About this Event
Boston Art Review editor-in-chief Jameson Johnson and Now + There assistant curator Leah Triplett Harrington will host a conversation with artists, curators, and community leaders around the future of public art in Boston. This panel will overview current trends and topics in the field, with a special focus on public art's role in creating a more culturally equitable Boston.
Panelists:
Kathleen Bitetti is a practicing visual artist based in Boston, Massachusetts (U.S.). Since the early 1990s, her art work has involved the creation of conceptually based sociopolitical objects, installations, and community-based projects. She is also a curator and arts administrator with over 30 years of experience. For over twenty five years, Kathleen has been advocating and advising on local, state, and national levels for artist's rights, first amendment and intellectual property protection, access to affordable health care & health care reform, arts funding, small business issues, the creative and cultural economies, and the development of free or low cost resources/services for artists working in all genres, small arts related businesses, cultural nonprofits, and grassroots organizations. She has helped to craft state and national legislation and regulations. For more information and to contact her: www.kathleenbitetti.com
Kai Grant: As a natural-born creative-turned-entrepreneur, Kai Grant gained 15 years experience inside of Boston’s retail landscape working with dozens of brands. Grant turned to meaningful community place-making after being laid off and founded Black Market- Nubian Square’s first flexible cultural event space and marketplace. Currently, Kai manages Black Market with a strategic lens on reigniting Roxbury’s creative economy. Grant launched the Black Market Marketplace with her husband Christopher in 2017, generating over $650,000 for over 250+ aspiring micro-business artisans and driving over 20,000 footsteps into a struggling Nubian Square district in its’ first two seasons.
Stephen Hamilton is an artist and arts educator living and working in Boston Massachusetts. Stephen’s Work incorporates both Western and African techniques, blending figurative painting and drawing with resist dyeing, weaving, and woodcarving. Each image is a marriage between the aesthetic perspectives and artistry of both traditions. As a Black American trained in traditional west African artforms, he treats the acts of weaving, dyeing, and woodcarving as ritualized acts of reclamation. he uses traditional techniques and materials native to West Africa to reclaim ancestral knowledge dissociated from Africans in the Americas, during the transatlantic slave trade. The work explores and heavily references the Black body in pre-colonial African art history, creating visual connections between the past and the present. This forms a body of work, which serves as a conceptual and visual bridge between the ancient and modern worlds. Through this, he explores elements of black identity through time and space on its own terms.
A Zoom link will be provided closer to the event date.
We will work with any and all members of our community to ensure accessibility needs are met for this event. Due to limited resources, we ask individuals to please reach out at least one week in advance with any accessibility requests.
Please contact info@nowandthere.org and jameson@bostonartreview.com with any questions.
Pictured: Rob “Problak” Gibbs, Breathe Life 3, 2019. On view at 808 Tremont Street. Presented by Now + There.
Image ID: A large technicolored mural on the side of a brick building features a small black child with celestial patterns in her pig tails sitting atop the shoulders of another child. The children are grinning and together their hand motions say "Breath Life" in ASL.