.

and Asian men. The only other group more likely to die from the disease was Black men.” Add that to the fact that Black women are three times more likely to die during childbirth, are paid less despite constituting a large part of the workforce, and are married less often, which makes becoming an architect of joy a form of revolutionary resistance.

The work that Croney Moses, Nixon-Silberg, and Truth are doing is part of a growing movement of concerned mothers near and far, from Atlanta’s Black Mamas Matter Alliance, which focuses on shifting the culture for Black maternal health, to Pittsburgh’s Brown Mamas, which aspires to “elevate the collective Black mothering experience through tribe building,” and Maryland’s Mocha Moms, centered on community activism. Though each of the above organizations has its worthy motivations, this local trio’s group seems to be the only one to focus solely on joy and liberation.

When thinking about what their project would look like, Croney Moses knew she didn’t want it to be about suffering or identity because “that’s baked in,” she says. She wanted to “focus on the Black joy that we had experienced as young girls and connect back to that as we take ownership of our bodies, ownership of who we are.”

They decided to bring back the games and activities of their childhoods for a summer of “Un-ADULT-erated Black Joy.” To fund their venture, Croney Moses engaged Truth and Nixon-Silberg as collaborators on a grant proposal for the Collective Futures Fund's sustaining practice category.

This sustained practice will conclude in an exhibition next May at the Piano Craft Gallery, featuring contributions from Croney Moses, Truth, and Nixon-Silberg, who is now part of the art organization Now + There’s Public Art Accelerator Program’s newest cohort. There will also be art from Holmes and Frazier. The three are still deciding what they'll contribute.

But whatever it is, it’s sure to be meaningful. //

Jacquinn Sinclair is a Boston-based freelance journalist whose work seeks to highlight creatives, organizations, and initiatives at the intersection of art and activism. Her work has appeared in The Philadelphia Tribune, DigBoston, WBUR’s The ARTery, and Boston.com.

“

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Words by Martina Tanga

INSIDE OUT: MUSEUM TALK WITH FUREN DAI

How should we reimagine museums for our collective futures? Furen Dai’s On the Future Ruin is a 3D video representing a fictional encyclopedic museum as a ruin sometime in the future. We are guided through the museum’s spaces—much like those of the British Museum or the Metropolitan Museum of Art—as if we were on tour, navigating its artificially lit rooms. The video raises questions about how audiences can experience connections between cultures across time and space, how artworks are displayed, and what the conditions are for the encounter with art. I discussed this project and the future of museums with Furen Dai.

Furen Dai, On the Future Ruin, video still, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

Martina Tanga: You have been interested in museum display spaces in your recent work. Can you talk about your first museum experience? How old were you, where were you, and what was particularly striking about that visit?

Furen Dai: Growing up in Southern China, I wasn’t used to going to museums and only started visiting when I moved to Beijing for college. The word museum can be trans lated into two different terms in Chinese—美术馆, refer ring to art museums, and 博物馆, referring to museums that collect antiques and other cultural items. I remember going to the National Museum of China often, and many of the exhibits were of just Chinese antiques, modern art, and folk art.

My first experience with an encyclopedic museum was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I went there as an adult. I still remember the disbelief when I saw the artworks whose images are reproduced so many times; I couldn’t believe they existed. It was also the first time I saw art from outside China gathered on the same site. I’m curious about your first museum experience and your first art experience. Did they happen in the same place?

MT: I have a tough time pinpointing my first museum expe rience. My family is Italian, and I grew up in the UK. Art was part of my upbringing; we used to go to cultural insti tutions as a family. In particular, my paternal grandmother made those spaces accessible to me. When I was a young girl—maybe three or four years old—she would sit with me in front of a painting and start to tell stories, perhaps using the figures in the scene. They were not necessarily based on the label; she would make things up and create a sense of mystery and wonder for me. I always felt like museums were a place of imagination, and I have felt at home in these spaces.

FD: It seems that in the initial encounter with the museum, you had an intermediary, your grandmother, who was inventing and reimagining the stories behind the artwork and made you feel less intimidated by the institution. When I first entered the museum, the scale of the building, the descriptions on the wall, the objects behind the case, the rules to follow, and the overall quiet setting resulted in a different relationship to the museum. It is fascinating how various factors influence how we perceive things within such spaces.

MT: I never thought that she played that role. You’re right— she made it feel safe and humanized the space. In a way, in your project, On the Future Ruin, you took on that interme diary role. Tell us how you came to the project and how the grant helped you create it.

FD: I began this project by looking at the US census, thinking about how the language of the census shifted with various societal changes. I was struck by the question about

a person’s race and color and started looking at how various scholars and organizations categorize people. In parallel, I started looking at the strategies encyclopedic museums use to categorize objects. The initial question was, how does a museum decide how to classify different objects?

How are they displayed, and where? Who constructs the narrative around the objects? While I was working on this project, the pandemic began. I saw the headlines about staff being laid off and museums turning to digital spaces and offering walkthroughs within the virtual realm to give people access to the artwork as their doors were closed.

Virtual walkthroughs offer an experience of detachment because you are wandering through the museum alone, and you become more attuned to the details in the environ ment. How do we envision a future if the museum’s struc ture functions like a machine? Without security guards and spectators, I started to imagine what a museum would look like if you took out all the art. It would become like a ruin but, at the same time, a blueprint for future-building.

While creating the video, I debated what voice to use for the walkthrough. Each voice I considered—female or male, with an English or American or a different accent— had preloaded associations, so I eventually decided to work with an elderly English accent voiceover. The voice contained the historical background and authority of a museum space. Through this reinforcement, the voice authenticates the display strategy of the art. I used the Collective Futures Fund grant to hire a professional voice over actor and compensate a 3D modeling artist who helped me with the rendering of the video.

MT: In this piece, you strip away a lot of the “noise,” the visitors, the artwork, and all the distractions that get in the way of seeing the museum. You work in a lot of mediums. Why video for this project?

FD: I’m interested in the idea of virtual space in the current moment and its conditions for easy access. Currently, galleries and museums are adapting to virtual showrooms, particularly during the pandemic, when all the artworks were confined within their architectural space. We couldn’t enter the buildings or move the artworks. The moving image seems to have more possibility.

Additionally, the 3D walkthrough provides an immersive quality, and the smooth camera pans give a sense of drift, which is what the film points to at the end: When we walk out of the museum, it’s an empty city and a grotesque moment.

MT: I like how your point of origin for this project about museums is grounded in people, and the idea of catego rization brought you to museums. Categories, such as the ones you mention, come out of the Enlightenment— mastery over knowledge and everything in the world

FUREN DAI

(all above) Furen Dai, On the Future Ruin, video still, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

by designating a place and space for it. This gave rise to museums in the first place, which goes hand-in-hand with the colonial enterprise.

The interconnectedness of that, I think, is something that the museum has wanted us to ignore or forget, but we need to remember that it continues to be a foundational structure. In On the Future Ruin, you followed this train of thought that museums are sites of display, and they choose to show some things and hide others.

FD: To me, museums stand as time capsules. The orig inal works’ context has since changed, and only the material object is preserved. Artworks from all over the world, created under substantially different contexts, have all been displayed within the same architecture. I got dropped into this site when I was already an adult. Inevitably, I would have many questions: Why did I never see this before? What are these objects? How did all these objects get into this place? And you have the urge to try to find answers.

MT: The idea of time is fascinating. Everything in the museum exists suspended from its different temporal ities, and all artworks become flattened. It is hard to experience the dimensionality of time in such a space. In your project, as you describe it, you’re looking to the future and, in a way, reversing time. By following this trajectory, I perceive the dystopian qualities of your piece, which are terrifying, but maybe it is out of the ruin that the museum needs to be recreated.

FD: I don’t see this project as a dystopia. When I created the 3D model for the video, I made a conscious decision not to make the place look like a typical— or Romantic—ruin or an abandoned place. On the contrary, the space looks prestigious and seems to have been preserved untouched. To a certain extent, I tried to invert the role of the container. Looking at the idea of the museum as not different from the objects it contains or categorizes determines it as ironic rather than dystopian. It was also a conscious decision not to use the term “pedestal” throughout the video script, since when we talk about pedestal, we often refer to it as a support for something else. The question for the museum is: If the art is no longer there, what is left?

MT: There are many ways we can appreciate culture; however, we still return to the question of what purpose museums serve and who they are for. What kind of institutions do we want museums to be? Is museum even the right word to describe what we would like to see going forward?

FD: How do you envision the future of the museum and its engagement with its surroundings when the world is shifting constantly and rapidly? I mean, this is a very big question. How do you envision the future of the art display/space?

MT: That is a big question. Well, I think that museums are at an inflection point. Museum relevance depends on a large constituency, and museums are starting to recognize that. But there is a long way to go from statements like “We are for all” and “Museums are spaces for everybody” and oper ationally getting there. I think there needs to be a profound recalibration of systems and priorities. In 2020, I spent a lot of time thinking about how museums work and how

they might function differently, starting from how the staff is organized and how they relate to one another. I wrote the article “Let’s Imagine a New Museum Staff Structure” based on nonhierarchical relationships grounded in femi nism and antiracism. It would require a complete reframing of how we approach work, making us more flexible and the organization more nimble and responsive. It would also make us question many ingrained assumptions we have about, for example, what knowledge is important.

FD: I work at an organization with a very small staff, and it’s easy to build a flat structure. Everyone contributes to the decision-making process together. But for an organiza tion like the MFA Boston, with so many staff, where do you start to build a flat structure, particularly since everyone has their own expertise? In your reorganization, do these departments still exist within the new space?

MT: This can work with a small staff and be scaled up to function with many people. It’s all about roles, not titles, based on the tasks the institution chooses to accom plish. I also think this is a much healthier way to approach work, which shouldn’t define who you are. The key to this functioning smoothly is radical transparency, which generates trust.

