Collective Futures Fund announces the inaugural 20 recipients of grants for visual artists and artist-run activity in the Greater Boston area through grants between $2,000 and $6,000. Collective Futures Fund awards $80,000 per year to artists and groups for collaborative, public-oriented projects, with an emphasis on experimentation, risk taking, and unconventional viewpoints. “We are thrilled to support these artists’ visions for their own independent platforms and research that create community- driven futures for our region,” said Abigail Satinsky, Program Director and Curator & Head of Public Engagement at Tufts University Art Galleries. “We are grateful to our first cohort of grantees, to the over 150 artists who applied, our thoughtful jury panel, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and our donors for their support on this initiative. There is an incredibly vibrant artist community here, and we look forward to these artists making space for creativity, healing and celebration in our city and region.”

Sustaining Practice: $2,000 grants geared towards emerging artists and collaborators in need of funding support for search, project development, and sustaining themselves.

• Eli Brown | Researching time and space to further think through the next iteration of Trans Family Archives, pushing toward the formation of a sustaining, multigenerational team, co-invested in the project and in group decision-making.
• Emily Curran | Restorative Cultural Critique, an experiment in open-ended cultural critique and scheming, dreaming, and speculation about the future of museums. This experiment grows out of our work with Look at Art. Get Paid. (LAAGP), a socially engaged art project that pays people who don’t visit art museums to visit as guest critics of the art and its institution.
• Furen Dai | Proposing to create a 3D rendering video piece of an encyclopedic museum’s ruin through guided tours; bringing current conversation around encyclopedic museums where audiences can experience connections between cultures across time and space.
• Perla Mabel Ledesma | The Rhinoceros Womxn project consists of armor being made for Black Femme Boston community members. A collaborative self-love approach of exchanging narratives with intention toward Black Liberation; a march from Mattapan to South Boston highlighting the gentrification across Boston ending at a mural site depicting elevated and empowered Black Femme Bostonians.
• FeministFuturist | Planning public installations and detailed research into the possibilities and limitations of a specific site.
• Whitney Mashburn | Seeking funding to support research and development for “Holding Spaces” archive, a burgeoning curatorial project aimed to bear witness to lived experiences of those marginalized by chronic illness.
• Dave Ortega | Writing and drawing 240-paged graphic novel set in the city of Potosi, Bolivia centered on the Spanish silver trade and its impact on Quechua and other indigenous peoples of the area.
• Gabriel Sosa | Research projects considering the role of memory in jury trial specific to Massachusetts criminal court system.
• Ngoc-Tran Vu | Proposing a multimedia storytelling project based on Intergenerational culture of Vietnamese women both in the U.S. (Boston-based) and Vietnam. This project will be conducted from a series of bilingual conversations and building on Viet Family Stories.
• Omalará McCallister Williams | Creating collaboratively devised performance piece around masquerades and capes made from resist dye fabrics, which include a combination of wearable sculpture, movement, fiber art, projection, sound, installation, and audience interaction. Telling a story about a group of nomadic QT BIPOC people who have built a floating, water-based society in a decolonized Afro-future.

New Works / Projects: $6,000 grants geared towards supporting the creation of new visual public art projects focusing on collaborative and public facing component.

• Marlon Forrester, Jaypix Belmer, and Casey Curry | “You, Me, We: (D.R.G.) Dystopian Revolutionary Gallery Pod” is a creative placemaking project that bridges communities by puncturing institutional spaces with portals into communities often unseen or dismissed by the institution such spaces represent.
• Melissa Teng and George Halfkenny | “see you in the future” is a reminder that someone else cares for your continued survival, a reality never taken for granted around Mass/Cass. We are interested in exploring this request on a collective level, by engaging the richly nuanced community groups surrounding the Engagement Center and co-creating an art piece with stable and distributable forms.”
• The Hidden Prompt in collaboration with Community Conversations, Malden Public Library, and Converse Gallery | Progression| Regression is a project that birthed itself out of this very commitment. This project is the manifestation of a deep interest in the cultivation of art spaces as projects of community agency and celebration. As a public-engaging project, this work concerns itself with the making of an archive as a space to mourn and rejoice and process – a space for the stories of Maldonians to find breath, nourishment, and admiration.

Ongoing Platforms: $6,000 grants geared towards sustaining long-term projects with financial support to thrive, or to reach completion. These projects must focus on collaborative and public facing component.

• Bosscrit (Courtney Stock, Janet Loren Hill, Demetri Espinosa, Diana Jean Puglisi) | To facilitate a critique publication that would help to support our general programming. The funding would enable us to work with peer consultants to create a publication that aims to dismantle the harmful academic habits and dated structures of critique and offer inclusive and productive alternative possibilities.
• AgX Film Collective (Genevieve Carmel and Collective members) | The AgX Film Collective is applying for general support to sustain the work of our collective of more than 30 Boston-area filmmakers who work across film and video, with an interest in experimentation and openness to formal hybridity. This grant would better prepare for a safe re-opening of a space, to offer revamped film workshops, screenings, and other public events.
• Creative Action (Callie Chapman, Marissa Molinar, Caitlin Canty) | Propose to create “evergreen” educational resources for artists who are new to civic engagement in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville. Resources will include clarification of each City’s structure; the pathways for policy change, from advocacy to legislation; some basic history; a calendar of important events for engagement, including forums, town halls, and opportunities to vote; and updated contact information for representatives.
• Haus of Threes (Po Couto, Kimm Topping, Maddie Brancel, Alex Azevedo) | To create and open the doors to a Haus of Threes physical space that will serve the greater Boston area. To host a public grand opening where resident artists can exhibit and sell their work. To pay queer performers from the Boston area as entertainment at the grand opening event, and to deliver business and art workshops to Resident Artists.
• Mattapan Open Studio (Allentza “Alley” Michel) | Organized by Powerful Pathways, the objective of the Mattapan Open Studios/Open Streets (MOS/OS) is to celebrate and uplift the built and cultural environments of Mattapan using arts and design. Through a week of free inclusive place-based activities and events, artist exhibits, performances and small business promotions’ Build community and promoting the local arts, artists, and the community cultural fabric; Support economic development and shed positive light on the neighborhood.
• Alison Moses, Zahirah Nur Truth and Tanya Nixon-Silberg | My Black Body has brought together Black mothers in the Boston area through virtual and in-person connection, exploration and cultivation of embodiment practice while supporting the development of artistic creations of honest and affirming representation. My Black Body Challenges Black mothers to nurture the artist and mother in all of us and challenges our larger community to uplift these Black bodies.
• Boston LGBTQIA+Art Alliance (BLAA) | Propose to purchase a risograph printer. BLAA will be able to iterate Boston’s first queer arts printer and publisher.

Collective Futures Fund 2021 Jury included: Gloria Sutton, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and executive committee member of the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Northeastern University; James McAnally co-founder and Executive Director of The Luminary and editor and co-founder of MARCH: a journal of art & strategy; and Neda Moridpour, an artist, organizer, Professor of practice at SMFA at Tufts, and co-founder of two artist-activist collaboratives, LOUDER THAN WORDS and [P]Art Collective.

The Collective Futures Fund is administered by the Tufts University Art Galleries and is a part of the Regional Regranting Program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Sustaining Practice tier is supported by an anonymous donor. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Regranting Program supports the creation of independent, non-traditional, public-facing artists’ projects by partnering with leading cultural institutions in communities across the country. Tufts University Art Galleries is part of a national network in thirty-two cities.