Some of my favorite memories of 2019 are of working with Now + There’s Accelerator artists. From helping them develop project concepts, to cheering with them when they find the perfect site, to joining in the celebration when they launch, there’s no shortage of wonderful moments, big and small. Now, as we look to 2020, I can’t wait to start working with an all-new group of Boston-based artists eager to expand their practice into the public realm.
So it’s with great pleasure that we announce this next Accelerator cohort: a dynamic group of six Boston-based artists, very diverse in aesthetic, approach, and media. These artists are each at an exciting point in their artistic careers, and ready to confront the exhilarating challenge of creating thoughtful, compelling artworks with communities.
We're thrilled to be able to get to know Shaka Dendy, Ang Li, Andrew Mowbray, Karthik Pandian, Gabriel Sosa, and Yu-Wen Wu and work with them to build their public art know-how. These artists are each invested in creating a more equitable present and future through their work. Through the Accelerator program, we are excited to offer them a framework to experiment and innovate. We're also excited to increase our support of the cohort in 2020 with the help of established public artist Gianna Stewart, who is joining us as our first-ever Public Art Accelerator Fellow. Gianna will work closely with me to make sure the artists have all they need to thrive through the program.
This third Accelerator cycle is generously funded by Joyce Linde and we are very grateful for her continued support of artists and communities. This year's cohort was selected from a pool of thirty-one talented artists by a panel of public art experts, practitioners, and enthusiasts including Jesse Baerkahn, Luis Cotto, Karin Goodfellow, Cher Krause Knight, and Daniela Rivera.
As in previous years, the 2020 program will guide its participants through a rigorous curriculum of workshops designed to equip them with everything they may need to successfully produce compelling public artworks. During the workshops, artists will create a conceptual design proposal to present to the same jury that selected them. If their concept design proposal is successful, each artist will receive $25,000 to complete their project.
There are many “highs and learns” (as we at N+T like to say!) along the road to building a public art city, but no matter what, public art makes for great memories. All of us on the N+T team can't wait to connect with more communities and memories through public art in 2020!
Shaka Dendy
Shaka Dendy is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working primarily in sculpture, video, performance, installation, and music. In addition to a fine art practice, he is one half of Camp Blood, a Boston-based industrial hip-hop band. Dendy holds a BA from Florida State University and an MFA in Film & Media Art from Emerson College. He currently works as a Teaching Artist at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
In 2019, Dendy was the Public Artist-in-Residence at Boston Center for the Arts, where his project Gestures of Incompleteness used community service-as-art to engage communities and reframe perceptions of race, class, and opportunity. This project resulted in valuable community donations and a semi-permanent public sculpture in Boston’s South End neighborhood.
In this Accelerator experience, Dendy is grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the community through his work, and deeply appreciative of Now + There’s support and guidance in doing so. As the youngest artist in this year’s cohort, he is looking forward to developing a skillset as a public artist by working alongside and learning from the cohort and Now +There fellows.
Ang Li
Ang is an architect and Assistant Professor in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University. Her work explores the maintenance practices and material afterlives behind architectural production through site-specific installations and temporary building experiments.
Ang has participated in exhibitions at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the Echo Art Fair in Buffalo, NY, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among others. Her most recent solo-exhibition, All That Is Solid–an investigation into the inventory systems of the contemporary waste-processing industry–was exhibited at Space p11 as a partner program to the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Her writing and work has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Log, Thresholds, Abitare, Wired and Blueprint.
During the Accelerator program, Ang looks forward to engaging Boston’s public art landscape through the city’s architectural inheritance.
Andrew Mowbray
Andrew Mowbray creates project-based work that employs many processes from sculpture, photography, video, horticulture, and traditional craft techniques.
His work has been exhibited extensively and often explores the context of the gallery or museum space as well as our contemporary relationships with domestic and urban architecture and nature. His solo exhibitions Another Utopia, Lamontagne Gallery, Boston, and Modular Forms, Gleb Gallery, Phillips Academy Andover MA, used modular formed Lagenaria gourds, created and grown by the artist as a way to think about sustainable architecture and building blocks for the future. Mowbray received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and is currently a Lecturer, Director of 3D Arts, and Co-Director of Architecture at Wellesley College.
He looks forward to meeting the other Now + There Public Art Accelerator participants and sharing thoughts and ideas throughout the process.
Karthik Pandian
Karthik Pandian is an artist who works across disciplines to unsettle the ground of history. He uses video, sculpture and performance to render the present through forgotten, fragmentary and mythical pasts.
Pandian has held solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Bétonsalon, Paris; and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis amongst others. His work has been featured in numerous international survey exhibitions such as the inaugural LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum in 2012; Okwui Enwezor’s La Triennale: Intense Proximity at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Film as Sculpture at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. His most recent project, Atlas Unlimited, a collaboration with choreographer Andros Zins-Browne and sculptor Zakaria Almoutlak, recently closed at 80 Washington Square East in New York City. Pandian teaches in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.
He is looking forward to working with the history of radical speech in Boston in the Public Art Accelerator this year.
Gabriel Sosa
Gabriel Sosa is an artist, linguist and educator whose practice is rooted in the cross-section of law, translation, social justice, and the synthesis of fact and fiction. Through a multi-disciplinary practice that includes drawing, video, and installation, he explores how the use of language subtly and consistently shapes our everyday experiences. Born and raised in Miami, he holds an M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Recent projects and exhibitions include¿Para llevar o para tomar aquí? at the O, Miami Poetry Festival, Let me explain to you what this means at the Tufts University Art Galleries and It’s Morning Again in America at the Illuminus Festival. In 2019, he was an artist-in-residence at Lugar a dudas in Cali, Colombia and is currently a Visiting Lecturer at MassArt. He is looking forward to learning about different approaches to public art and innovative ways to implement them in Boston.
Yu-Wen Wu
Born in Taiwan, Yu-Wen Wu’s subjectivity as an immigrant is central to her artwork. The projects she pursues operate at the crossroads of art, science, politics and cultural issues. The form the artworks take includes site-specific video installations, large-scale drawings, community engaged practices and public art. Her work can be broadly categorized into three areas: the current global migration crises, environmental displacement and the immigration experience.
Her most recent solo exhibitions include With/Out Water, Boston, High-Water Mark, Portsmouth and Leavings/Belongings, Boston. Wu was the 2018-2019 Artist-in Residence at the Pao Arts Center Boston, engaging community in the durational project Leavings/Belongings. This project brings together small groups of refugees, immigrants, and the public to make symbolic bundles that tell what was brought and what was left behind in their migration. Bridging experiences, generations, and ethnicities, the residency culminated in a transmedial installation of material artifacts and collected stories. Wu’s work has been exhibited at the Weisman Art Museum, Perlman Art Museum, MN and ICA MECA, ME among others.
She is a graduate of Brown University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. For the Accelerator Program, Yu-Wen looks forward to expanding current indoor installation ideas to the outdoors and continue building community on many different levels.