FD: Within the encyclopedia museums, though, the situ ation is slowly changing; like when you mentioned your grandma improvised in front of the artworks, I’ve noticed the museums are trying to bring in the multiplicity of voices in interpreting works, which is important, as we all approach art differently. For instance, you come to it from an art historical perspective, while I see it as an artist.

MT: Yes, of course, and education comes in many forms, not just degree-granting institutions. Talking about educa tion, how do you see your work in art in historical terms like “institutional critique”?

FD: The legacy of institutional critique has helped me to look at my practice from the periphery in relation to the center. Since the origin of the institutional critique, it seems many things have already been moved from the periphery to the center. This time, I would like to remove things from the center back to the periphery. In On the Future Ruin, the central object has been removed, and we reside in the periphery and look at the margins.

How can we move beyond an institutional critique, a cultural practice typical for a ruling class? I certainly acknowledge the history of where we are coming from, but at the same time, I don’t want to be grounded within this term and would like to step back and look at the center.

MT: I think what you’re saying is clever because when you have these terms, institutional and critique, the critique gets subsumed into the institution and loses its criticality. You’re

Dai in her studio. Photo by Jeff Weber. Courtesy of the artist.

saying that we need to move back toward the periphery to maintain a sense of criticality. I see why you feel like you’re dancing between the center and the periphery.

FD: Many artists who engage in institutional critique come from prestigious educational backgrounds, and it’s the dilemma of critique from within. The same can be said about the reform of a museum space.

MT: Absolutely, and we come full circle thinking about who holds power and what is prioritized, how we can make cultural spaces more embedded in the community so that they better serve the community. And even the term community is a loaded term that gets thrown around so much that it has lost some of its meaning, implying rela tionships, support, and care. As you say, terms, frame works, and systems are essential, and I think this is where we need to start reimagining museums. //

Martina Tanga is a curator, art historian, and educator interested in art that engages with social justice, feminism, and the built environment. She is a specialist in twentieth-century Italian art, and her book, Arte Ambientale, Urban Space, and Participatory Art, released by Routledge Press, examines radical artistic practices sited in Italy’s 1970s urban landscape. She held positions at the Worcester Art Museum and deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and is currently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Tanga earned her BA and MA in the history of art from University College London and a PhD in the history of art and architecture from Boston University.

Vu in front of Mekong Installation—Past, Present, Future, 2022, a collaborative piece with artist Sam Lê Shave and AARW volunteers. Located on the wall of Pho Le off of Dorchester Ave. Photo by Loi Huynh for Boston Art Review

This past July, artist and 2021 Collective Futures Fund grantee Ngoc-Tran Vu celebrated thirty years in the United States with her family. Just weeks later, she was in Vietnam again, on a group pilgrimage through the country’s sites of loss and suffering, tracing the timeline of the Vietnam War. For Vu, each visit to Vietnam is different, because each time she is different. “Certain information is only available to me depending on the growth in my life,” she shares.

During the pilgrimage, Vu and other Vietnamese travelers, some from the US and some based in Vietnam, visited ten sites to share in collective prayer and healing. With so many narratives lost or erased by war and colonialism, those on this journey were attempting to reconcile with each site’s violent history. Collective healing and shared memory across borders, generations, and cultures are common themes in Vu’s work. From multimedia storytelling to live events to collaborative community murals, Vu is constantly working and reworking through the communal experience of time and place.

In August, Vu’s Garden of Healing opened at the Fenway in partnership with the Jewish Arts Collaborative. Inspired by the concept of peace and healing gardens, Vu created a sculpture of roses that light up at night, providing passersby with a moment to pause

On Belonging: In Conversation with Ngoc-Tran Vu

and linger with the flowerscape. In a time so fraught for mental health and wellbeing, the sculpture speaks to an urgent need for renewal and care with its blooms rising from face-shaped pots, reaching toward the sky.

Most recently, “Who Belongs Here? Who Doesn’t?” took place in Dorchester at Town and Field Park. The multimedia event included live storytelling and a community art installation tying together stories around home, deportation, and displacement. Vu and artist collaborator Sam Lê Shave shaped the event as an open space for people to connect across generations, languages, and experiences. On a bright September afternoon, community members gathered to share, listen, and learn against a backdrop of art panels that braided portraiture with interview narratives of migration.

Now, Vu is setting her intentions toward early planning for a potential memorial in Dorchester to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. I caught up with Vu to talk about the impact of the Collective Futures grant and her pilgrimage in Vietnam, and how both have influenced her creative practice today.

Words by An Uong

Vu in front of Community in Action: A Mural for the Vietnamese People , 2017. 24' x 8'. This mural resulted from a collaboration with her neighbors and Vietnamese youth artists. Located at Fields Corner in Dorchester. Photo by Loi Huynh for Boston Art Review .

An Uong: The pilgrimage has certainly made an impact on your recent works around collec tive healing and shared memory. Could you name the specific impressions that have stuck with you?

Ngoc-Tran Vu: One of the biggest marks from the journey would be the collective prayers and rituals that we shared at each site. The core question within the group was: “How do we pray?” People never really think about it. How do you know what to talk about? What do you ask for?

Opening that up was really powerful. At each site, we introduced ourselves—our names, where we’re coming from—addressing directly the people who have passed on and creating a framework of why we were there, what our hopes were, and what our relationships were to the spirits there. There’s still a lot more we need to learn but it was a start in acknowl edging where we’re coming from.

AU: Yes, that acknowledgement is so important. All these people were lost and no one ever said anything after that. Time just moved on. Looking back at your experience there and then coming back here, suddenly back in the context of Boston and the US, how has that been for you?

NTV: It’s a conversation I actually had earlier on in our journey around where we’re all coming from. Half of us were coming from the US, perhaps identifying as Vietnamese-American, yet when we’re in Vietnam, we’re all like Vietnamese people. Of course, our language around that is varied, but when thinking about our roots, being Vietnamese, and being of the land and connected to it, it made me reframe how I think about being Vietnamese and being American and all the different dynamics that come with that. This shift has been happening in the past few years, but after this trip, I’m reconsidering my identity as a VietnameseAmerican artist. Now that feels so redundant. Do I really need to proclaim that? VietnameseAmerican? I’ve lately started to identify myself as a Vietnamese artist. I’m based in Boston. I grew up in the US but I’m a Vietnamese artist. I don’t need to state that I’m a VietnameseAmerican artist.

When thinking about sites of memory and sites of connection, I’m working toward a permanent

memorial healing project for the Vietnamese community in Dorchester. I was thinking about that project before the pilgrimage, but being part of it really solidified the importance and need to have shared sites of memory and healing—physical sites that people can visit. Somewhere they can go to and honor the memory of their loved ones. There’s something about the actual travel. Going to each site during the pilgrimage, lighting up incense, and being in the actual space is critical. The author Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote, “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” The trauma continues to be fought and passed down. It continues to haunt people and families across borders and boundaries.

AU: We inherit a lot of that haunting from our parents and their parents. There’s a lineage to all of this, whether good, bad, or complicated. How does intergenerational memory and experience play into your work?

NTV: There are so many stories and narratives that stay hidden, rarely even acknowledged between family members. Pathways are closed off within families, too. There’s such a barrier. We keep things inside for so many different reasons, whether it’s reputation or not wanting to acknowledge our own wounds. We simply don’t know how to engage with it or talk about it, but when I talk to Vietnamese families or my own family, there's such a collective narrative. There are so many parallels, espe cially regarding survival. During the pilgrimage, there was such a need to keep on going, not knowing when to even rest. That’s something that’s so passed on within Vietnamese culture, something other cultures can reso nate with too. That’s part of being such a poor country with such a legacy of war.

AU: As you just mentioned, this is something that resonates with other cultures and other peoples as well. Especially in Dorchester, where there are so many different cultures living side by side. How do you approach that in your practice or, in collaborations, bring that to your engagements in the community?

NTV: Mindfulness is key. Understanding and knowing that the Dorchester community is a working-class commu nity is also critical. I often ask: How do people spend their time? Do they have their own systems of support? Staying grounded and engaging with people on a deeper level helps reveal how people interact and engage with one another.

AU: Thinking about the Vietnam War fiftieth anniver sary commemoration project that you’re starting to plan, it’ll be very much part of the Vietnamese community’s healing process, but it will also be part of the greater Dorchester greater community. So often people think about collective healing in terms of a specific group of people, but your work really brings different perspec tives together towards an even bigger collective healing. This is important for a place like Dorchester, where so many people have called it home over different waves of immigration or migration.

NTV: Definitely. It’s a balance of both being specific, having something to really reference, but at the same time making it accessible because so many communities and cultures can resonate with those themes. In the stories of how people enter this country and this land, there are a lot of parallels, and it’s not a coincidence. There are a lot of stories that are legacies. //

An Uong is a writer orbiting themes of pop culture, food, and shared memory. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eater, Catapult Magazine, Roads and Kingdoms, Taste, Bon Appétit, Serious Eats, and else where. Find her online: @anuonganuong

The altar of Võ Thị Sáu, Vietnamese national martyr. Photo taken during Vu’s pilgrimage to Vietnam. Courtesy of the artist.

Reimagining a Rhinoceros Womxn

Words by Lex Weaver

Perla Mabel in front of an unfinished Rhinoceros Womxn painting of their project manager, Erica Imoisi. Photo by Lex Weaver.

Over two years ago, Perla Mabel, a non-binary artist based in East Boston known for their mixed-media series #PLATANOGIRLS, went on a spiritual journey to reconnect to their Afro-Caribbean culture. It was after reading Assata Shakur’s “Rhinoceros Woman” and exploring their Dominican roots through the practice of Santería that Mabel felt a sense of personal empowerment. They wanted to share that essence along with their own experiences through art.

To that end, they’re creating Rhinoceros Womxn, a collaborative project that began with Mabel’s concept of empowering arts-focused workshops for Black and Brown women, as well as femme and queer-identifying people. The workshops would allow participants to explore their relationships with themselves and their traumas in a small group setting and also through one-on-one conversations with Mabel. Then they would be ready to put on handcrafted “armor” and march through the streets of Boston.

