In a year unlike any other, we’re still counting, and cherishing, all of our blessings.
Now + There would like to recognize the many artists, partners, generous supporters, and ESPECIALLY YOU who helped demonstrate that public art is us, no matter where we are right now!
As a Board and N+T’s Executive Director, we give thanks to the following remarkable people and organizations who are, with us, building an open public art city, despite a global pandemic, a call for racial reckoning, political upheaval, and many personal challenges.
Thanks first to YOU, the hundreds of thousands of Bostonians who’ve left your homes (safely!) to embrace (IRL!) ¡Provecho!, The Shape of Play, and To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom. We give thanks to all of you who have also joined us digitally on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and our live events to create powerful conversations about how art, artists and communities can support change, healing, and togetherness. Participation and imagination are at the heart of what we do!
Photos of the ¡Provecho! opening by Dominic Chavez
2020 began with an explosion of color, festivities, and a Latin flair as Justin Favela unveiled his largest piñata-style tapestry to date, ¡Provecho!, in the Prudential Center’s Boylston Street entrance. We’re grateful to Boston Properties and Rebecca Stoddard for inviting us to return to the Pru where Leah Triplett Harrington curated a work that celebrated the specificity of Latin American foods while reminding us of the strong, unified Greater Boston Latino community. Coming together at the ¡Provecho! opening with Boston’s first Afro-Latina councilperson Julia Mejia, lighting the Prudential tower in rainbow colors, and celebrating at DelFrisco's Steakhouse seems like a lifetime ago.
Luckily, we can relive Justin’s Feb. 26, 2020 conversation that started with thoughts on the Boston lobster roll (spoiler alert: he’s not a fan of the mayo), and an honest conversation with our partner Rosario Ubiera-Minaya of Amplify Lantix on her experience as an Afro-Latina. It was all captured during a live taping of Latinos Who Lunch that Justin recorded with Los Angeles based writer and podcast producer/host Myte. Shout out to our partners and hosts at the BU Arts Initiative!
And props to Polina Starobinets for her first successful management of a start-to-scratch project and first overnight install!
The double-entendre message of Justin’s work, enjoy your food/good advantage, primed us for the conversation we couldn’t ignore when the pandemic hit — addressing the gaping economic and health disparities in our BIPOC communities.
Through it all, Justin’s humor kept us eyes-wide-open to our current situation while remaining grateful for the small things, like a perfect empanada!
Cultural diversity through partnerships underpins our projects and we couldn’t be more honored to work alongside, learn from, and kvetch with friend and partner Laura Mandel, Executive Director of JArts, Jewish Arts Collaborative, during the challenging process of reimagining and fabricating Sari Carel’s The Shape of Play as the pandemic hit. (This is where our fabrication and project partners BRM Production Management really shined! But heaps of praise for them below.) Joey Barron, Jim Ball, and Sara Gardner also lent good humor and tenacity. With BRM, Friends of Christopher Columbus Park, Paul McCafferty, Liz Sullivan, and the wonderfully friendly rangers at the City of Boston Parks and Rec Department, we brought The Shape of Play to the North End waterfront from September 4 through October 31.
Top left: Laura Mandel of JArts enjoys The Shape of Play with her daughter.
Top right: Kate Gilbert, Laura Mandel, Leah Triplett Harrington, and Jared Bowen hang out (from a distance).
Top Right: Sari Carel with her installation. Photo by Nir Landau.
Originally scheduled as a Passover project symbolizing freedom, the work’s central message, Who feels free to play? took on a deeper meaning with the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Together we all acknowledged and for the first time spoke words to what we already knew: that we operate in the whiteness of contemporary art spaces and the systemic racism inherent in Boston’s public spaces. And as the Columbus statue was symbolically beheaded on June 10, 2020, we added the erasure of Indigenous Peoples to the context in which the work operated.
We are grateful for the Brooklyn Rail putting words to this experience, “The Shape of Play stood nearby as a non-monumental public installation and represented everything non-colonized....It suggests a different philosophy that our society needs to follow, and now maybe it will.”
It isn’t lost on us that the team surrounding Sari’s work were all women who, when the going got tough, knew to err on the side of over-communicating and getting vulnerable. And when that didn’t work, try some chocolate. (Thank you Sari for that extravagant post-deinstall treat!)
lauren woods talks to us during her keynote Accelerator Forum presentation.
