Mayor Martin J. Walsh and Boston Art Commission Name George Fifield of Boston Cyberarts to Board

Mayor Martin J. Walsh and the Boston Art Commission have named George Fifield, the Founder and Director of Boston Cyberarts, to its Board for a five-year term. Nominated by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, George Fifield is the first board member to fill the new seat on the Boston Art Commission, which was recently expanded from a five-member to a nine-member board. 

“George brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the Board of the Boston Art Commission,” said Mayor Walsh. “His broad understanding of digital arts and media is perfectly aligned with our strong support for public art and artists. George will be a tremendous asset to both the Boston Art Commission and the City of Boston.”  

“I want to thank Mayor Walsh and the Boston Art Commission for this exciting opportunity,” said George Fifield. “I look forward to helping to bring innovative and contemporary public art to Boston.”  
Fifield is a media arts curator, writer, teacher, and artist. He is the founder and director of Boston Cyberarts, Inc. (http://bostoncyberarts.org), a nonprofit arts organization, which produced the biennial Boston Cyberarts Festival and currently manages The Boston Cyberarts Gallery inside the Green Street MBTA station on the Orange line. Fifield is a long-time Jamaica Plain resident.  

The Boston Cyberarts Festival celebrated a long tradition of technological and artistic innovation throughout Massachusetts from 1999 through 2011. The festival showcased artists and high-technology professionals from around the world who use new technology to advance traditional visual and performing arts disciplines.  
Boston Cyberarts also works on a variety of special projects in Boston, including Art on the Marquee (http://www.artonthemarquee.com) in partnership with the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.  
Boston Cyberarts, the National Park Service, and Boston Harbor Islands Alliance are also collaborating on an ongoing project to commission public algorithmic art for display on the LED screens at the park Welcome Center on the Greenway between Faneuil Hall and the Ferry Ticket Center on Long Wharf.  

From 1993 to 2006, Fifield was curator of new media at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA. He was executive co-producer for The Electronic Canvas, an hour-long documentary on the history of the media arts. Produced by the DeCordova Museum for WGBH-TV, The Electronic Canvas aired in April 2000 in Boston and subsequently was in national PBS distribution. Fifield is also executive producer for the feature length comedy Made-Up, written and produced by his wife, Lynne Adams.  

In addition, Fifield has written on a variety of media, technology and art topics for Artbyte, Bomb, Communication Arts, Digital Fine Arts, The Independent Film and Video Monthly, Sculpture Magazine, and Art New England. Among his numerous curatorial efforts, he co-curated the computer installation art show, The Computer Is Not Sorry at the Space in January 1993 and in May 1999, he co-curated Mind Into Matter, the first international survey show of new digital sculpture at the Computer Museum in Boston. 
 

Fifield has taught at a number of institutions on New Media subjects. Presently he is adjunct faculty with the Digital Media program at Rhode Island School of Design where he teaches a graduate level course on Interactivity in the Fine Arts. He has lectured at Harvard University, Brandeis University, Massachusetts College of Art, University of California Los Angeles, University of Tampa, and many others. 
Fifield is also a member of VideoSpace, which he founded in 1991. VideoSpace, a project of Boston Cyberarts Inc., is a collective of media artists who have organized and presented exhibitions of video art at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Mobius performance space in Boston, the Harvard Film Archives at Harvard University and produced shows for the Public Access Television Consortium of Eastern Massachusetts and arts organizations throughout New England. His own art videos have been exhibited at the Dallas Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the International Super 8 Film and Video Festival in Brussels, Belgium among others. 

In 2006, Fifield was honored with the First Annual Special Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Boston Arts Community by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Boston Chapter. 
Boston Art Commission’s current Board members can be found at http://www.publicartboston.com/content/who.  
For additional information about the Boston Art Commission, visit http://publicartboston.com.