But COVID changed the course of the project. Mabel’s initial concept required in-person interactions at planned community workshops and at their private studio, which they could no longer do.

“I’ve learned a lot about how I want the project to manifest. And it’s not how I originally planned,” said Mabel, who stepped back from Rhinoceros Womxn for some time to ensure their mental health was secure enough to lead the effort.

In reviving the project this year, Mabel has kept in mind how the pandemic and the George Floyd protests have spotlighted inequities in Black and Brown communities. Many prominent institutions—including ones in the arts—have worked more intentionally to represent people of color, but such efforts have had little effect on the actual conditions of their lives and progress of their livelihoods. This made Mabel rethink their plans for a march incorporating Black and Brown bodies, which has been put on the backburner until they find a deeper meaning for the display.

“[Addressing] the reality of public space and how we take up space, my desire for putting us at the forefront is not to just put us at the forefront,” Mabel said. “I don’t want to make all this effort and do all this when it’s not helping. That’s a big reality check that I’ve had these last two years.”

Armor still plays a key role in Mabel’s revised vision for Rhinoceros Womxn. They’re creating armor for each person included in the project, as well as a mixed-media portrait of every muse that contains materials used in the armor.

Mabel’s studio is filled with fabrics and beads used to make “armor” that the artist hopes subjects will wear with confidence. Photo courtesy of the artist.

PERLA MABEL

“I didn’t want just to create moments for paintings; I wanted to capture people actually living and orchestrate the opportunity for us to just exist with one another,” Mabel said.

Over time, the idea of armor has evolved from printed T-shirts to individualized and fully-formed garments. Made primarily of satin—a nod to Santería culture—along with tulle, cotton, and other fabrics, they’re constructed with the wearer’s personal comfort in mind. Whether tight-fitting or loose, a dress or suit, the armor is meant to enhance their confidence.

“The whole project is about creating or displaying a type of strength,” says Erica Imoisi, project manager for Rhinoceros Womxn and one of its subjects. “The armor itself is its own type of strength… not a traditional metalarmored suit, but with these softer, more contextual layers… It’s kind of about people who have that quiet strength to them.”

Mabel has envisioned Rhinoceros Womxn as an ongoing and adaptive project, rather than a curated collection that you can see for only a limited time. Arts workshops incorporating mental health activities remain part of the plan. The hope is to partner with organizations to create opportunities for growth and reflection in a community space. “It’s using really intimate moments of growth, to kind of broadcast the types of people that we are trying to become,” Imoisi said.

The artist also wants to spend time with their subjects talking about how they want to take part in the project and be portrayed. “People don’t have to be there to perform this version of themselves, or this idea of what that armor needs to look like. It’s more like people coming together to build that armor,” said Mabel, who hopes participants gain a sense of agency from the art-making process. “I see myself doing workshops where people can come together to dye fabric, have stencils to make their patterns, and create this material that can be incorporated into these portraits.”

By emphasizing the fluid nature of the project, Mabel aims to honor the cultural journey they experienced in embracing their ancestors’ traditions while adapting to the needs of Black and Brown communities and each individual subject.

“I think that everybody has their certain essence. I like to call it their light, and I want to capture that in the work and also directly pay homage to what got me here and in the culture that has kept my identity as a whole,” said Mabel. “Because of the work that I’m doing, I was able to come into myself, and I want to be able to do that for others as well, kind of bringing them into my world.” //

(opposite) In its early days, Rhinoceros Womxn started with screenprinted T-shirts and emphasized mental health day gatherings for Mabel’s muses to tap into their personal identity.

(above) Erica Imoisi wearing a Rhinoceros Womxn shirt.

Photo by Perla Mabel.

Lex Weaver is a journalist and media producer based in Boston.

Diagnosing Museums, Healing Ourselves:

In Conversation with

Emily Curran and Josephine Devanbu

Words by Eliza Browning

In 2016, Josephine Devanbu and Maia Chao founded Look at Art. Get Paid. (LAAGP) to host more inclusive conversations about art and art museums. LAAGP is a socially engaged art project compensating people who rarely or never visit museums to attend as paid guest critics. The project reversed the traditional boundaries between critics and educators, gatekeepers and guests. As pressure builds for museums to expand accessibility toward working-class communities and people of color, the project illuminated existing disparities in the art world that cater the museum experience largely toward white, wealthy visitors. Although increasing equity in the white-dominated museum world remains a challenge, the project identified pressing problems as well as their potential solutions, opening up a space for dialogue between museum administration and diverse local communities.

Josephine Devanbu and Emily Curran on a picnic in front of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with a few of the books that have provided inspiration for their projects. Photo by Madison Van Wylen for Boston Art Review

In early 2020, Chao and Devanbu brought on Boston-based educator and artist Emily Curran as a collaborator to launch LAAGP across a cohort of Massachusetts museums. LAAGP had initiated a major multi-year partnership with the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the state’s arts and culture agency. But the COVID-19 pandemic brought the cultural sector to a grinding halt, and funding for the project was redirected toward emergency grants. The team ultimately decided to sunset the project, but the LAAGP model is freely available through their website “www.lookatartgetpaid.org.

After the conclusion of LAAGP, Curran and Devanbu continued to research paths toward making cultural critique more accessible to a diverse audience. In 2021, they received a Collective Futures Fund (CFF) grant focused on sustaining practice, designed to support research, project development, and collaborative, public-oriented projects that prioritize experimentation, risk taking, and unconventional viewpoints. Their project, Restorative Cultural Critique (RCC), grew out of their work with LAAGP as an experiment in open-ended cultural critique, emphasizing their work on “scheming, dreaming, and speculation about the future of museums.”

Expanding upon the collaborative space opened up by LAAGP, RCC explores the potential of individual critique while navigating the ethics of labor and compensation. Devanbu and Curran reimagined the project as a space for open-ended conversation directed by participants. In this model, participants would receive compensation that didn’t rely upon the traditional structure of artistic labor, such as grant writing and research studies. Instead, RCC imagines an opportunity to cultivate a restorative discursive space. They draw upon Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s idea of “speculative practice”—an accessible way of participating in “intellectual” life unbound by the constraints of the academic and professionally funded world. Speculative practice—which could be as simple as a conversation during a walk—is meant to be recuperative, accessible even to the exhausted.

Eliza Browning: Could you tell me about how the RCC project came about?

Emily Curran and Josephine Devanbu: While collab orating during the long months of the pandemic, we conceived of RCC—the working title for our CFF project— as an experiment in open-ended cultural critique and scheming, dreaming, and speculation about the future of museums and cultural funding. We hoped to host an exchange, a kind of “collaborative aesthetic practice,” that would engage participants in restorative and imag inative thinking while compensating them for their time. We envisioned continuing the practice of paying ordi nary people to serve as cultural critics that characterized LAAGP, and initially conceived of this next experiment as paying self-selected pairs of critics to take walks, catch up, catch their breath, and talk museums.

Our working title is based around the idea of being “restorative”—in the sense of having the power to restore consciousness, health, strength, or a feeling of wellbeing—and of “critique” as a practice of brave yet careful reflection and engagement. We envisioned the possibility of a creative practice with the potential to help empower our consciousness and strength, honor our dignity and knowledge, and rebuild relationships to address and prevent harm.

EB: What has your process looked like?

EC & JD: As we worked together throughout the fall and winter of 2021–22, we encountered far more physical separation from each other (and from others) than we had originally anticipated. In our still-shifting circumstances,

we have used this time to research and adapt. We origi nally had the idea of pairing critics from outside museums, but decided it was important to take time to study and dream together to arrive at an understanding of how this might work.

EB: Both LAAGP and your current project focus on domi nant, historically white cultural spaces, specifically art museums. What brought you to focus on these spaces and what keeps your attention on them?

EC & JD: Historically white institutions don’t have any monopoly on culture, but they do monopolize cultural funding. Less than 2% of arts funding in the US goes to organizations led by people of color. It is tragic, if unsur prising, that the logic and values of capitalist extraction shape not only the rhythm of working-class people’s workdays, but also the cultural production and spaces available outside those hours. Even spaces like public art museums are shaped by the worldview and priori ties of board members and donors who have made their fortunes within a capitalist system. How can museums instead offer genuinely open-ended spaces for engage ment and exploration?

Over the past two years, the pandemic and racial reck oning brought museums to a juncture of historic uncer tainty, scrutiny, and potential for reform. While the need for cultural inspiration, affirmation, and experimentation that museums can provide to their communities could not be higher, those with the lived expertise needed to envi sion liberatory futures for museums have also been hit hardest by the pandemic and systemic racism. Museum workers and communities are calling for institutional

accountability and change. Although museums have voiced a commitment to transform, we continue to see systemic issues of inequity recur in the museum world. In order to truly change, in the words of curator Yesomi Umolu, “we must go beyond token gestures of diversity and inclusion, and arrive at a fundamental rethinking of the role of museums.” This era of upheaval seems like the right time to dream of a different future.

EB: Can you describe the deadlock that both LAAGP and RCC seek to address?

EC & JD: Museums receive public money to serve the public. But to truly serve their community, they need to understand the demographic majority outside their current visitor base. Art museums hear from, and answer to, their visitors—a disproportionately white, affluent, and educated segment of the population that doesn’t reflect the general public. This isn’t a coincidence—most museums were built and curated under white leadership and center white narratives of history, value, and beauty.

LAAGP emerged from Maia and Josephine’s recognition that this situation wouldn’t change without deep invest ment from and in folks outside museums’ current visitor bases. As artists, we asked ourselves: What conditions might host a new kind of conversation about the future of museums, one that centers lived experience as exper tise1 and offers community members a seat at the table without asking them to assimilate or donate their time? Cash payment was one way to name and compensate for the emotional and intellectual labor of visiting a histor ically white space and voicing one’s honest opinion. By reversing the role between the paying and the paid, it opened a crack in the deadlock of only receiving feedback from those already invested in or catered to by museums. When the pandemic halted in-person visitation and radi cally altered how people could interact with museums, we began to think about whether it might be possible to break this deadlock in ways that centered the experience and wellbeing of critics.

