We are thrilled to announce the funding of five projects by Boston-area artists, who have been part of our Public Art Accelerator program since January 2020.
The artists, Shaka Dendy, Ang Li, Karthik Pandian, Gabriel Sosa, and Yu-Wen Wu, successfully completed a six-month intensive designed to demystify the process of creating public art and will each receive a $25,000 stipend to realize their projects in over 7 Boston neighborhoods between now and September 2021.
Accelerator Gabriel Sosa will have the first installation, “No es fácil/It ain't easy.” The first in his series of billboards which went up last week (July 27) on a billboard next to the Meridian Street Bridge in East Boston will be on view through August 25. The prominent pastel-colored signs with bold red lettering offer encouragement in Spanish and English with phrases such as: “No es fácil, pero no te desesperes (It ain’t easy, but don’t despair).”
Our Public Art Accelerator program, a three-year pilot program concluding this year, is generously funded by Joyce Linde. The program supports six artists annually with a six-month curriculum to help them develop new temporary and site-specific works of art for a Boston neighborhood. At the conclusion of the program, artists present their concepts to a jury to receive funding. Also in this year’s Cohort was Andrew Mowbray who chose not to propose a project. This year’s jury members included Luis Cotto (Massachusetts Cultural Council), N+T Board Chair Jesse Baerkhan, (Grafitto SP), Karin Goodfellow (Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture), Cher Krause Knight (Emerson College), and N+T Accelerator Alum ‘19 Daniela Rivera (Wellesley College).
Notably, all members of the Cohort continued with the program throughout the social distancing challenges caused by the Covid-19 global pandemic, the racial reckoning triggered by George Floyd’s death by Minneapolis police, and within the current memorial takedown moment. “Very quickly, the discussion of how to make public art became a question of why to make public art, for whom, and to what end,” said Kate Gilbert, Executive Director on the shifts we and the artists made midway through the program. “Each funded project reflects those conversations we had as a cohort and deftly responds to the current moment with conviction and empathy. Some projects offer hope, others are transforming spaces with symbolic materials or color, and many are calling into sharp relief whose voices are represented in public art.”
Our 2020 curatorial theme was Shared Power, planned long before this past spring erupted with the pandemic and protests calling for racial reconciliation. "Recent months have renewed our commitment even more to amplify voices from diverse backgrounds," said Leah Triplett Harrington, Now + There's Assistant Curator. "We are eager to support this year's Accelerator projects and the broader themes of social justice and equity that they represent."
Here is more information about each of the 2020 Accelerator artists projects:
Shaka Dendy: Blutopia
“Blutopia” is an immersive light installation that bathes pedestrians in Boston Common’s Parkman Bandstand in blue light to create an ephemeral site of collective memory, experience, and envisioning. The project replaces the bulbs of lampposts with blue lights for several months during the colder months of the year. In “Blutopia,” blue light signals a utopic future tinged by the blues of Black history, and alludes to the significance of blues in African-American culture and Blackness and references Minimalist art practices.
Timeline: Programming starts in August and runs through October. Lights on the Common to be installed no later than December 2020.
Mock-up around Parkman Bandstand, Boston Commons a public artist by working alongside and learning from the cohort and Now +There fellows.
Ang Li: Place of Assembly
“Place of Assembly” explores how familiar building materials can serve as catalysts for collective forms of storytelling in the public realm. The project uses reclaimed masonry fragments sourced from demolition sites around Boston to construct an improvised landscape that invites the public to reflect on the material turnover of their neighborhoods. The piece provides a changing backdrop for a series of community-focused events and public conversations around the role of public memory in the maintenance of the built environment. At the end of the project’s life span, fragments of the installation will be deinstalled and donated to neighborhood organizations and local businesses.
Timeline: Design and planning will continue this summer and fall. The project will be installed in July 2021 and deinstalled in December 2021.
Mock-up of four different stages of the project with different programming.
Karthik Pandian: out in all directions from a core of merciless love
“out in all directions from a core of merciless love” will organize circles of study for communities to collectively engage possible futures for the former site of the Christopher Columbus state on the North End. Using the June 2020 “beheading” of the monument as its catalyst, Pandian proposes a process to consider how ceremony, ritual, and performance can be used to cede resources and space back to Indigenous peoples. Pandian will collaborate in this process with many others, including groups who have long been in conflict over the site and artist Anthony Romero of the City of Boston Artist in Residence program.
Timeline: October 2020-June or July 2021
A slide from Karthik’s final presentation.
Gabriel Sosa: No es fácil/It ain't easy
“No es fácil/It ain’t easy,” is a multi-site project meant to give hope and encouragement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Encouraging phrases in both Spanish and English will be printed in block letters in bright colors. The project is inspired by the titular phrase, which Sosa often heard growing up in Miami. Phrases printed on the billboards will include “No es fácil, pero no te desesperes” (It ain’t easy, but don’t despair), “It ain’t easy, but keep going” and “Tremendo lío, pero tú sigue” (It’s such a mess, but stay the course). Billboards in Spanish will be placed in predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, including East Boston and Egleston Square, while those in English will be in other locations throughout the city. The billboards will be accompanied by writing and silk screening workshops that empower people to write their own phrases and make their own signs.
Timeline: July 27, 2020 through winter 2020
Spanish billboard currently installed near Meridian Street Bridge, East Boston
Mock-up of billboard in English
Yu-Wen Wu: Tell Me
“Tell Me” amplifies immigrant voices and links communities. The work begins with a series of workshops that gather first- hand stories from immigrants in Boston communities of their personal journey of migration and the challenges of assimilation in the United States. Workshop participants are invited to create a bundle representing what they chose to carry or must leave behind on their flight from their homeland. Each participant is asked to write their story on a tag attached to the bundle. The bundles and their stories become part of a public artwork carried on an open truck to highlight the physical movement of migration. The truck will stop at various community events in Boston neighborhoods. The public will be encouraged to engage in dialogue and share their own stories of immigration.
Timeline: Design and planning will continue this summer and fall. Workshops are projected for late spring 2021 while the truck will take place over summer 2021.
Bundles from “Leavings/Belongings”
Mock up of the truck for “Tell Me”
Check out Yu-Wen’s website.
Andrew Mowbray
Andrew Mowbray was an integral part of the 2020 N+T Public Art Program. Mowbray chose not to present a final project for funding but remains a close member of the Cohort and a N+T artist alum. Mowbray creates project-based work that employs many processes from sculpture, photography, video, horticulture, and traditional craft techniques.
His work has been exhibited extensively and often explores the context of the gallery or museum space as well as our contemporary relationships with domestic and urban architecture and nature. His solo exhibitions Another Utopia, Lamontagne Gallery, Boston, and Modular Forms, Gleb Gallery, Phillips Academy Andover MA, used modular formed Lagenaria gourds, created and grown by the artist as a way to think about sustainable architecture and building blocks for the future. His work has been noted in Architizer and Inhabitat, along with being reviewed in Art in America, and featured on the cover of Sculpture magazine. He has received grants from The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The LEF Foundation and the Artists Resource Trust. Mowbray received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and is currently a Lecturer, Director of 3D Arts, and Co-Director of Architecture at Wellesley College.
For media inquiries, please contact Diana Brown McCloy at diana@teakmedia.com; 978-697-9414.