Fourth cohort of Boston Artists-in-Residence announced

Through this program, the artists will work with a parallel cohort of City partners to explore, critique, and re-imagine City initiatives at the intersection of civil service, social justice, and artistic practice.

“We’ve seen great projects and powerful relationships come out of the Boston Artists-in-Residence program,” said Mayor Walsh. “I look forward to seeing this new cohort help us think creatively about how we can enhance our services and programs for all Boston residents.”

Experienced artists, cultural practitioners, and cultural workers across all disciplines were invited to apply. A selection committee made up of local arts leaders, former Boston artists-in-residence, and City officials selected the following artists: 

Anthony Romero

Anthony Romero is an artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting artists and communities of color. His collaborative practice engages intercultural exchange and historical narratives in order to generate reparative counter-images and social transformation. Recent projects and performances have been featured at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), the Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston) and the Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Biennial (Calgary, Canada). Publications include The Social Practice That Is Race, co-authored with Dan S. Wang, and the exhibition catalogue Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements, of which he was the editor. He is a cofounder of the Latinx Artist Visibility Award, a national scholarship for Latinx artists produced in collaboration with artist J. Soto and OxBow School of Art. Romero is a Professor of the Practice at the School of The Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 

Anthony will be working with the Mayor's Office for Immigrant Advancement, which seeks to strengthen the ability of immigrants and Boston’s diverse cultural and linguistic communities to fully participate in the economic, civic, social, and cultural life of our great City, and promote the recognition and public understanding of immigrant contributions to Boston.

Erin Genia

Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and organizer whose practice merges cultural imperatives, pure expression and material exploration with the conceptual. Genia seeks to create a powerful presence of Indigeneity in the arts, sciences, and public realm to invoke an evolution of thought and practice within societal instruments that is aligned with the cycles of the natural world and the potential of humanity. Erin’s work has been seen by national and international audiences, at the US Pavilion - Venice Biennale, the International Space Station, and the Urbano Project in Boston. Erin is a recent graduate of the Art, Culture and Technology at MIT, earned an MPA in Tribal Governance from the Evergreen State College and studied at Institute of American Indian Arts.

Erin will be working with the Office of Emergency Management, which plans for and helps to coordinate the response and recovery efforts to any major emergency impacting the City of Boston. 

Pat Falco

Pat Falco is an artist and organizer from Boston, Massachusetts. He received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His work has been shown at The Luggage Store Gallery (SF), New Image Art (LA), SPACE Gallery (Portland ME), Parklife (SF), New Bedford Art Museum and the deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum. His interest in highlighting and critiquing the absurdities of everyday life has recently shifted into the public realm, with a focus on Boston’s housing crisis. Through a faux-luxury development company Upward Living Associates, Inc. - he has produced a series of installations critiquing housing policies and development in Boston, and vying for alternatives on a path to housing justice. He has organized shows at the Distillery Gallery in South Boston since 2012 and is the recent recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship (Sculpture/Installation/New Genres) and a participant in the Now & There Public Art Accelerator program.

Pat will be working with the Housing Innovation Lab, which partners with different stakeholders to explore and test different ideas that increase housing affordability and opportunity.

Victor Yang

For the past decade, Victor has been working with people to tell their stories. Stories that articulate hard truths, demand change, and inspire others to do the same. As an artist-in-residence, he is excited to bridge City Hall and Boston streets in this project—to play accomplice to individual imagination and to collective vision. As an organizer, he has supported local community leaders to run national campaigns for immigrant rights, to stop ICE deportations, and to double voter turnout in communities of color. He is an MFA candidate in fiction at Boston University. He also has a PhD in Politics from the University of Oxford, where he studied movements for racial equity. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Boston Globe, Longreads, The Rumpus, and The Southern Review, among others. He received the 2018 Chertkov Fellowship for Labor and Justice at the Blue Mountain Center. Victor is an immigrant, and for immigrants, the notion of home can be complicated. Yet he unequivocally claims Boston as home, this place that has given him so much, and this place he hopes to give back to. As for his first home: his parents have and always will be his biggest inspiration.

Victor is working with the Boston Public Health Commission’s Violence Intervention & Prevention Initiative (VIP), which aims to prevent violence through building and sustaining strong communities where residents are knowledgeable about the root causes of violence and empowered to address them. 

Golden

Golden (they/them) is a black gender-nonconforming trans-femme photographer and poet raised in Hampton, VA, currently residing in Boston, MA. Utilizing their lifelong proximity to bullying, homophobia, racism, and transphobia, Golden empowers conversations around trauma work, representation, blackness, Americanisms, and gender identity and expression. Golden is the recipient of a Pink Door Fellowship (2017/2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminary Fellowship (2019), the Frontier Award for New Poets (2019), and a Pushcart Nomination (wildness, 2019). Their work has been featured on/at the Shade Journal, the Offing, wildness, Button Poetry, i-D, Interview Magazine, & elsewhere. Golden holds a BFA in Photography from New York University. 

Golden will be working with the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement, which seeks to promote gender equity by empowering women and removing systemic barriers to their advancement.

“I am so excited to build, challenge, and grow new understandings of community engagement and civic practice within a cohort of intentional artists through the City of Boston,” said Boston artist-in-residence Golden. “Alongside the Department of Women's Advancement, I know this opportunity to connect with women & femmes across the Greater Boston area, to further create more written & visual representations of black and POC trans/nonbinary femmes and their concerns, is going to be a fruitful experience. I can't wait to get started!”

During their year-long residency, the artists will research, co-design, and implement civic practice projects. The artists will collaborate with their partnering City department to imagine and test new approaches to City of Boston policies, processes, and procedures. Artists will then share their work publicly through facilitated workshops, presentations, and other forms of community engagement. The artists will work together as a cohort, and will be mentored by three former artists-in-residence, Karen Young, Rashin Fahandej, and Shaw Pong Liu.

“This is an unprecedented time in the City of Boston, and having a group of diverse, talented artists who can help us envision a stronger city is more valuable now than ever,” said Kara Elliott-Ortega, Chief of Arts and Culture. “I’m optimistic that this cohort will utilize their creative disciplines to help guide us through many of the issues we’re currently facing as a city.”

Since the creation of the Boston AIR program in 2015, the City has had a total of 25 artists-in-residence. This year’s program incorporates core learnings from previous years. Artists receive a $30,000 artist fee and up to $10,000 for project materials during their residency. 

Building off of Mayor Walsh's record-breaking investment in Boston's arts sector, the City of Boston is investing $250,000 for the artist residency program, as well as an additional $200,000 FY20 investment in sustaining key grantmaking programs for individual artists.

To learn more about Boston Artists-in-Residence, visit the Boston AIR website.