EB: How has the CFF grant allowed you to explore what could make transformation possible in elite cultural spaces?

EC & JD: In keeping with a trend that has increased during the pandemic, the CFF grant provided open-ended, unrestricted funding, not tied to a specific deliverable. This enabled us to spend time researching open-ended thinking about the future of museums and, more broadly, the future of funding and labor conditions in the arts.

We are asking: How could the practice of paying regular people to serve as cultural critics be reimagined to foster space for open-ended conversation, directed by

the needs and vision of participants rather than around a specific cultural institution? What would it take for everyone to have the chance to participate in reshaping how we fund culture, on terms that make sense to their unique sensibility and perspective? What would it take to make cultural criticism accessible to everyone, including to those who don’t currently see themselves in main stream culture, who can’t do this work unpaid? What models might be feasible now that would have been hard to imagine just a few years back? What if there was a fund that people outside the demographics museums have historically catered to could invoice for time spent critiquing and brainstorming how the sector could be transformed to serve their own communities? What if recipients didn’t need to report to a funding body about their conversations?

As critic and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it, “Millions of people today struggle to carve out the time, permission, and resources for creativity and thought that will not be in the service of corporate profit, nor struc tured by its rhythms. Many, many more are scarred by the prohibitive difficulty of doing so.” This sense of scar city is deeply drilled into us, but can we imagine other wise? Where do things stand on this front in 2022? What openings do we have now to move towards a world where the opportunity to engage in deep, open-ended critical inquiry isn’t a rare privilege? The future of art museums is a key part of this conversation. Who is able to access the time, permission, and resources to engage in conversa tion about the future of these spaces, and, more broadly, the future of how we fund culture?

Alongside the theme of open-endedness, acknowledge ment of exhaustion and the need to recuperate has been central to our research. We seek ways to make this prac tice nourishing and restorative rather than draining and stressful.

EB: What kind of cultural funding landscape do you want to see?

JD: We want to live in a world where the resources that support culture are allocated in a way that is truly liber atory. We don’t know what this will look like ahead of time. To get there, a radical transformation is in order. This is a process where, like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, there is a dark, murky interim. Here’s what we do know: We will only be able to get there with oppressed people at the wheel. They need to be finan cially supported in making this trip.

EC & JD: We envision a cultural landscape in which people will be fairly compensated to engage in cultural critique without justifying to funders the fruits of their pursuit, or explaining why they are exceptionally and

uniquely poised to do this work. Where people are able to rest and recover and rediscover their reasons to carry on. Where people are able to mess up and start over and be allowed to do so with dignity and in privacy.

EB: Where do things stand in terms of access to the resources to engage in open-ended critical inquiry?

EC & JD: Cultural critique can take a long time. It’s not a linear process. You must be able to wander around, to

embark on this journey without knowing ahead of time what you might find out. You need the freedom to find out how you feel, what moves you, where you stand. What if everyone, not just the wealthy, had the right to rest, to recover, to embark on inner transformation without having to convince someone else to fund it ahead of time? Activist, teacher, and performance artist Tricia Hersey is “deeply committed to dismantling white supremacy and capi talism by using rest as the foundation for this disruption,” and reminds us that “rest is a spiritual practice, a racial justice issue, and a social justice issue.”

Leadership from outside of the museum’s power structure has always been ongoing, with cultural critics of all identities. We are all engaged in the work of cultural critique by both necessity and pleasure as we learn to make our way in the world. As cultural theorist and critic Fred Moten puts it, “Study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering… playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory… The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intel lectuality of these activities was already there.” Recognizing the value of this expertise allows us “to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.” //

Eliza Browning studied English and art history at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and is studying for a master’s degree in modernist literature at the University of Oxford. Her literary and art criticism appears in the Adroit Journal, the Oxford Review of Books, the Oxonian Review, and the Chicago Review of Books, among others.

1 Murawski, Mike. “Interrupting White Dominant Culture in Museums.” Art Museum Teaching. https://artmuseumteaching.com/2019/05/31/ interrupting-white-dominant-culture/

Curran and Devanbu’s choice of picnic snacks includes Takis Fuego, Little Debbie Zebra Cakes, jalebi, assorted Indian sweets, and chakli. Reading material includes Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest by Laura Raicovich, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power by Susan Cahan. Photo by Madison Van Wylen for Boston Art Review

CURRAN & DEVANBU

Thinking in Poems, Painting with Power:

In the Studio with Marlon Forrester

Words by L Scully

Marlon Forrester inside his Jamaica Plain Studio. Photos by Stefanie Belnavis for Boston Art Review .

When I arrive at his Jamaica Plain studio after hours, Marlon Forrester greets me outside with a hug. I follow him up the stairs of the old Northeastern building that houses the studios of artists in the African American Master Artists in Residency Program (AAMARP), a collective that began in 1974 and holds a rich history in the Boston arts community. Forrester lets me take in the gallery space before leading me back into his personal studio, where the heat overwhelms me immediately. The artist tells me that he prefers to work in a stuffy studio with just a single fan because it encourages him to get in, get to work, and get out.

Marlon Forrester received funding from Collective Futures Fund for a collabora tive project titled You, Me, We: (D.R.G.) Dystopian Revolutionary Gallery Pod, a creative placemaking project that aimed to bridge communities by puncturing institutional spaces with portals into communities often unseen or dismissed by the institutions such spaces repre sent. After the project was discontinued, Forrester turned his attention back to his personal practice.

Forrester was born in Guyana and raised in Boston, his deep roots in the city extending from when he was a kid to a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and then a teacher in Boston Public Schools. His works meditative perfor mances, sculptures, paintings, room-sized installations, and drawings contemplate the exploitation and fear of the Black male body.

I had a connection to Forrester’s work before I ever had the chance to meet him. Forrester was a 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize recipient a prestigious award given biannually to three Boston-based artists at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. I’m a former visitor assistant at the ICA, and the first gallery I was ever positioned in housed Forrester’s series If Black Saints Could Fly 23: si volare posset nigra XXIII sanctorum. The series, which posits Black men as saints on brightly colored basketball-court-inspired back grounds, immediately drew me in. Forrester uses vibrant turquoise throughout all of

Forrester works in several mediums, constantly ideating with scale.

Photos by Stefanie Belnavis for Boston Art Review.

these works. The color reverberated off the walls of the white room in which the paintings hung.

In the studio, I get a sneak peek into some of Forrester’s works he’s preparing for this December’s art fairs in Miami. The tiny, vibrant vignettes that compose his studies will soon translate into large-scale pieces. They remind me of the poignance of Dutch miniature paintings.

When I remark on the lightning bursts of color throughout the studio, but espe cially in the Saints series, Forrester tells me he is trying to have a “conversa tion about color,” set against the mono chrome of Boston. He is certainly adding to the conversation. Forrester describes his work as a “vehicle for transformation,” and as I stare into the oscillating palette of the as-yet-unnamed saint, I feel the impending transformation of the canvas and the viewer.

Forrester tells me a favorite word of his is “disequilibrium.” He is drawn to the instability and entropy of shapes and color in his work, and yet it is the farthest thing from chaos. The restraint of the pointillistic aspects of the work and the clear influence of the Impressionists nod to Forrester’s classically trained back ground. “I used to be attached to trying to construct the narrative,” Forrester shares about the shifts in his practice. He’s working on relinquishing control so that the art may speak for itself.

Despite this attempt, Forrester’s voice is evident throughout every piece. It becomes even more clear that writing, music, poetry, and the spoken word are just as crucial to his practice as painting. Forrester asks if he can “put on a beat.” He explains that he comes from the world of spoken word and hip hop. “I don’t feel constricted,” he tells me. Like his visual art, Forrester’s music and spoken word pieces (although almost always freestyle) center on life, male ness, community, and transcendence.

Rapping from his chair, Forrester says, “Close your eyes while I’m drifting out.” I close my eyes momentarily, then open them once more facing the nameless saint I

was drawn to upon entering the space. The figure drifts out in front of me, as do Forrester’s words. His musicality mirrors the piece, and in that moment, the poetic nature of Forrester’s life and work comes into view. //

L Scully is a writer and artist based in Boston. They are currently completing their MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. As cofounder of Stone of Madness Press, L has sought to create a virtual space for queer, trans, and disabled authors.

Marlon Forrester inside his Jamaica Plain Studio. Photos by Stefanie Belnavis for Boston Art Review.

MARLON FORRESTER

Moving a Community Forward One Dance Step at a Time

Words by Sophia Paffenroth

Marissa Molinar, cofounder of Creative Action, grew up learning steps from her parents, who were Mexican folk loric dancers. Dancing was always a part of her family’s cultural fabric—an experience Molinar says rings true for many Black and Brown communities.

“For me,” Molinar, the Boston-based dancer says, “contemporary dance is just about: How do we remember to feel at home in our bodies and in rhythm with each other?”

Molinar says her activism has always been most tangibly enacted and embodied through her administrative work. With a background in environmental science, she says she takes a lot of inspiration from the simple fact that

seemingly disparate things are interconnected and that, in ecology, very large, system-like changes can start from very small places.

“Sometimes one seed can lead to a new plant species that is suddenly everywhere—and that’s a systems change too. I like to bring people on board by just remembering and resonating with our potential to create change, espe cially when we do things collectively.”

Molinar danced for many years at Boston Dance Alliance, where she met Callie Chapman, another multitasking dancer and native Bostonian who later became a teacher at Molinar’s project Midday Movement Series and, eventually, a partner of Creative Action.

Left to right: Callie Chapman, Caitlin Canty, and Marissa Molinar, founders of Creative Action. Photo courtesy of Callie Chapman.

