Can we change the way Boston creates public art? Over the last year, we've been trying to do just that. With 2018's pilot program, the Public Art Accelerator, Now + There partnered with six Boston-based artists and communities from East Boston to Roxbury. Artists and communities worked collaboratively to present engaging, interactive, and temporary artworks. As they developed projects particular to neighborhoods around Boston, Now + There provided curatorial, technical, and financial support. We learned, we laughed, and together, we made art and shared experiences.
We’re excited to continue learning, growing, and supporting Boston’s artists and communities and humbled to announce the second year of Now + There’s Public Art Accelerator, generously funded by Joyce Linde. In 2018, Linde quietly fostered our own growth by supporting our pilot year of the Accelerator. We’re deeply grateful for her commitment to Boston artists and communities.
We can't wait to start working with David Buckley Borden, Pat Falco, Samantha Fields, Dell Hamilton, Cat Mazza, and Daniela Rivera to continue changing the way Boston creates--and lives with--public art. These artists are working through a variety of issues that affect Boston and beyond, from climate change to affordable housing and social equality.
Like their predecessors, the 2019 cohort will receive hands-on coaching from concept to (permitted!) completion. These artists represent many different backgrounds and sensibilities and work in a range of media. Each is deeply dedicated to Boston and its neighborhoods, and is committed to sharing their work with the people across our city.
The Accelerator supports people, not just projects, equipping local artists with the skills they need to make meaningful public art for Boston audiences. The six artists comprising the 2019 cohort were among twenty-seven nominated by Boston-area curators and were selected by a panel of public art experts and practitioners including Karin Goodfellow, Ekua Holmes, Beth Kantrowitz, and Cher Krause Knight. We’re excited to accelerate the possibilities of public art in 2019!
David Buckley Borden is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based interdisciplinary artist and designer. Using an accessible combination of art and design, David promotes a shared environmental awareness and heightened cultural value of ecology. David's projects highlight both pressing environmental issues and everyday phenomena. Driven by research and community outreach, David's work manifests in a variety of forms, ranging from site-specific landscape installations in the woods to data-driven cartography in the gallery. David's place-based projects have recently earned him residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Teton Artlab, Trifecta Hibernaculum, and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. David was a 2016/2017 Charles Bullard Fellow in Forest Research at Harvard University where he worked with researchers to answer the question, “How can art and design foster cultural cohesion around environmental issues and help inform ecology-minded decision making.”
Pat Falco (b. 1987. Boston, MA) is an artist and organizer from Boston, Massachusetts. He received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His work has been shown at The Luggage Store Gallery (SF), New Image Art (LA), SPACE GALLERY (Portland ME), Grin (Providence), New Bedford Art Museum and the deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum. Recent work includes public interventions and installations around Provincetown, Faneuil Hall and on George's Island in the Boston Harbor. Through a faux-luxury development company Upward Living Associates, Inc. - he has produced a series of buildings critiquing housing policies and capitalist development in Boston, and vying for alternatives on a path to housing justice. He has organized shows at the Distillery Gallery in South Boston since 2012.
Growing up in Brockton, MA, Samantha is drawn to the materials and processes that have historically lived outside of an “Art” context, she strives to make work that can live in and speak to the different worlds of 'high' and 'low.' “I make--slowly--with/through craft. Making slowly is a personal act of resistance against the fast-paced, multi-tasking, product-driven world in which I find myself.”
As a multimedia artist, Samantha engages with these processes as a survival mechanism, aesthetic, and a conceptual strategy. Through these modes of making, she is able to explore different social constructs associated with the decorative: gender, class, professional/hobbyist, and the hierarchical categories of taste and morality. Sam received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and her undergraduate degree from Massachusetts College of Art; and is currently adjunct faculty at both institutions.
DELL HAMILTON
Dell Marie Hamilton is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and independent curator whose projects include artist talks, solo performances and collaborative work. Working across performance, video, installation, painting and photography she uses the body to investigate the social and geopolitical constructions of memory, gender, history and citizenship.
Dell has a B.A. in journalism from Northeastern University and a MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. A self-professed political junkie, she also served as a member of current Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s arts and culture campaign team in 2013. In January 2019, her first solo show All Languages Welcomed Here will open at Salem State University. Her current curatorial project, Nine Moments for Now, launched under the aegis of Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman’s For Freedoms/50 States Initiative in an effort to highlight the complex relationships between art, civic discourse and culture and is on view at the Cooper Gallery for African and African American Art at Harvard University until January 21, 2019.
Cat Mazza (b. 1977 Washington DC) is a visual artist whose combination of craft and digital media explores the overlaps between textiles, technology and labor.
Mazza’s new sculpture Taking the Cure is currently on view at deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park through July 2019. Past work has shown at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York City), Triennale Design Museum (Milan), Garanti Gallery (Istanbul), the Jönköpings läns Museum (Sweden) and the Milwaukee Art Museum. She has also exhibited at new media festivals The Influencers (Barcelona); Futuresonic (Manchester), FILE (São Paulo) and Ars Electronica (Linz). Mazza is Associate Professor of Art at University of Massachusetts Boston. She has a MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2005) and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (1999).
Born in Santiago, Chile, Daniela received her BFA from Pontifcia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996. She went on to earn an MFA from SMFA/ Tufts University in 2006. She is currently an associate professor of Studio Art at Wellesley College and has directed the program since 2015.
In 2017 Daniela installed The Andes Inverted solo show at the MFA Boston. The project transformed the architecture of the exhibition space and developed further her mode of approaching painting. This project was transformative and radically affected the way she produces work. For the creation of the project, Daniela conducted a series of interviews that made her travel and engage with a community. Her last solo exhibition, installed in August 2018 at the Davis Museum, Fragmentos para una historia del olvido/ Fragments for a history of displacement, involves interviews as well and close work with the larger community of Latino immigrants to the US. Her museum installations often focus on uncanny spatial and material dislocations. Breaking from the traditional mold of painting, she creates fully environmental and immersive experiences that draw from her personal history. Daniela’s work has also been shown around the United States and other locations in Latin America.
Now + There’s Public Art Accelerator strengthens the careers of Boston’s artists and our communities through neighborhood-centric public art production. Artists are nominated through a nomination process and juried by experts in the field. Now in its second year, the Accelerator is generously funded by Joyce Linde.