Collective Futures Fund supports ideas that bring communities together in radical reconsiderations of our status quo. They are excited to announce twenty grant recipients for visual artists and artist-run activity in the Greater Boston area for its 2023 funding cycle. Through individual grants of $2,000 and $6,000, Collective Futures Fund awards a total of $80,000 per year to artists and groups for collaborative, public-oriented projects, with an emphasis on experimentation, risk taking, and unconventional viewpoints.

“In this third year of the Collective Futures Fund, we continue to fund Sustaining Practices, New Works, and Ongoing Platforms,” says new Program Director of the Collective Futures Fund, Laurel V. McLaughlin. “The Collective Futures Fund is a key structural step in artistic world building in the Greater Boston region. From projects such as a mobile massage cart interacting with immigrant communities in Boston’s Chinatown, an open-access multimedia publication concerning local ecologies with new writings, works of art, video roundtables and documentaries, and printable zines to a trans-affirming public writing collective creating installations in interstitial spaces, the Collective Futures Fund continues its mission to resource vibrant communities in Greater Boston. We are grateful to unite these artists with the support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and a generous anonymous donor, as well as collaborate with discerning and generous jurors.”

Sustaining Practice

$2,000 grants for emerging individual artists and collaborators who need critical support for research, to develop new projects and future ideas, and sustain themselves in the process.

• Jhona Xaviera Fabian | CHIMÆRA/SERAPHIM: ANGELS DON’T FALL FROM HEAVEN uses poetry and prose, music and sound, light and fabric, photography and video to create altar installations that are ritually activated through drag performance. Fabian seeks to revive queer ancestral bloodlines traced back to the Yoruba people brought to the island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as the Taíno people by using their installations to emulate a deity while reclaiming monstrosity as a path of transformation and resistance.

• Ran He | Asian immigrant women and nail salon industry researches the relationship between Asian immigrant women and the nail salon industry in Boston, through conversations collecting their lived experiences to inform an installation composed on ceramic sculptures and paintings responding to these exchanges. The artist specifically explores “[workers’] compensation, living and working condition, how they came to the U.S.” The project also asks: “Why did they want to come to the U.S.?; What makes them work as a manicurist, and what are some of the emotional skills to finesse strong reactions of customers?”
• Jessica Roseman | Nourish composes a community-based movement project of recognizing and choosing what you need in the moment, as a form of social change. By resourcing memory, attention, physicality, talking, drawing, and writing, Nourish participants get grounded and connected to themselves, their surroundings, and each other. Nourish is developing an immersive, interactive exhibition that through time-based interactivity in a 3D public space, intends to gently bridge the gaps between public performance and personal experience; active dancer and “passive” audience; movement and visual art.

• Stephen Proski | Paintings for the Blind investigates strategies to supplement visual language to reach a deeper understanding of ourselves and one another when images do not suffice. As part of a practice that advocates for a language of accessibility and accommodation in a seemingly inaccessible world—a world that is dominated by the hegemonic forces of vision and power—they will create works that addresses their personal experience of blindness while questioning and interrogating the imposing hierarchical structures that continue to shape, oppress, and favor the ocularcentric.

• Zhidong Zhang | No Place Like Home is a photography project that explores the gap of photographic representation between the real and the imagined, and its functionality to articulate and manifest personal experiences through particular regimes of representation/non-representation, within which the exteriorization of queerness is made visible and accessible in a state of grotesque masquerade and visual rhetoric. Zhang asks: How does one find oneself without compromising when identities are only produced by the representation of alterity? And how to orient oneself between the construct of Asian-ness and the actual being of Asian?

• Kitaab Kollective : Anukriti Kaushik and Aftan | Ziddi (Urdu ضدی meaning obstinate, persistent, stubborn) Zubaan (Hindi जुबान, Urdu زَبانmeaning tongue, language, speech, flame (of candle) tip(of pen)) The term Ziddi Zubaan is borrowed from the song Khalbali by A.R. Rahman (from 2006 Bollywood film Rang De Basanti). It is the title for Kitaab Kollective’s first publication project, and one that serves to curate/compose/ impart knowledge in the form of artistic expression and dissent, through a series of open calls and artistic collaborations from across Boston and South Asia.

• Maria Servellon | Phantasma offers a narrative short film centered around a woman who hears the persistent ring of a mysterious bell. Determined to uncover its unknown source, she calls out from work on a whim and embarks on a day-long introspective journey. Along the way, she encounters an array of individuals often ignored by society. Phantasma examines the cards that have been dealt to us and what we decide to do with them.

• Iaritza Menjivar | Silence Dies Here researches the long-term effects of generational trauma in children of immigrants in the United States, involving interviews with immigrant families and first-generation Americans, culminating in an installation of photographs and text. The artist’s goal is for this work to serve as a resource through direct programming and to provide a space for people to gather and have vulnerable conversations.