Chapman, who works in media design, says the best way to describe her work is as “kinetic art,” because it could be anything that moves—whether that’s digital or phys ical bodies. After founding her own studio, Studio 550, in 2016, she began working at the Somerville Arts Council, which allowed her to “be inside the system while trying to do the advocacy work at the same time.”

The Midday Movement Series, a grassroots initiative driven to cultivate a new generation of dance leaders who believe in the personal and communal impact of move ment, was also the fateful meeting place where Chapman and Molinar teamed up with Caitlin Canty, a lifelong dancer who began at Midday as a student and later became a teacher and the third member of Creative Action.

Canty, who grew up in the Greater Boston town of Concord, began dancing at three years old. “Of all the different pursuits I’ve had in my life,” says Canty, “dance is something I just can’t walk away from.” A longtime member of the Boston dance scene, she began to want to be more involved in creating the culture she was immersed in.

In 2020, the dynamic trio—Canty, Chapman, and Molinar—founded Creative Action, an artistic initiative aimed at connecting artists and especially dancers to resources of civic engagement. “I think of Creative Action as the formalization of conversations that Callie and I have been having forever,” says Molinar.

When Canty joined in, she says she “added extra legroom” to what Chapman and Molinar were already doing. At the time, just as the pandemic began, it seemed like a reck oning for the city as a whole, and the possibility of a systems shift ignited these three artists.

Creative Action was a recipient of the Collective Future Fund in 2021— the inaugural year of the grant. The group used the funds to start a Code of Ethics for Boston dancers.

“We decided we needed to change ourselves first,” says Chapman. “It sets the playing field. Then, we’re secure enough in our own methods and our own ethos to carry that forward and manifest into the greater, bigger picture.”

The Code of Ethics covers everything from mandating a living wage and transparent employment contracts for dancers to establishing diversity on governing boards, advocating for sustainable practices in facilities, and more.

Still in the midst of determining what shape their project will take, the Creative Action team hopes to use this next year of funding to shift toward implementing the Code within organizations and institutions around the city, and eventually, to neighboring communities.

“The vision is that there are going to be several versions of this, but eventually we’re going to have some kind of entity that oversees what the implementation actually looks like,” Molinar says.

The group has been especially appreciative of ways in which Collective Future Fund is unique.

“One of the aspects that makes this grant unique, and also successful,” says Molinar, “is that it respects and trusts the artist.” It offers unrestricted funding, she explains, which means that artists can use the funds as they see fit for a given project, and don’t need to necessarily put it toward a final product, like a performance.

“The program is about taking that risk of imagining what the new future could look like, and that was incred ibly powerful,” says Molinar. “That’s something that art does anyways—it allows you to imagine the thing that doesn’t exist yet. So having a grant that sees the holistic view of the artist as worthy of that funding feels very important too.” //

Sophia Paffenroth is a Boston-based multimedia journalist and master’s candidate at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. She currently works as an assis tant editor at The Scope: Boston. With a background in liberal arts, she has a passion for enduring stories that illuminate, elevate, and connect. She specializes in feature stories and documentary work.

founders of Creative Action. Photo courtesy of Callie Chapman. CREATIVE ACTION

Words by Lex Weaver

Haus of Threes, originally founded five years ago as a pop-up shop for local makers, is a queer arts organization led by Po Couto, a queer hairstylist and artist known to many by their artist name, Po.Ave. The organization has taken on various forms as Couto adapts based on community needs. After receiving a grant from the Collective Futures Fund, the organization is focuses on expanding its range of opportunities and experiences for Boston’s queer community.

“Haus of Threes is creating socially interactive art installations intended to spark unity, hope, and joy while bringing education, harm reduction, and the foundations of strong community to the forefront,” said Couto. “I want folks to reimagine what community and chosen family look like without the barriers.”

Couto has been open about their personal experiences with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, and how it has shaped their plans for running Haus of Threes and building safe and equitable spaces for Boston’s queer community. Couto says that the organization is a response to ableism, trauma, and gatekeeping, processed through an autistic lens.

“I have always been someone who looks for ways to grant queer people access to the spaces they’ve always been entitled to occupy,” Couto said. “This is my art installation in response to intergenerational trauma.”

In 2021, the organization found a physical home by leasing a property in Charlestown. The location is open to queer businesses, health and wellness professionals, artists, and other individuals in the queer community to rent at a low rate. Couto hopes to host workshops and other community-related events in the space soon as well.

“I’m opening doors for people. I want to give this community a structure, open up [opportunities], and let people decide what they want to do with it,” Couto said. “This space is meant to allow for collaboration among queer people and the space can adapt to meet their needs.”

Haus of Threes has already hosted offsite events. In September, the organization held the first installment of its HOT series, a three-part program set to run from this fall into the summer of 2023. QUEER BOOTY, QUEER HANDS, a pirate-themed beach party and ad hoc yard sale, allowed queer artists to sell their work at Revere Beach while generating intracommunity profit and providing socialization opportunities for queer youth.

The second part of the series, HOT Mobile, took place at the beginning of October and allowed Couto to share their practice during a twenty-four-hour cut-a-thon. With an RV unit attached to their car, Couto drove around Boston and provided free haircuts to the queer community. HOT Mobile was a soft launch for a bigger part of the series: HOT Caravan. Under HOT Caravan, Couto plans to branch out to other states, providing an elevated haircutting experience that supports queer people, including those seeking gender-affirming and gender-nonconforming styles. When cutting someone’s hair, there is a nonverbal but empowering and trusting connection, they said, that allows for self-care. The third event in the HOT series is still being determined.

In expanding the purview of Haus of Threes, Couto considers how the structure of a triangle—which features in the organization’s logo—exists as a balance and can also suggest the imagery of a home. “I believe that anything from three angles is as balanced as you’re going to get things in a chaotic situation,” Couto said. “That has a lot of connection with symbolism and queer religion and philosophy. It kind of just encompasses everything.” Couto plans to continue Haus of Threes’ expansion—with community always at the core. //

Lex Weaver is a journalist and media producer based in Boston.

Clothing is a central part of the Haus of Threes market. Photo by Lex Weaver.

(above and opposite) Po Couto inside their Charlestown studio space, which Haus of Threes has called home since 2021. The studio hosts local artists and small businesses while doubling as Couto’s barber shop. Photo by Lex Weaver.

Candice Gosta (they/them), untitled (alone in my room #2), 2019. Charcoal and graphite on canvas drop cloth. 12' x 9'.

Note from the artist: untitled (alone in my room #2) is the reclamation of physical and emotional space I was denied during an abusive relationship. The work serves as documentation of the beginning of my healing process.

Holds Space for Artists with Disabilities

Words by Lian Parsons-Thomason

The idea of “holding space” includes many different concepts: an archive for things considered to be precious, a location of confinement and isolation, or the act of holding a safe space for others in community. In Whitney Mashburn’s case, it means all of the above.

Mashburn is an independent contemporary art curator whose work centers disability activism and disability justice. She lives with severe environmental illness and chronic pain, which have significantly informed her work during the past ten years.

The pandemic also emphasized the confinement component of “holding space,” reflecting Mashburn’s personal experience with the necessity of isolating herself for her own health and safety.

“In times of isolation due to chronic illness, what’s given me the most freedom is connection with others,” said Mashburn. “If you are sharing a space [even virtually] with someone else with mutual understanding of access needs, there is a freedom to speak openly, feel heard, feel seen, feel acknowledged.”

As she was seeking ways to hold space for herself and others in her community, Mashburn spoke with several other artists and friends with disabilities about their experiences with ableism and how to create more impactful shifts of consciousness.

Through these discussions, she came to the idea of what “Holding Space” is now: a living online platform with three components: exhibitions of artworks, artist interviews and conversations, and accessibility manifestos. Via the website, artists are encouraged to join the archive in three main ways: submit works to the permanent collection at any time through the general submissions page, learn about accessibility and contribute to the access archive, and sign up to share their story in an artist interview. Thanks to a second Collective Futures Fund grant, she is also planning public programming in the coming year in collaboration with disabled artists and community centers and organizations.

Three events in this upcoming programming include: a workshop about water access on the Charles River with artist moira williams, a workshop about learning how to identify access needs with Carmen Papalia, and a workshop with visiting artists to sew protest banners about accessibility.

Mashburn defines “Holding Space” as a living archive, an archive that accounts not

only for physical works and objects, but centers people. Individuals’ lived experiences are documented side-byside with their work, providing vital context.

“It considers knowledge animate, it’s alive and embodied in people,” said Mashburn. “It’s dynamic and always changing; the archive needs to change and adapt to include people's perspectives.”

Because the traditional art canon does not typically include disabled artists, Mashburn designed “Holding Space'' to be a platform for disabled artists to make their own archive. Here, they can share their stories, with the archive intentionally centering those who have been traditionally underrepresented in art. Within disability, this means centering queer, trans, and BIPOC community members. She drew on inspiration from sources such as the Vancouver-based Open Access Foundation for Arts and Culture, Voices in Contemporary Art in New York, the Museum of Trans Hirstory and Art, disability activists like Alice Wong, Mia Mingus, and Sins Invalid, and BIPOCoriginated concepts of disability justice and mutual aid. The archive operates under the Open Access tenet that everyone is an expert in their own experience.

“That’s my role as a curator, to create a platform for artists and then step back and allow their voices to be heard in an honest and candid way that’s not overly interpreted,” she said. “Oftentimes curators have this idea of control over artists and I think we need to flatten that hierarchy.”

“Holding Space” is planning its first exhibition, “(un)rest for the bodymind,” launching online on November 1. The open call for the exhibition was focused on bed portraits,

moira williams (they/them), LAWNSHROOMING, installation, 2021. Shown: image and artist’s description of interactive installation.

