In 2023 Now + There invited audiences to reflect on what healing and rejuvenation could mean for them, for our communities, and for our neighborhoods. Built around the curatorial framework of A Year of Mending, we worked with community partners and artists to repair Charlestown’s relationship to an abandoned parking space with color, play, and plants for Lot Lab’s inaugural year. Artists in Public Art Accelerator program Cohort Five encouraged us to imagine a little Black girl’s joy as an act of healing and to consider what mending looks like for people who have lost their homes. Meanwhile, Edra Soto’s Graft at Central Wharf Plaza, an iteration of a series named after a medical procedure, serves as a metaphor for living in the diaspora of one’s home country, transplanted to a foreign land.
Coming into 2024 we are left reflecting on what healing means for Boston’s people and historical landscape. Meaningful mending takes time and work– more than what one year of public art programming can do. Addressing decades of racial injustice, gender inequity, settler-colonialism, gentrification, and the overall erasure of stories and people will take time and work. So the work of mending with art in community must continue for Boston to become open, equitable, and vibrant. Contending with history and opening up nuanced dialogues must continue, with care still at their core.
The movement for telling untold stories gained momentum this past year around the United States. We saw this at our Lot Lab initiative in Charlestown, which honored untold stories of women’s labor at the Navy Yard through Sam Field’s Stay and Ghada Amer’s Women’s Qualities. In New York City, Shahzia Sikander similarly brought attention to female figures unrecognized in historical representations of power and justice in her project Havah…to breathe, air, life. In Washington D.C., the National Mall hosted its first-ever public art exhibition, Beyond Granite: Pulling Together. Curated by the Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, the exhibition was framed around the question: What Stories Remain Untold on the National Mall? And back in Beantown, our very own monument to the lessor told story of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King’s revolutionary love opened with the unveiling of The Embrace by Hank Willis Thomas on the Boston Common.
As we bring attention to untold histories and grapple with the myths and markers represented in the commemorative landscape of the United States, we have been thinking about the language and words we use to describe our stories. As culture shifts, how do we unconsciously reinforce presumptions and narratives of erasure? Can we go beyond categorizing people and stories as “untold”?
How do we shift focus from absence into presence? How can we creatively and programmatically honor those who have always been?
These questions among others have brought us to 2024’s curatorial theme: Presence. This year, we are presenting deeply rooted local artists together with internationally recognized artists, each responding to the multiple layers of meaning behind the idea of presence. We are thinking of:
Presence as power, or as a tool of the monumental;
Presence as representation, a marker of who or what is and was;
Presence as endurance, as evidence of resistance and persistence;
Presence as participation, or as a responsibility and requirement of democracy;
Presence as resonance, a reverberating reminder of intangible being and our nation’s ancestors;
And Presence as community, as support and care by being together and showing up for one another.
The emergence of untold stories is the emergence of presence, a signifier of a shift in our civic and cultural cognition and a step towards rightfully acknowledging that which has always been. From honoring the presence of our nation's Indigenous ancestors, the rightful stewards of these lands, to reckoning with the presence of violence and historical trauma in marginalized communities, like Black Americans and migrants from around the world, platforming presence is emerging as a revolutionary act of care.
So what can you expect?
At Lot Lab 2024, three local artists will be resurrecting difficult histories to transform them with love, imagination, and speculation. Reclaimed wood and reimagined vessels will tell stories buried in Charlestown’s historical landscape. Participatory programs ranging from restorative processions to paper wish-making will invite your presence at our gatherings. Cohort Six of the Public Art Accelerator is exploring the presence of myths in cultural memory, of missing people in our neighborhoods, and of cyclical poverty through systemic racism. And while we can’t announce more about artists or projects yet, we are excited to continue our partnership with the National Park Service at the Charlestown Navy Yard. We welcome new partnerships with fellow commissioning organizations– Emerson Contemporary, Pao Arts Center, North American Indian Center of Boston, and National Center of Afro-American Artists– who are part of Un-Monument | Re-Monument | De-Monument: Transforming Boston with the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture for the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project.
We are eager to share space with you all this upcoming year. Follow us to get involved with projects and programs designed for gathering and participation. See how local and international artists unearth hidden histories and honor their presence in our cityscape. You can keep up with Presence @now_and_there on social media, share your thoughts at a community listening session coming to a neighborhood near you, or tell us more in the comments below or via info@nowandthere.org.
What does presence mean to you? How do you practice it? And who–or what– is emerging in your community?
Banner photo: Jasper Sanchez and Artist Samantha Fields at Lot Lab, 2023 (c) Annielly Camargo