Like all of you, we’ve had a few setbacks along this year. No matter how hard our team of “art doulas” tried, a few projects just weren’t ready to come to life in 2020 as we followed State mandates to socially distance and close beloved venues. We are indebted to our friends and partners at Revolutionary Spaces, especially Anne Freeh Engel, who believes as much as we do in artist lauren woods’s vision for decolonizing the Old State House, lifting up multiple interpretations of Crispus Attucks to name how the white imaginary created Blackness, and to ultimately transform a piece of downtown Boston into a space where Black Bostonians see themselves. Stay tuned!
Site visit to the Boston Common with Sarah Hutt, Janet Zweig and the N+T Team.
Similarly, another group of dedicated women at The Friends of the Public Garden including Executive Director Liz Vizza and art consultant Sarah Hutt have been midwifing a special project by Janet Zweig for 2021. Working with them has been a true delight and we can’t wait to share more about this project that highlights what we have in common and the Friend's dedicated park stewardship.
Left: To Each Era sets the stage for a game of tag. Right: We must have said something to make Pedro Alonzo and Jose Dávila laugh. Both photos by Dominic Chavez.
Guest curator Pedro Alonzo joined us again this year and we’re indebted to his calm and reassuring demeanor that set the tone for a project that asked us to imagine across Zoom, FaceTime, napkin sketches, and architectural models, a spatial experience that didn’t come together until the final installation. (We have to point out that this took place the week of the presidential election. Talk about embracing the unknown!) Pedro invited Mexican artist, Jose Dávila, to transform Central Wharf Park, first designed by Reed Hilderbrand, into a space that invites play and the consideration of a common good.
Among the many heroes who helped make Jose’s To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom. a reality is Jose’s US-based assistant Mario Navarro, local fabricator Peter Somers and his team at Concrete Poetry, Peter Branagan Engineering, BrightView Landscaping, and BrickStone Masonry. We also namaste to a few angels who supported this project from afar.
Our gratitude list includes Jose’s unifying vision that human interaction is what keeps civilizations evolving and for inviting us to let art lead the way in finding balance during these times of uncertainty.
From reflecting on neighborhood values to sharing resources for artists in the early days of the pandemic, the N+T team was invigorated by the over 400 people who created N+T Asks with us between April and August including our guests: Rachel Allen, Kenneth Bailey, Denise Capers, Stephanie Cardon, Tiffany Cogell, Alex Cornacchini, Sarah Coughlin, Juma Crawford, Michael Dowling, Nia Evans, Ifé Franklin, Rob Gibbs, Stephen Hamilton, Mswati Hanks, Charla Jones, Steve Lambert, Lisette Le, Silvia Lopez-Chavez, Ayana Mack, Ross Miller, Maria Molteni, Anita Morison-Matra, Gladys Oliveros, Larry Pierce, Destiny Polk, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Veronica Robles, Kim Szeto, Chanel Thervil, Thuwaiba Thezine, Johnetta Tinker, Rosario Ubiera-Minaya, Christine Varriale, and Tran Vu. Together we confronted a monumental moment as a community, without the need for answers.
We are still blush thinking of our first attempts at Instagram Live and subsequent conversations with Philip Barash, Ryan Edwards, Jen Mergel, Arielle Gray, L'Merchie Frazier, and Camilo Alvarez. Thanks to them for getting vulnerable and oh so up-close-and-personal with us!
Photo of the Grove Hall installation of No Es Facil by Victoria Roytenberg
Our Accelerator Artists consider what makes public art “successful” with an interactive activity.
Almost exactly a year ago, six artists agreed to enter into the third cohort of the pilot N+T Public Art Accelerator program and a journey of learning/unlearning and cohort-building with us. We appreciate the tenacity and collaborative spirit that Shaka Dendy, Ang Li, Andrew Mobray, Karthik Pandian, Gabriel Sosa, and Yu-Wen Wu put into the program. We’re grateful for this third cohort for teaching us as much about equity in the arts as we’ve hopefully shared about the nuts and bolts of public art production. Their input will forever shape the future of the program and we’re grateful for the message in Gabriel Sosa’s project: No es fácil/It ain't easy (but don’t despair).