Screenshot from “Broken Time Machines: Discussing the Work of Daisy Patton,” a panel discussion organized by Holding Space, with Minerva Press. Feb 7, 2022. Zoom event hosted by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. Pictured left to right: Regina Gallardo, Wellesley student; Whitney Mashburn, panel moderator and organizer; Zoey Hart, panelist; Daisy Patton, artist; Megan Bent, panelist; Rachel da Silveira Gorman, panelist; Carrie Cushman, panelist; moira williams, panelist; Simone Johnson (not pictured), access doula. The panel discussed Patton’s work in the lenses of critical disability theory and personal experience as disabled artists. Topics included: crip ancestry, liminal spaces in photography, reimagining of archives, activation through ornamentation, malleability of time and memory in relation to ‘crip time,’ collaboration as care and interdependence, and interaction with the viewer as an act of memory activation.

or what Mashburn described as, “the all-encompassing space of rest, pain, healing, refuge, confinement, comfort.” Mashburn received about fifty submissions. In the process of selecting which pieces to include, she looks at the works as a whole, evaluates how they relate to each other in a meaningful way, and seeks a storyline that could speak to the wider public.

“My strategy for curating is ‘relational curating,’ meaning valuing people over art objects, flattening traditional hierarchies, and focusing on relationship building,” she said.

When “Holding Space” received $2,000 through the Collective Futures Fund grant, Mashurn said the support has been foundational for the project. The funding went toward building the website, hosting the first open call, launching the exhibition, and co-organizing a panel event in February 2022 about the work of Daisy Patton, with the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

“The panel event was great because we got a chance to show the intellectual rigor of the disability community, but also the feeling of support that comes with being in community,” Mashburn said. “It was an opportunity to share how all spaces can benefit from practices of accessibility. As disabled people, we’re super creative, finding ways to exist in the world that was not made for us. We want to share that approach with the world and say, ‘You might learn a thing or two.’”

The community building aspect of the project has been especially fulfilling to Mashburn. Throughout the process, the feedback has been “overwhelming.” “In the disability community, there’s this feeling of safety, of closeness,” she said. “I think that’s what we’re trying to [accomplish] with ‘Holding Space;’ to take that and share it more widely to those who may be unfamiliar with it. Even for a lot of people who are disabled, they’ve never been immersed in disability-led spaces and I wanted to share that feeling of support.”

Mashburn hopes to share the diverse range of disability stories with a broader audience and foster greater understanding. “We’re being very intentional about writing our own story. I think the way that you can make art more real, more approachable to people who are not yet disabled, is through storytelling,” she said. “[It’s about] making our experiences more real to people who may not have experienced something similar.”

In sharing “Holding Space,” Mashburn hopes to continue to grow the community, mirroring a circle of support that she once imagined. “We’re adding to who’s creating this circle of collective support, we’re adding to that effort all the time,” she said. “People take turns of who is protected in the middle and as long as you feel that connection, you’re okay. It’s a way of making sure each other are taken care of.”

For Mashburn, this also means building connections both within and outside the disability community, working together to affect change. “What a lot of ableist society has done for so many years is to cut off disabled people from having connection and agency,” she said. “Agency comes as a result of mutual support from others who understand. Right now in the disability community, there’s a wave of dreaming better futures. People are

asking, ‘what would it take to make a more accessible world?’ and ‘How can we better support each other in the face of ableism?’ These are the questions we need to ask to build the future on our own terms. And then we have to take action.” //

Lian Parsons-Thomason is a Boston-based writer and journalist. Her bylines can be found at iPondr, the Harvard Gazette, and Experience Magazine.

Mae Eskenazi (they/them). Still from Offerings to Bob Flanagan (November to May), 2021–22. Video, 29 min, 7 sec.

Offerings to Bob Flanagan explores themes of loss, collective memory, amnesia, meeting at the nexus of whiteness, queerness, and disability. Inspired by Bob Flanagan’s Pain Journals, the video collects audio recordings of the artist’s own pain journals written to Bob over time while filming footage in their bedroom. The piece will expand over the course of one year (November 2021 to November 2022), matching the approximate framework of Flanagan’s Pain Journals of 1995, before his death on January 4th, 1996.

“My strategy for curating is ‘relational curating,’ meaning valuing people over art objects, flattening traditional hierarchies, and focusing on relationship building.”

Love Meets Legal Jargon:

Gabriel Sosa at the opening of his exhibition, “No Vehicles in the Park,” 2022. Photo courtesy of Fitchburg Art Museum.

Gabriel Sosa on

Parenting, Pedagogy, and Subverting Public Space through Language

Words by Claire Ogden

At long last, I’m finally hopping on an interview with artist and educator Gabriel Sosa. He pushes a stroller through his Salem neighborhood, his Zoom connection lagging and the view pixelating. “I was trying to coordinate this call so that it would align with nap time,” Gabriel Sosa laughs, “but that kind of didn't happen.” Every now and then, his baby daughter Luciana makes an appearance— Sosa pulls away for a moment, taken with his child and her innocent awe at the world. In his art and his life, there is a willingness to not bow to arbitrary power structures and rules. Instead, he approaches his life’s work from a place of love.

It’s a busy time for Sosa: His first solo museum exhibi tion, “No Vehicles in the Park,” opened at Fitchburg Art Museum on October 1. He also welcomed Luciana, his first child, into the world this year, and he’s now on parental leave from his current position as deputy director of Essex Art Center. Amid these changes, a new body of work is emerging from Sosa’s grant-supported research with the Collective Futures Fund.

Sosa has long been intrigued by language and its rela tion to public life. Increasingly, he finds himself drawn to projects that subvert public space, inserting critical site-specific text installations into otherwise commercial or bureaucratic spaces. In a series of Spanish-English bill boards and writing workshops for his series No es fácil/ It ain’t easy (2020–2021), Sosa, who is Cuban American, turned advertising space into beacons of hope at the height of COVID. Much of his work has a playful quality, where unexpected contexts allow viewers to rethink the social purpose of language. Likewise, his workshops allow him to share his ideas far and wide. Sosa is inspired by artists like Jenny Holzer, whose messages on condom wrappers reimagined public space, and Félix GonzálezTorres, whose minimal billboard installations still make Sosa tear up when he mentions them to students.

Now, Sosa is turning his attention to the Massachusetts criminal court system, specifically the jury trial selection process. His Collective Futures Fund grant has empow ered him to go down a meandering path of research, investigating the legal history of the jury in Massachusetts and doing close studies of the current jury trial guidelines and questionnaires. As Sosa examines these bureaucratic documents, he latches onto phrases that interest him, drawing and erasing in a practice that mirrors the incom plete, layered nature of historical record.

Sosa’s interest in the jury trial comes from an eleven-year stint as a court interpreter—work that overlapped with his MFA program, when he’d show up to classes in a full suit and be mistaken for a performance artist. What he took away from these experiences was a mistrust in the court room’s power structures and an interest in how its rules

oppress marginalized groups. Sosa became obsessed by the jury trial’s imperfections, ranging from misrepresen tative jury makeups to jurors sleeping during a trial. Even as an interpreter, Sosa had a hard time keeping up with the courtroom’s stringent rules, and he saw how hard it made things for people who weren’t familiar with the legal system or who didn’t speak English. According to Sosa, these strict guidelines are “supposed to ensure that the system is fair… and that’s just not the case.”

As an educator, he views the courtroom’s flaws through a pedagogical lens: “One of the things I always try to do,” he said, “is to have a pretty egalitarian atmosphere where students aren't just learning from me, but really learning from each other.” During the start of class, he’s often seen students idling or waiting for his instruction to begin. Instead, he wants students to rely on themselves and each other. He instructs students to get into the habit of drawing, and not just wait for external deadlines: “How can I create a sense of community in this course, where not everything depends on me?” By contrast, the jury trial process fails to deliver information in a compelling way, and it is individual and atomized. Jurors are instructed to rely on their own interpretations above all else.1

Recently, Sosa has taken a particular interest in the Massachusetts guidelines for note taking, which advise jurors to limit their notes and rely on their own memory.2 Underlying this fascination is a concern about memory’s fallibility. As a Cuban American growing up in Miami, Sosa noticed a pervasive “notion of absence and leaving” in his hometown. In particular, he recalls his great-aunt’s recollection about the last time she saw his grandfather. She was pro-revolution, but his grandfather was against it. “The divide between them,” Sosa said, “was so much that he couldn’t even bear to talk to her.” During a family visit, all she remembered was “looking at him from the window and seeing him sitting in the car.” Reflecting on this experience now, Sosa can’t help but question the logic of relying on years- or even decades-old testimony to determine a defendant’s fate.

In his show at Fitchburg Art Museum, Sosa’s draw ings expose the manipulation of meaning in the judicial context, spurred largely by the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade. The works are all graphite and colored pencil on paper. Though humble in materials, they vibrate with intensity. A myriad of words take on their own expressive, emotional forms—and much lies underneath, erased. Le queda un minuto (2017–present) towers to the gallery’s ceiling, an amalgamated behemoth of wrinkled paper and pencil marks.

For his work with Collective Futures Fund, Sosa is still exploring what visual paths his jury trial investiga tions might take. He feels compelled to subvert the jury

(both) Installation view, “Gabriel Sosa: No Vehicles in the Park” at the Fitchburg Art Museum. Photo courtesy of Fitchburg Art Museum.

questionnaire form; whether by sending these forms in the mail or via AirDrop, the artwork’s method of delivery is sure to match the intrusive spirit of its inspiration.

Even with his debut show underway, Sosa wants “to just revel in being a dad.” He sees his research practice as very much intertwined with both his present life as a parent and his past as a Miami resident. Growing up, “people would come from Cuba, but no one was really going there [due to travel restrictions].” Once restric tions loosened, Sosa started traveling with friends to Cuba in 2011–2012, when he was twenty-six. Now, he wants to keep his ties to Cuba alive for little Luciana; in parenting and in artmaking alike, Sosa seeks to make a kinder, more connected future. Propelled by the cold realities and disconnection of the legal world, he erases the harmful elements and rewrites them in a new, more loving language.

