Sustaining Practice—$3,000 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.

• Jana Amin | Azooma: The Arab Kitchen as Visual Archive   

  Azooma is a visual and culinary arts project featuring a supper club series where participants eat alongside archival materials and a curatorial project featuring analogue film photographs of Arab women's kitchens in Greater Boston, in partnership with Minara's existing community.  

• Jamison Cloud | where the roots meet 

  where the roots meet will explore the intersection of native plants from Colombia and Massachusetts, in which Cloud will cultivate, harvest, and process into handmade paper by way of my community garden plot in Dorchester. Through this research, the artist hopes to investigate how plants from these two very different geographies can coexist within a single material practice, creating paper that embodies both personal and cultural histories.  

• Simone John | Motherwit: Archival Storytelling Practice and Platform    

  Motherwit: Archival Storytelling Practice and Platform pursues answers through the archive: family photographs, domestic ephemera, newspaper clippings, and vernacular imagery produced within Black communities across the twentieth century. The project includes two concurrent periods of practice development: a solo writing retreat at Easton's Nook in Newark to draft family/function, a biomythographic graphic memoir and preparation for my pilot solo exhibition at Roslindale Open Studios in fall 2026. 

• Dorian Wood | Mares Ocultos   

  Mares Ocultos (Spanish for “Hidden Seas”) comes from a larger series of experimental compositions investigating the heteronormative construct through interviews the artist conducts with subjects who identify as cis heterosexual men. Each Mares Ocultos composition introduces visual research centering on local queer histories and interview audio to create the foundations for experimental scores for different chamber ensembles.  

• Melissa Q. Teng | The Urgency of Presence 

  The Urgency of Presence emerges from long-term collaborations with unhoused communities and activists as well as public servants and frontline workers in Boston. The project will use archives, walking, and interviews to investigate connections between Long Island, encampments like Mass and Cass, and spatial care practices like mutual aid. 

• Daniel Keating Jr. | Can I get a ride  

  Can I get a ride is a project borne from a desire to understand how Boston's overlapping infrastructures meet with human experience in urban environments—traversed and supported by its most public facing employees (bus operators). The project features 200 poems and created corresponding artworks documenting what Keating experiences from the driver's seat of an MBTA bus: complex systems dynamics, expressions of human experience for exhibition in accessible public spaces like libraries, city hall, and T stations.  

• Enzo Nguyen | Doo-rēan       

  Doo-rēan is a queer design, curatorial, and archival practice that reconstructs and reimagines reading rooms as community spaces for collective learning and flourishing. The project conducts research through the creation of pop-up reading rooms that engage archivists, artists and/or the public. Doo-rēan’s spatial and experiential interventions develop queer and decolonial approaches to archiving and public history and events center on the stewardship of anti-war movements within today’s global struggle.

• Andrew Zou | Where We Belong 

  Where We Belong is a photographic series exploring migration, belonging, identity, and interpersonal connection through portraiture and domestic space. Using large format camera, the project creates intimate environmental portraits that examine how people develop a sense of self and home within moments of transition, displacement, and cultural negotiation.

• Beatriz Amelia & Gabo Azurdia | Today I remember: Cartografías de Memoria       

  Today I remember: Cartografías de Memoria will engage with personal archives as a way of building a collective memory system within the Latinx diaspora community. The project aims to connect the younger generation to older first-generation immigrants and longtime community members through portraiture and collage workshops in order to gain more understanding of how to create community storytelling platforms through the reimagination of personal archives. 

• Delia Harrington | Measured in Stitches: Fiber Art, Disability, and Lived Data 

  Measured in Stitches: Fiber Art, Disability, and Lived Data engages the crossover of fiber art, data visualization, and disability/chronic illness, and the way that disabled people can use these tools to express lived experiences and build community. The project aims to expand my knowledge of data science, increase community, and explore expressions of experience.  

   

  New Projects—$8,000 grants supporting the creation and public presentation of new projects

• ponnapa prakkamakul | Streetlife  

  Streetlife is a creative placekeeping project that uses asphalt murals to create culturally expressive markers at crosswalks along the edges of Boston’s Chinatown. By transforming everyday public infrastructure into meaningful cultural landmarks, Streetlife helps affirm Chinatown’s presence within a rapidly changing urban environment. The project is co-created with multigenerational residents, including youth, students, and seniors who live, learn, and gather in the neighborhood. Through a collaborative design process, participants will share stories, memories, and cultural traditions that inform the mural design.  

• Fatima Hamdani & Felix Rosen | House(ing) of Worship 

  House(ing) of Worship is a collective experiment in the potential of art, aesthetics, material culture, and architecture to generate a space in which the cultivation of shared belonging becomes possible through hybrid rituals and reciprocal social practices. This project mines archives documenting the more than one-thousand-year history of shared material culture and belonging of Muslim and Jewish peoples in the Middle East, North Africa, Southern Europe, and South Asia. The project endeavors to co-design, build, and occupy a mobile, deployable-in-public sacred space in which local Muslim and Jewish communities can pray, study, and gather together side-by-side and intertwined.

