Sustaining Practice - $2,500 grants geared toward emerging individual artists and collaborators who need critical support for research, to develop new projects and future ideas, and sustain themselves in the process.

• Ileana Doble Hernandez | Rebellious Zines is a research project for a zine publication and activist zine making workshops for teenagers.  

• Rania Abdalla Kadafour |Threads of Displacement: A Quilted Archive of Sudanese Voices is a collaboratively built archive of “text clippings” from the Sudanese diaspora, both locally and worldwide, that encapsulates memories made in Sudan—memories forever changed by displacement and war. Eventually incorporated into a quilting practice creating text reliefs on fabric.

• MOSH Studio (Adrienne Shishko and Suzanne Moseley) | MOSH Studio is an artist collaboration with repurposed mixed media, fiber, and found objects, to explore humanity’s “throw away” culture and impulsive consumerism and its direct impact on the environment, as well as the role of hallowed objects in shaping our identities and futures. The collaboration will create large-scale public art installations that invite audiences to reflect on their own purchasing and discarding habits and their role in helping protect the environment.

• W.O.V (William Omar Valdes) | Pulp Presence: Exploring the performative and material nature of papermaking is research delving into the performative essence of papermaking, viewed through the prism of that artist’s experiences as a Queer Cuban immigrant and online sex worker.

• Yutong Shi , and Yindi Chen | countercurrent is a biannual publication dedicated to uncovering independent art spaces that operate beyond the confines of the mainstream art scene. The publication celebrates the fluidity and rebelliousness of non-traditional spaces, such as artist-run, collective, and small-scale venues, in an increasingly industrialized art world.

• Kathryn Ramey  | SILVER & earth is a speculative essay film centered on the area described in settler language as New England. The project investigates the interrelationships between humans, the built and natural environment through a variety of rituals, re-imaginings, and conventional research on silver-based film.

• Jay Lynn Gomez | Medication Box project is research revolving around exploring the concept of domestic and ephemeral labor, examining its nuances and significance within everyday life. The research involves transforming the artist’s medication and hormone boxes into canvases for painting that document their lived experience as a trans woman living with Hemophelia.

• Mariona Lloreta | HEIRLOOMS, East Boston is a film series that showcases the stories of local community members in a rapidly gentrifying East Boston, focusing on empowered storytelling and reclaiming narratives that have been invisibilized historically. 

• Joanna Tam  | Visibility Studies (Activists Inspired) examines the meaning of hypervisibility and invisibility pertaining to safety through the lens of Asian American experiences. The artist will expand their research focus to include the histories of Asian American activism, collecting and presenting archival activist materials in partnership with local AAPI organizations.

• IMAGINE (Aka Sneha Shrestha) | Prayer Wheels comprises of research and proto-typing of a life-sized prayer wheel that will feature repeating rows of ‘Ka,’ the first letter of the Nepali alphabet. The artist envisions this form to eventually exist in a life-sized format in public space, inviting publics to interact and turn the wheel to send their personal meditations out to the universe.

   

  New Projects- $7,500 grants supporting the creation and public presentation of new projects

• sair goetz| Study in signaling is an experimental typographic soft-sculpture and collective writing performance project made for and by trans* people in Greater Boston. Participants use miniature meditation cushions to individually form a single letter and collectively form words that prioritize letting go and liberation over legibility.

• Vikiana Petit Homme and Tatiana White | Guerrilla Mag is a new guerrilla publishing effort emerging from Dorchester, MA. Guerrilla Mag speaks to and for the underground and the self-starters.

• Maria Fong and Wen-hao Tien | Dragon and Friends: Speculative Cosmologies in the Year of the Dragon is an activity book featuring a collection of reinterpreted AAPI fairytales focused on the cosmos and creatures that were once here that serve as the foundation for a series of pop-up programs throughout Boston’s Chinatown during the culmination of the Year of the Dragon. The project features storytelling, activation of green spaces in Chinatown, and mythical connections to species loss through climate change.

Ongoing Platforms - $7,500 grants sustaining long-term projects

• Department of Public Imagination (Crystal Bi Wegner and Dzidzor Azaglo) | Department of Public Imagination is a public art project that designs and prototypes new infrastructures that hold space for imagination work in Boston. Dream activations invite publics to contribute to a living archive by dialing in and leaving a message to shape the future in a Dream Portal Phone Booth. The activations are paired with a live soundscape to encourage rest, reflection, and envisioning. 

• Leena Ismail, veronique (nico) d'entremont, and Amanda Saunders | When You Cry, Cry Into Yourself: A Shrine to the Martyrs of Palestine is a 250-foot installation comprised of 30,228 thumbprints, made on unfired clay, surrounding a pillow on which visitors can kneel.

• Jenn Houle | ‘Plant Paint Cross-Pollinate’ (PPCP) is a public art mural project led by artist Jenn Houle that cultivates ‘botanical belonging,’ decolonizes public and private land, and restores ecosystem health with native plants. Through community art and nature workshops, PPCP inspires a cultural shift from echoes of colonization, lawns & imported plants, towards restorative land use with the creation of interspecies habitats for seasonal cycles in a shifting climate.

• Sarah Brophy and Tanya Nixon-Silberg | The Climate Monsters Project draws inspiration from the imaginations of Boston Public School kindergarteners as climate change is visualized as mythological monsters that come to life through an illustrated storybook and outdoor Augmented Reality installation. Visualizing the overwhelming subject of climate change as a monster provides a new way to grapple with the immensity of the climate crisis and gives young kids agency in centering themselves as the heroes of their story.

• Helen Popinchalk and Jay LaCouture | Test Print Tuesday is an event series that celebrates the power of print. Part skill share, part artist talk, and all fun, each week features new artists and new printed content. Participants are invited to come up to a press, pull a print and then print again (and again). Each week new artists add their images into the Test Print Tuesday mix.