“This really does connect back to the drawing for me,” Sosa said. “You can mark on it. You can rip something apart. It’s just really malleable and universal, and you know, this is all you need. So I think drawing has been a really important tool to investigate all this subject matter, thinking about the eraser and what’s left underneath. And this notion of oh, well, something’s not quite right. So erase it and try it again. But still there’s that residue of what was before that’s underneath. And I think that's so appropriate for thinking about the law and how our society transforms.” //

Claire Ogden is an independent writer, administrator, creative producer, and aspiring film programmer. She lives in Jamaica Plain.

Installation view, “Gabriel Sosa: No Vehicles in the Park” at the Fitchburg Art Museum. Photo courtesy of Fitchburg Art Museum.

1 According to Mass.gov “Function of the Jury” document (Instruction 2.120), each juror is to operate on their own assumptions and life experiences only: “Your function as the jury is to determine the facts of this case. You alone determine what evidence you believe, how important any evidence is that you do believe, and what conclusions to draw from that evidence.”

2 From Mass.gov “Notetaking by Jurors” (Instruction 1.160): “You must decide whether and how much you believe the witnesses, and an important part of that is your observation of each person's appearance on the witness stand. Don’t let note taking distract you from those important observations. Most of your work in this trial must be done with your eyes, your ears and your mind, not with your fingers. When you get to the jury room, remember that your notes are only an aid to your memory, and not a substitute for what you actually remember.”

WE ARE FEMINISTS. WE ARE FUTURISTS.

Words by L Scully

Group shot from “Liminal Lab.” Left to right: Freedom Baird, Nancy Hayes, Carolyn Wirth, Karen Meninno, Christina Balch (not in photo, AK Liesenfeld and Marjorie Kaye). Photo by Melissa Blackall.

The FeministFuturists’ Humanifesto is a declaration of history and purpose by the Massachusetts collective of the same name. Though the concept for the collective was conceived following the 2016 presidential election, the FeministsFuturists told me via Zoom, the idea for the group came to fruition at the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020. The collective consists of a handful of feminist artists who have synthesized their ideas into a proclamation of values that they call the Humanifesto.

Members of the primarily Boston-based collective describe themselves as a team composed of different strengths, in which no single member’s work is more important than the others. This value is aligned with the Humanifesto’s advocacy for “complementarity,” which came through immediately in the popcorn-style conversation I had with the artists on our call as they encouraged one another to speak and weigh in on each subject we discussed.

Members Carolyn Wirth and Christina Balch told me that the Collective Futures Fund grant provided an impetus to move the FeministFuturists project forward and imparted on the collective the validation and confidence they needed to co-create their show, “CURRENCY”, at Boston CyberArts Gallery in Jamaica Plain.

“CURRENCY” featured art by collective members who work in mixed media: Wirth and Balch, as well as Freedom Baird, Nancy Hayes, AK Liesenfeld, Karen Meninno, and Marjorie Kaye. The show, on view from September 9 to October 16, 2022, presented a variety of works both physical and virtual, with NFTs accessible via QR codes. Themes included the idea of monuments, both physical and digital; feminist perspectives on augmented reality; and a new way of looking at the world beyond the patriarcho-capitalist status quo.

When I stepped into the opening reception for “CURRENCY” on September 16, the “shared technolog ical expertise” described to me by the collective revealed itself immediately. Consistent with each artist’s unique practice, the exhibition took a multimedia approach to the idea of monuments and who owns them in a hybrid physical and augmented reality setting. Wirth said of her work, “I envision collectively installed monuments comprised of an aggregate of objects, rather than a single, permanent, commissioned object.”

At the front of the gallery, the FeministFuturists “Free Store” was nestled into shelves, encouraging viewers to take books such as Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell. The influence of such works is apparent; the pieces in “CURRENCY” reflected a post-technological, antidystopian sense of hope, centeredness, and harmony.

Baird described the exhibition as “a collection of physical objects, paintings, sculptures, projection. As a collective, we’re coming up with interesting ways of subverting male-dominated constructs of what comprises ‘art.’” She added, “My piece takes on the system of value, how it's generated, how it's perceived, what it means to ‘sell’ or ‘own’ something, how value flows through objects, organizations, and thought.” The piece in ques tion is Mined (2022), a painting of a diamond ring super imposed upon nearby Jamaica Pond. The piece was also available via QR code as an NFT.

Balch also works with NFTs, including Awake (2022), a series of selfies taken through motherhood and the pandemic lockdowns. The portraits question personal experience as a commodity and explore the influence of memes on NFTs. The series includes twenty-one stand alone selfies of Balch’s face in various stages of waking and emotion. Her augmented reality video Rest (2022) floated within a QR code nearby, a hovering image of

Freedom Baird, Mined (component), 2022. Oil on canvas, 24" x 36". Accompanied by yellow diamond with certificate of value, photo-collage NFT, and geo-positioned digital object on Jamaica Pond. Courtesy of the artist.

Installation view, Christina Balch, Rest, part of “CURRENCY” at Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 2022. Video in augmented reality. Photo courtesy of Boston Cyberarts Gallery.

Installation view, Karen Meninno, Radial, part of “CURRENCY” at Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 2022. Augmented reality outside of the gallery. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Balch sleeping with an eye mask over her face. The wall label read, “In this time of social injustice, war and polar ization, there is much to do, but I also need to rest.”

The digital work by Liesenfeld, sculpture by Meninno, and the paintings by Kaye and Hayes all further contributed to the synthesis of a world-building project. The artists are reimagining what we know of the existing digital and physical realms by calling into question the way we construct our reality. This whimsy of voices representing the collective reflected both the FeministFuturists as a whole and the works in the “CURRENCY” show, a union of different practices coming together to create something both otherworldly and distinctly of the world we know. The colors, geometrics, and screens of the exhibition transported me to another future, a better future. The success of this reimagining comes through how the work was presented: an amalgamation of physical and virtual objects creating an integrated physical/digital land scape, and the feeling of a universal reshuffling that the exhibition evoked.

As the FeministFuturists ask in the Humanifesto: “What new beautiful things can we dream into existence together?” //

L Scully is a writer and artist based in Boston. They are currently completing their MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. As cofounder of Stone of Madness Press, L has sought to create a virtual space for queer, trans, and disabled authors.

Gallery visitors with Freedom Baird's Journey Quilt at "Liminal Lab" at Hess Gallery.

Photo by Melissa Blackall.

Visibility and Growth:

Dikko (right). Photographed by Jingqi Yang. CONVERSATION

How the Hidden Prompt Is Reconsidering the Archive

Words by slandie prinston

The Hidden Prompt is a collective that Adaeze Dikko and Heresa Laforce started in 2020. It grew out of a project they began working on together in 2019 as students at Tufts, where they facilitated inspiring discussions reflecting on inequitable access to resources and the divide between promises and realities within their university journey. Their latest project, Progression | Regression, has them creating an archive of stories from participants in Heresa’s hometown of Malden and other nearby communities. In the following conversation, Adaeze and Heresa reflect on the Hidden Prompt’s origin, intentions, and project in progress. Together we share observations on public art, public spaces, public archives, and the autonomy of subjects at the center of these sites of friction.

slandie prinston: So, the Hidden Prompt where did it all begin?

Adaeze Dikko: We were looking at this idea of a hidden language being used at universities and how some people carry it inherently because of their social circles. We were interested in how language is cultivated or learned. We felt a pressure to be moving through university spaces with that language, and we believed that shouldn’t be the case. We shouldn’t be made to feel queasy and always have to catch up, catch up, catch up. We held a series of three programs at Tufts University. These programs ranging from workshops to conversations were open to students, employees, faculty, and local community members.

These programs were aimed at folx who were feeling lost. And we were sitting with folx to help assess and ask, what are our core values? How do we find ownership over our own narratives, even as we are constantly being encouraged to pander to all these audiences and package ourselves in such a way that we are going to be respectable and professional? We wanted to offer a space for any and all desires that folx have and refrain from shaming any of that.

The previous workshops/conversations we curated were very different from what we are doing now… We’re not students at Tufts anymore. We’re in a pandemic. We don’t necessarily have the resources that we had when we were attached to the university, or the audience. And so we were thinking about the things that are really precious to us, and the things that we were identifying as community needs around us. We launched a project called Progression | Regression.

Our tagline was that this is a project to remind us of who we are, where we are, what has changed, and where we’re going. And so that manifested as a short video project documenting how folx and of course we took a very specific look at Malden because of Heresa’s roots are experiencing their relationships to themselves, to people, to place, to the current moment, and that looks like a lot of different things.

Heresa Laforce: Part of the Collective Futures Fund grant is to have a public installation that is accessible for all, and I felt like, what better cultural institution than a library, which provides so many resources to various people, not just those who are wanting to read but also those who want help applying for jobs?

So this archival collection we’re creating, comprising film footage and other materials that tell stories of local people and places, will be welcoming to folx who are interested in attending and also to those who are casually going into the Malden Public Library, who we

wanted to be able to access this sort of art. We really wanted to emphasize that this is for the people and it was made by the people.

We want to continue to have additional interviews and include active members of Middlesex or Suffolk County.

AD: It’s been really interesting working alongside Heresa, who has been in the area her entire life and has a lifetime of memories, connections, relationships attached to this specific place. Her [upbringing] is so different from my own background as someone who grew up in Southern Connecticut and came to the Medford/ Somerville area by way of university.

Our coming together from seemingly oppositional backgrounds speaks to the way that this project brings up concepts of space, identity, and culture. And, of course, as we’re having conversations with folx, I’m thinking about my initial image of the Greater Boston area, what drew me here, experiences here that I cherish or was deeply concerned by, and why that shock, excitement, or disappointment has been enlightening or transformed.

All the collections of folx that take up place here are invited to consider themes like opposition, alignment, interrogation. These narratives are offered with vulnerability and grace.