• Karina Malm, Paul DeFazio, Hannah Wong, and Caroline Karbowski | Blind Design Workshop: Perkins Campus + Multi-sensory Access Mapping        

  Blind Design Workshop: Perkins Campus + Multi-sensory Access Mapping uses knowledge and practices from Blind maker culture, and collective experience in art, architecture, accessible design, and human factors research. Employing a non-visual survey kit and experimental forms of Orientation & Mobility (O&M) practice, the project explores the architecture at Perkins School for the Blind, a center of Blind culture and technology in Boston. The research will lead to the development of a curricular toolkit on teaching nonvisual art and design and be disseminated through a weekend workshop with Blind high school students. 

• Cicely Carew & Anthan Rajaratnam | Witnessing Tree       

  The Witness Tree is a permanent, site-responsive sculptural installation, centering on a 300-year-old tree at 15 Simms Street in West Newton—one of only two remaining structures from The Village. The Village was once a thriving African American community of approximately 100 homes, erased by turnpike development in the 1960s. The project collaborates with Anthan Rajaratnam of Black Cat Labs for fabrication, a certified arborist, and the surrounding church and school communities. It will restore the tree's structural health and activate its ground as a gathering space in an ecological and collective memory installation. 

• Tushar Gidwani & Homa Sarabi | Beatrice Has A Dream        

  Beatrice Has A Dream is an 18-minute film that concludes with a hybrid community performance, that reconstructs Beatrice’s fractured past by documenting the lead up to a one-woman show. Beatrice Fernando is a seventy-year old Sri Lankan in Massachusetts who survived domestic trafficking in Beirut, rebuilt her life across several continents, and is now; with uncompromising determination, pursuing her dream of becoming an actress. The performance blurs the lines between lived testimony, theatre, and dreams. Through this project, we investigate the healing potential of art in the aftermath of trauma, while tracing the communal fabric of Greater Boston that shaped Beatrice’s journey over the last decade.  

• Bosede Ajibola Opetubo & Lucy Lomas | Artist/(m)Other… 

  Led by two Black women, a practicing artist and a practicing OB/GYN, Artist/(m)Other… comprises a series of public explorations of vulnerability, care, and (self)perception. In the form of collaborative, photography-based experiments led by, for, and among Black women, this three-part project initiates/invites them into an embodied experience of seeing and being seen. 

• Ruben Feliz | A Man's First Bouquet 

  A Man's First Bouquet is a visual art project and community event exploring what it means to give someone their flowers while they can still receive them. Rooted in painting, photography, and participatory installation, the project asks why emotional acknowledgment for Black and Latino men is so often deferred until death. The project unfolds across August 2026 in Greater Boston and Lawrence, MA through two community activations and a main immersive exhibition.  

Ongoing Platforms—$8,000 grants sustaining long-term projects

• Gabriel Sosa, Colomba Klenner, Riley McLaughlin, Iz Hall, and Nate Bourget | Come print with us: ñ press open studios 

  ñ press is a community print studio and publishing platform focused on connection, activism, and education. Launched by artist Gabriel Sosa as part of the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, ñ press conceptualizes print as public art, embracing its capacity to circulate in the public space while providing opportunities for shared learning. Through screenprinting and risography, ñ press produces posters, zines, pamphlets, and books that prioritize care, solidarity, and social advocacy. ñ press lives at Maverick Landing Community Services (MLCS), a community health nonprofit in East Boston.  

• An Hà, Vivian Tran, and Miguel Caba | Copenger   

  Copenger is an artist-run, nomadic platform that organizes experimental exhibitions and happenings to create unexpected encounters between people, artwork, and place. The collective stages exhibitions in unconventional venues—church, farm, laundromat, café—challenging parameters of what art exhibitions in Boston can be, where they can happen, and whom they can serve. They approach each site collaboratively, exploring how art can meaningfully live within existing contexts while serving surrounding communities. And they organize participatory activations informed by the poetic assemblage of Southeast Asian street vendor booths and traditions of resourcefulness shaped by frugal upbringings.  

• Leddy Rosalia Saenz & Yumi Izuyama | Banderines de la Memoria: De Muchas Casas / From Many Homes 

  Banderines de la Memoria: De Muchas Casas/ From Many Homes is the second stage of Somerville Quipus, a public art community building project. Stage 1 (2025–2026) reached Padres Latinos through a quipu weaving workshop and a collective installation unveiled at Fiesta Junina 2026. In response to the deepening immigration climate and the growing need for safe, welcoming public spaces, Stage 2 expands the work from Padres Latinos to the broader Latino immigrant population in Somerville. In fall 2026, families will harvest dye plants at the Growing Center; across winter, they will transform recycled textiles into naturally-dyed cloth flags at Leddy's studio in Somerville; and in summer 2027, the flags are strung between trees in the spirit of papel picado.