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.

• Cathy Della Lucia | Trojan Tools: Modular Objects for Collective Survival    

  Trojan Tools: Modular Objects for Collective Survival explores the relationships between the body and tools, toys, and weapons through modular forms built to come apart. This research will seed protective “multi-tool” sculptures based on interviews with women-identifying individuals, merging care, humor, and absurdity into forms of imagined safety.

• Sam Lê Shave |Textile Altar

  Textile Altar is a research-based exploration into woven materialities and the personal, communal, and ancestral hxstories we choose to carry and which collectively form a sacred platform for resisting assimilation and reimagining tradition.

• George Annan Jr.  |  Route 111   

  Route 111 is a photography project that explores the creeping erasure of long-standing communities in Chelsea and the shifting of spaces that were once home to many. This tension between familiarity and displacement is a central theme of the project. The photographs for this project serve as an homage to the fondness of Chelsea for veteran residents and acts of resistance to gentrification.

• Ziyi Billy Zeng |“Gaysians, Assemble!”: Queer Asian American Community Organizing Histories in Boston  

  Gaysians, Assemble! explores queer Asian American organizing histories in Boston beginning in the 1980s through archival and vernacular storytelling. Said research will translate into a community-based exhibition  with participatory art. A key component will involve collaboratively creating an AIDS quilt panel to honor Siong-Huat Chua, a queer Asian Boston elder who passed from AIDS in 1994.

• Fiona Phie | Batik Baddie 

  Batik Baddie aims to connect the diaspora of batik users (SouthAsian, African, modern, etc.) in storytelling and workshop spaces. Batik is a practice of coloring fabrics using wax to resist dyes.  Combining batik and transformative justice practices, to teach trauma-informed tools for healing.

• Gray Winburne | Fat Queer Dialectics Across Space-Time   

  Exploring fat queer futurism, Fat Queer Dialectic Across Space-Time studies contemporary atypography, an art movement that graphically represents traditional writing systems in an unconventional way and builds a method of communication that is intrinsically fat and queer. The project aims to secure a space that can serve both as a creative space and hub for fat queer community building.

• Amanda Beard Garcia | Ordinary/Extraordinary: Chinese American Paper Families of Boston       

  Ordinary/Extraordinary: Chinese American Paper Families of Boston engages historical and genealogical research on paper families (refers to people who entered the U.S. using falsified documentation) culminating in an interactive exhibit or publication, specifically highlighting multigenerational Chinese American families of Greater Boston.

• Sadie Saunders, Daniel Bracken, Olivia Goliger | Samizdot  

  Samizdot is a riso micropress dedicated to publishing the work of individuals in the Boston area who have not previously been published. Samzidot sees self-publishing as a radical, intentional act; one that slows the pace, invites care, and allows me to make physical objects which give weight to my ideas and allow for more meaningful exchanges.

• DaNice D Marshall | Artists with Disability      

  Artists with Disability engages with art from a disability focused lens and aims to strengthen artist collaboration and create opportunities for accessibility “artivism.” The artists will create a series of workshops cards and textile card so people with low-vision can feel what they cannot see.

• Yorgos Efthymiadis | The First Ones In Line

  The First Ones In Line is a photography project centering the home lives of union workers expanding on the brazen heroic depictions of workers to showcase the quiet parts the workers in their homes, how they live, with their families. This project amplifies workers’ voices by celebrating their persistence, self-sacrifice, bravery, and everyday life.

   

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

• Dell Marie Hamilton, Angela Counts | Mark, Phillis, Phebe—A Murder Told in 3 Parts 

  Mark, Phillis, Phebe—A Murder Told in 3 Parts mines the underbelly of 18th century colonial Massachusetts in a three-channel public art video installation that tells the true crime story of three enslaved African Americans who poison their owner, Captain John Codman.

• Maggie Wong |Unity Newspaper

  Unity Newspaper is an interdisciplinary project that utilizes publication and social engagement to examine collective caregiving through the lens of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (1978–1990), a multiracial activist organization that raised many children through its childcare system.

• Siobhan Landry, Angie Morrill, Kali Simmons | Haunting Hannah       

  The feature film HANNAH is an unsparing consideration of the colonial violence contained within this story as well as an exploration of how it might be imagined differently. The filmmakers of HANNAH will produce Haunting Hannah, a short film, panel discussion, facilitated discussion, and educational artist book that invites people from Haverhill into the creative and collaborative process of the film.

• Tanya Nixon-Silberg, Ash Winkfield | Like One of the Family: A Puppetry Production      

  This collaborative puppetry project brings to life Mildred Johnson, the sharp-witted Black domestic worker from Alice Childress’ “Like One of the Family,” through a series of devised vignettes exploring the relationships and resilience of Black women. Developed through gatherings with Black women in Greater Boston, the process centers community storytelling, collective authorship, and embodied puppetry performance techniques.

• Rachel TonThat | The Airtight Garage       

  The Airtight Garage will be a multifunctional art space aimed at growing a contemporary art scene in Boston's North Shore and beyond, hosted in a studio space in Salem.

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

• Paloma Valenzuela | "Now Playing" Film Series

  "Now Playing" is a film series at JustBook-ish that offers free film screenings, Q&As with filmmakers/film creators & actors as well as plans to offer workshops (such as screenwriting workshops), conversations on film and script table reads.

• Charles Crowell | Deiner   

  Deiner is an artist run gallery located in Arlington, MA. The space presents itself as a site for supporting unusual / non-commercial projects by under-recognized artists in the Boston / New England area and beyond.

• Yolanda He Yang, Jose Cortez, Wenbin Huang, Theodera Earthwurms, Xiaoyue Xu | Behind VA Shadows    

  Behind VA Shadows is a DIY artists-run community art project founded by a group of Visitor Assistants at the ICA, Boston that aims to break down barriers between art and the public, showcasing the creative work of museum workers while extending accessibility beyond institutional walls through community-centered exhibitions, programming, and catalogs.