HL: When I became a subject of a physical archive/ database, or digital media, it was usually for the benefit of the person taking it and that person has had complete ownership over it.

sp: You mention clear distinctions between roots and ties. Can you unpack some ideas around ownership and share your desire to nurture the land and its people? Where have these threads come up in the virtual and physical spaces you’ve co-designed?

HL: When people introduce themselves or say where they’re from, I always need to respond “Malden.” I don’t say I’m from Boston; I don’t say right around Boston. I specifically say my city. I have been in this area pretty much all my life, and that essentially has shaped who I am as a person. I want to highlight stories from cities or communities making up Middlesex County or Suffolk County.

AD: Making an archive is a very delicate thing. We believe in consent for contributions to archives, and so we’ve been really intentional at every point of our practice to remind folx that whatever you contribute can be pulled from the archive. We want to honor that people maybe wanted to share at some point and no longer do. When we observe and are holding space for folx

who want to participate in the Hidden Prompt’s archive, you get those glimpses of how they grew up, their ethnicity, class, and neighborhood, their childhood and schooling, and what they’re seeing around them.

We’re interested in the individual, but ulti mately, that does have implications for bigger and bigger communities. And a big part of our praxis is removing shame that folx may feel from exposure or telling their stories, especially if they’re coming from backgrounds where they’ve already been silenced or manipulated.

sp: How do your personal perspectives, philoso phies, or archives guide your gaze or creative processes?

AD: Black Feminist archival practices have been extremely important to us. We’ve been heavily theoretical while thinking about the practical applications of what it means to have an archive and what that means for people to participate in an archive.

HL: Originally when it came to asking people for the interviews, [their willingness to participate] was predicated on my personal 

Polaroids from the Hidden Prompt’s interactive, collaborative photography installation for the City of Malden’s Cultural Dance and Fashion Show held in the Malden High School courtyard on May 20, 2022. Each Polaroid features a Malden community member responding to the prompt “Malden Culture is...″ The installation was curated to spark conversation about culture in the city and celebrate the diversity of backgrounds, attire, language, and thought present at the community event.

relationship with them. For the Malden folks, they knew my intentions and where I was going with the project. And so they were more enthusiastic and responded along the lines of “Sure, I’ll participate. This feels like a school project.” Then, when I've ventured outside to other individuals, they had questions about what I wanted from them or how I wanted to portray them. [I told them] I’m prepared to hear whatever you want to say during this interview.

AD: I feel like there's an emphasis on documentation as the top tier or upper echelon of all knowledge production and we really refrained from that. We want people to be able to express their stories in whatever ways they feel fit. We welcome all types of submissions. We collect pieces of painted stories in a way that honors knowledge and truth without asking for legitimacy through a specific type of documentation. With every interaction there’s a give and take, so we don’t shy away from that. It can feel robotic otherwise.

sp: While you were talking about the different physical and metaphorical spaces you’ve been able to co-design or co-create together, I was thinking about the objects in that space technology, for example, like professional camera equipment vs. an iPhone or, better yet, the presence or absence of people or noise, and their influences on the stories people are telling. And how spaces carry their own histories and how that history is tied to who lives there, for example, and who gets to settle there and who gets to build community ties or trust…

My experience of living here having been born in Haiti and lived in Lynn, Everett, Jamaica Plain, Brighton, Chinatown, and Dorchester has been hard. Trust has been a hard thing to build with people. I’m sitting with how the trust Heresa has been able to cultivate in interpersonal relationships in Malden and at Tufts spills into the work and its impact.

AD: You never know what you’re going to get through these interactions. There’s so many different iterations and it makes each interaction that much more special.

This is all volunteer information... This is a collaboration in that we want participants to feel represented in what they share. These documentations also have great amounts of silences... both as in missing voices and literal pauses or breaks in the recording.

We carry our stories. I feel like our bodies are the only things that carry stories in their completeness.

sp: What are your thoughts on how cultures within the Greater Boston area feed or disrupt

what’s happening beyond the immediate spaces that surround us or influence the journeys we take? What is exciting about invisible borders? What I mean by invisible borders is essentially we are one and we’re still all on one land that has been truncated, a ruptured physical space. So, I’m just wondering what you think about this. Particularly, that sort of relationality between communities, beyond time/space/borders.

AD: All of the material we’ve collected from people sharing bits and pieces of themselves in person, on Zoom, and on our website center radical transparency around everyday realities.

And so, I think we are not interested in curating an archive by virtue of having buildings, being responsible for what’s going on in a modern library exhibition (or highly polished exhibitions). Or being responsible for how things are displayed in the Hidden Prompt’s digital archive. Simply put, we’re not necessarily interested in distorting or decorating things/what folx are choosing to contribute to the archive.

We’re more interested in just offering the time and site for discussion about the wide array of experiences that folx are having with themselves, with other folx, with the land that they live on. Simply offering a space for that to be honored, regardless of the type of conversation it brings up, or sadness, or a type of joy. We are trying to break down those barriers with the minimal resources we have.

sp: What has been most supportive in your creative process? What do you hold close as you navigate transitions in this work and in Boston?

AD + HL: What has been most supportive in our creative process is both the call and calling to memorialize the beauty of people and spaces. Nothing compares to the time others have poured into this with us. There are so many names and hands in this work. Time is a finite resource we can never recoup, so we are very thankful. Special thanks to Chanel, City of Malden HHS, Dora St. Martin, the Malden Cultural Council, and all the others (all of YOU). The financial and material support we’ve received has been amazing as well. //

slandie prinston is the marketing and communications fellow at Now + There, as well as a writer and organizer in Boston.

TheStreets BelongtoUsAll

A Photo Journal

by Jaypix Belmer

Jaypix Belmer is a Boston-based photographer and self-described “visual communicator.” As a Black and Indigenous nonbinary creative, Belmer prioritizes gaining trust in the communities that they photograph and champions the power of being seen. Belmer is the force behind PIXWORX, a creative agency that, in Belmer's words, “captures the impor tance of the soul.” PIXWORX’s mission statement encompasses the photographer’s community- and identity-based approach: "We must always present Black people positively and forever striving forward.″ The artist approaches archiving images as an act of “collective memory,” creating space for oneself through self-assertion and advocating for the importance of having a voice. With extensive experience in other local projects, such as B.I.R.D. Street Photography and YouMeWe, which was the recipient of a 2021 Collective Futures Fund grant, Belmer strives to nurture Boston communities. Creating images that range from bus shelters and bodegas to institutions such as Boston City Hall, Belmer emphasizes the YOU in universe, a reclamation of who the city belongs to. Belmer notes the concept of quality time as a love language, and the artist’s images, reflections, and creative integrity illustrate just that. //

Words by L Scully

Corner Store, a bodega located on Howard Ave. in Dorchester remains an asset to its community.

A Remembered Corner, two kids on a summer day hang out on a street pole that was later removed.

JAYPIX BELMER

PROFILE

On Stage, a talented young dancer engages in a routine at the Strand Theatre.

On Wheels, a talented young boy does a wheelie on Columbia Road.

SunGlow, a woman and her child.

You Me We, collage.

You Me We, generations are to be remembered.

Artist ID, an artist lives in the neighborhood and creates best in safe spaces.

JAYPIX BELMER

Kaitlyn Ovett Clark is the managing editor at Boston Art Review. In 2015, Clark earned an MFA at Tufts University in conjunction with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her ceramic work often highlights her experience working at a casino.  She is currently the exhibitions manager and public programs coordinator for Tufts University Art Galleries.

Zoë Gadegbeku is a Ghanaian writer living in Boston. She received her MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, and her work has appeared in Blackbird, AFREADA, Torch Literary Arts , and Longreads , among other publications.

Karolina Hać is a writer working at the intersection of art, design, and the built environment. She is an editor at Boston Art Review, and her writing has been featured in Big Red and Shiny, Amadeus magazine, and Landscape Architecture magazine, among others.

Jacqueline Houton is senior editor at Boston Art Review. A former editor of The Improper Bostonian and managing editor of The Phoenix and STUFF magazine (RIP x3), she currently copyedits kids’ and YA books by day. Her writing has appeared in Big Red & Shiny, Bitch magazine, Boston magazine, Pangyrus, Publishers Weekly, and other publications.

Jameson Johnson is a writer, editor, and independent curator based in Boston. She is the founder and editor-in-chief at Boston Art Review and the communications and development manager at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Her research practice is rooted in the exploration and preservation of narratives through contemporary information archives.

Maya Rubio is an independent curator and editor at Boston Art Review . Recent projects include “What’s the Secret?” at Gallery 263 and “M’Kenzy Cannon: Please Let Me In” at Boston Center for the Arts.

Jessica Shearer is a Boston-based writer, editor, and communications professional. Currently serving as the director of communications and marketing at the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, she is passionate about the power of storytelling and experienced at crafting compelling narratives in service of creating a more equitable, just, and vibrant society.

Julianna Sy is a designer and creative director with ties to Boston, Los Angeles, and New Mexico. Her work prioritizes inclusivity and compassion and functions on the principles of artistic expression, mutual aid, and anti-oppression. Sy has been the lead designer with BAR since Issue 01. She is an editorial designer at Not A Cult Media, producing recent titles Zigzags by Kamala Puligandla and Grocery List Poems by Rhiannon McGavin.

Leah Triplett Harrington serves as curator for Now + There and editor-at-large for Boston Art Review. The founding editor of the publication and platform The Rib, Triplett Harrington also edited Big Red & Shiny from 2013 to 2018. Her writing has appeared in Flash Art, Hyperallergic, WBUR’s The ARTery, Big Red & Shiny, and The Brooklyn Rail.

Victoria Wong is a graphic designer and editor, blending the two to create strong, quality work. She got her BFA from Emerson College in 2014 and a graphic design certificate from SMFA at Tufts in 2021. By day, she creates data visualizations for the tech industry, and by night, she’s working on passion projects, including embroidery, collages, and assisting in the creation of the layouts for this magazine.

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