We want to call special attention to the many educators and specialists who shared their time and expertise with the Accelerators, including, Maggie Cavallo, Karin Goodfellow, Jim Grace, Ekua Holmes, Silvia Lopez Chavez, Jules Rochielle, Barbara Quiroga, Ellen Tani, Sienna Oristaglio, and Julia Ryan. Lastly, none of this would be possible without the generosity of Joyce Linde, who funded three years to ensure all neighborhoods of Boston can have accessible, contemporary public art.
Lessons learned from the Accelerator were shared out at our first-ever Accelerator Forum in October and we’re over-the-moon happy with the community that was formed over those two days and that continues today!
Thanks to Michael Bobbitt, BRM Production Management, J Cottle, Shaka Dendy, Sabrina Dorsainvil, Cedric Douglas, Ryan Edwards, Pat Falco, Samantha Fields, Stephen Hamilton, Elisa Hamilton, Ekua Holmes, Lina Maria Giraldo, Cat Mazza, Dawn Meredith Simmons, Kymberly Pinder, Joseph Quisol, Daniela Rivera, Sarah Rodrigo, Julia Ryan, Gabriel Sosa, Marian Taylor Brown, and lauren woods. Special shout out to Marian Taylor Brown of Arts Connect International, who helped us craft two days of engaging and accessible online content.
N+T team is showing their appreciation from left to right on N+T’s Leather District HQ (Leah), our cozy home (Victoria), on the Esplanade (Adria), at the ’rents up north (Katie), from N+T’s stoop (Kate), someplace mysterious in Cambridge (Jules), and in one of Somerville’s most photogenic loading docks (Polina).
We give tremendous thanks to the Now + There staff and team who made our projects come to life, including our new Director of Operations Victoria Hall, Assistant Curator Leah Triplett Harington, Project Manager Polina Starobinets, Development Assistant Katie Charton, Office Manager Adria Katz, and starting next week, our first Communications Manager Jules Leondardos.
It can’t be mentioned enough that with Bianca Mauro and her entire team at BRM Production Management we’re able to an artist’s concept from sketch to reality and we’re comforted each time she reminds us that, “everything is figureoutable.” BRM’s team includes Jane Long, Meg Kelly, Chaz Morse, Kevin Hanley, and Emily Castro. It extends to Simpson Gumpertz & Heger and Citywide Contracting who make sure everything stays in its place and looks better than when we got there. (Hello new windows at 555 Columbia Road!) And to say public art doesn’t exist without our friends at the City of Boston is no exaggeration. Thank you to our public art champions Kara Elliot-Ortega, Karin Goodfellow, Julia Ryan, Brian Ronan, Paul McCaffrey and Jacob Wessel.
Spreading the word about the power of public art and reliving the moments of connection and wonder experienced in our projects comes easily with great press coverage in Boston’s leading publications, from the Boston Globe to El Planeta, thanks to Diana McCloy of Teak Media, overall messaging from Mary-Liz Murray of Streamix Consulting and Jennifer Ingham and Word Spark Consulting videos crafted by Casey Preston of Whitebirch Media, and the magic captured by photographers Dominic Chavez, Nir Landau, and Faith Ninnivagi.
None of this work happens without funding.
We extend much respect and humble thanks to the foundations that continue to fuel and underwrite our growth with unrestricted funds — many of whom came through with additional Covid-19 emergency funds.
We express our deepest gratitude to the Barr Foundation, The Boston Foundation, the City of Boston, the Harold L. Wyman Foundation, the Klarman Family Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, NEFA’s Fund for the Arts, the Target Giving Circle (in/PACT) and Technical Development Corporation. We’re appreciative of the cohort building and scenario planning training we’ve experienced with peers across the Commonwealth in the Barr-Klarman Massachusetts Arts Initiative.
It is these foundations, a few anonymous angels, the many generous individual donors, and partners LIKE YOU who make building an open public art city a truly collaborative and invigorating process.
We have much to be grateful for this season! And we invite you to say thanks to these friends and join us in our work with a gift to our annual campaign today.
In partnership,
Kate Gilbert, Executive Director, with the Now + There Board of Directors: Jesse Bearkahn, Chris Colbert, Emily Foster Day, Audrey Foster, Geoff Hargadon, Charla Jones, Kathy Sharpless, Lisa Tung, and new this year, Laura Camila Rivera!