“What’s an Accelerator?” is a question I hear all the time in my work as a curator at N+T.
The answer is not as simple as this three-word question. It’s not a fellowship or a grant, and nor is it simply a course. In the business world, Accelerator programs are crash courses for entrepreneurs to get all the skills needed to launch their new business. In the end, they compete for start-up funds.
The N+T Public Art Accelerator is a bit like that in that it equips Boston-area artists with the tools, resources, and fellowship with like-minded public-space artists over a series of workshops. At the end of the program, artists present project ideas for the chance to receive $25,000 in implementation funding and then have 10 months with N+T’s continued support to bring their ideas to life. Like so much of public art, it doesn’t follow a straightforward path and blends many different methodologies and strategies.
This year, we’re thrilled to announce the 2021 Accelerator Cohort of new artists, Eli Brown, Rixy, Karmimadeebora McMillan, and Rhea Vedro! Each brings a rich range of experiences, artistic and otherwise, to this journey. Each is poised and ready to create contemporary art within Boston’s communities. We’ll ask the hard questions--about public art’s purpose--together to open up conversations and spaces around public art.
Eli Brown
Eli Brown is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, comics, and community organizing. Eli’s work explores queer and trans intimacies through time and cross-generational dynamics. They are especially interested in asking what the future of human evolution could look like if we reimagined reproduction as a queer, ecological strategy. Recent work has been featured at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston Huntington Library, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Creative Time Summit X. Most recent work is flown at Tailgate Projects in Tampa, FL.
Rixy
Rixy is a Latinx Interdisciplinary Street Artist, Educator, & Storyteller, building a world focused on the forms of feminine divinity in various cultures. She reinterprets narratives of agency and identity – like episodes of a never-ending cartoon. Redefining "sensuality" as a relationship to our external and internal perceptions, the stylized works play in vibrant mediums, to create these energetic palettes across surfaces. Predominately focused in Murals, Paintings and Installations. This practice not only reflects the layers of those painted, but also, the complexities of expressing internal dialogues.
Rixy graduated from UMass Boston in 2019 with a concentration in Conceptual Sculpture, as a spatial and material awareness. She received the 2019 Ruth Butler Travel Fellowship for a Studio Residency in Mexico, and the 2017 Arts|Learning Award for Student Arts Advocacy. Her passion to expand her practice, personifies her drive to educate and provide access to the Arts. This has allowed her to evolve into a Teacher and Director; holding positions as an Adjunct Instructor at the Boston Architectural College, & the Public Art Coordinator of Central Sq’s BID's "Speak Your Piece" Campaign; exhibiting on street-wide to institutional walls.
Karmimadeebora McMillan
Karmimadeebora McMillan was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina and is based in Cambridge, MA. She has a MFA (2013) and Post Baccalaureate certificate (2011) from The School of the Museum of Arts at Tufts, Boston. McMillan’s paintings are influenced by her southern childhood. Characters from racist’s propaganda and black dolls wander through brightly colored and fragmented landscapes.
After graduate school McMillan worked for the well-known street artist Swoon for five years as her business manager and helped start her non-profit organization Heliotrope Foundation.
McMillan has also performed with her mentor Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Queens Museum in New York, and Havana , Cuba Biennale 15. Karmimadeebora is currently the Director of the Post Baccalaureate Program and part time lecturer at SMFA at Tufts, Boston.
Rhea Vedro
Rhea Vedro is a metalsmith and cultural producer with over twenty years of experience leading community-based arts programs. Vedro is Director of Community Engagement for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. National projects include consulting for the Vizcaya Museum, Queens Museum, AOL/Time Warner Foundation, El Museo del Barrio, The Fund for the City of New York, The New York City Parks Foundation, and numerous schools, shelters, prisons and community settings.
Vedro earned her BA at NYU in Community Based Arts & Youth Program Design in 2010. Based in Brooklyn, Vedro founded A.Y.E. International, a teaching artists collective which fostered her exploration of best practices in community-based arts throughout the US, Brazil, Canada, Cuba and Mexico.
Vedro received scholarships to craft schools Haystack, Penland and Peters Valley to study blacksmithing and steel engraving. In 2006 she completed her MFA in Metalsmithing from the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she later taught in the Art Department. Vedro moved to Wisconsin to teach Metals in the Department of Art at the UW-Madison in 2008 as a Visiting Professor investigating the trajectory of humankind’s relationship with metal - ways we source it and refine it into objects of beauty, war, value, infrastructure, ceremony and industry. There she concurrently built her community engagement practice as Bilingual Community Education Program Director for Planned Parenthood of WI, and with the Madison Metropolitan School District’s Office of Multilingual and Global Education. Since returning to the East Coast in 2015, Vedro is delighted to serve on the North Bennet Street School Board of Advisors, and to collaborate as a Guest Artist Reviewer for The Boston Foundation, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture + Planning, and New England Foundation for the Arts.
The cohort was selected by a jury of public art experts, practitioners, and enthusiasts including Jesse Baerkahn, Luis Cotto, Sabrina Dorsainvil, Samantha Fields, and Cynthia Woo--who had the tough challenge of reviewing a record fifty-five applications submitted through an open call. The N+T Public Art Accelerator is generously funded by individuals who believe in the power of art + community including Joyce Linde and James and Audrey Foster.
First, the cohort will participate in fourteen workshops designed to offer all the practical and conceptual tools they’ll need to create public art. We’ll talk about what success means, consider questions around accessibility, equity and audience, and make sure they’re ready to manage large-scale budgets and fabrication timelines. Next, we’ll collaborate on public artwork concepts for a specific Boston neighborhood and ready everyone for pitches that simulate public art commissioning juries. And finally, we’ll see them through the completion of that concept, with projects launching by October 2022.
This fourth cohort joins an esteemed group of eighteen other Accelerator alumni. In many ways, Cohort Four’s experience will build upon lessons learned during our three-year pilot program. First and foremost, the 2021 program is more equitable as it was run as an open call, versus a nomination process, and received 55 submissions. It offers artists more time to complete their projects — 5 more months. We are also committing to bringing in a racially diverse group of workshop leaders to more accurately and equitably represent the neighborhoods in which the artists may work. And there are more of us who can help open doors and share resources! N+T’s Community Partnership Manager will assist each artist in developing engagement strategies and relationships in the communities they want to work with and for.
These are important, critical changes that continue our work to build an equitable and vibrant public art city. So Boston, I have a question for you: what will you make with these four?