• Wen Yu | Aurora Dance or Killed by Jupiter choreographs immersive virtual reality using motion capture to create an “aurora dance” that reimagines the movements of Aurora within Jupiter’s atmosphere to explore the sensual intersection of mythology, gendered politics of knowledge production. The project seeks to poetically manifest the experiences of women “dancing” in a male-dominated world.

• sair götz | T4Be: trans-affirming public writing organizes trans-affirming collaborative public writing in which the Greater Boston T4T community co-writes messages of upliftment for our trans siblings to be displayed in public settings. They have installed, inscribed, and enacted public messages on walls in monumental scale, on sidewalks in ice cream, and on rivers in ice. Funding supports research into collective writing experiments, scouting locations and venues, learning local ordinances, and identifying environmentally safe materials.

New Works

$6,000 grants to support the creation and public presentation of new work / projects by visual artists, curators, or collectives.

• Che Yeh | Interstitial Lives is a community-oriented project that attempts to build cross-species kinship between residents in the Boston Chinatown neighborhood, passersby, and their ruderal plant neighbors—ones that grow in interstitial spaces, between buildings, highways, and fences. The project focuses on one of the ruderal plants, Ailanthus altissima (commonly known as “tree of heaven”), and proposes them as living monuments. They witness, commemorate, and reactivate moments of self-organized resistance and embody multiple cultural, familial, and personal memories that challenges neoliberal urbanization. The two-week-long project features presentations, panel discussions, workshops, a walk tour, a massage session, and a temporary exhibition. Through these commingling events, citizens came together to vibrate with plants, to be massaged, to move alongside others, and to collectively ponder the question: how to live an entangled and interstitial life?

• Katarina Burin | Planned to be Unplanned situates outdoor site-specific sculptures that draw attention to the material history of Boston’s brutalist architecture and the fraught relationship that this architecture continues to have within public space. The project takes this discrepancy between the ideology that concrete evokes and the harshness of its realized design as a point of departure for sculptural objects that toe the line between model and site, function and aesthetics, fiction and archive.

• Maria Patricia Tinajero and Julie Poitras Santos | SOIL CULTURE aims to address the growing problem of waste and pollution on and within urban soils as well as promote soil remediation, through a public walk and freely available map of scientific and creative research that facilitates participant discovery of the hidden narratives of soil. This ecologically engaged project looks at soil degradation as part of the capitalist infrastructure of consumption and production, where soil is without recourse. SOIL CULTURE invites participants to a site to experience embodied understandings regarding hidden narratives and historical material layers that shape the community in Essex County, Massachusetts.

• Joe González and May-Lisa Chandler | Guilty Until Proven Innocent (The Sean Ellis Story) narrates the story of Sean Ellis, a 19-year-old Black man wrongfully imprisoned in Boston for 22 years, through movement and choreography. The piece aims to shed light on the ongoing racialized violence that police exhibit against people of color, in addition to bringing healing and acting as a call to action in the fight for justice, explored through a contemporary dance lens.

• Nelly Kate, Georgina Kleege, Fayen d’Evie and Charles Gushue | Space is Noise You Feel explores the sensorial translations of stories through collaborative video installation. Georgina Kleege is an artist who is blind and translates text to movement, while Nelly Kate films her movement and creates parallel translations of sound, audio description, and captions.

• Carolyn Lewenberg and Maria Lopes | Rafael Hernández Collaborative Mural develops a collaborative mural located at the Rafael Hernandez Dual Language school. In partnership with this year’s 7th grade class, students will work with lead artists throughout the entire process, from site selection and ideation to design development and implementation.

Ongoing Platforms

$6,000 grants to support sustaining or the completion of long-term projects. This category recognizes the commitment, time, and focus required to pursue long-term artistic endeavors that support and foster local artist communities.

• Kirsten Swenson and Rebecca Uchill | On This Ground: Local Ecologies of Eastern Massachusetts explores the layered history of Massachusetts as an open-access, free, public-facing multimedia book hosted by Amherst College Press and Fulcrum (University of Michigan Press), as a new genre publication that presents key artistic practices. This project shares works of research and social practice ranging in focus from the plastics industries of Leominster and the nuclear futures of Plymouth to the indigenous memorialization of Deer Island. This multimedia publication will also present new writings, works of art, video roundtables and documentaries, and printable zines.

• Ami Bennitt | Culture Crisis Convenings raises visibility and promotes conversation around the prevention of artistic, musical, and cultural displacement across Greater Boston through collaborative events. Events will take place in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, and convene stakeholders in arts, advocacy, government, funding, and development to discuss potential solutions to the decades-long problem of arts displacement in the region. Convenings will also feature artists sharing their own experiences having been displaced and detailing its impact on artist practice, livelihood, and wellbeing.

• Xray Aimes | “Six (part of a series)” connects six LGBTQIA+ collaborators to each other, with one piece of thread in a multidisciplinary performance. The work breaks the fourth wall to create a space for collective reflection, curiosity, and dialogue between myself, my collaborators, and the audience.

• John Guthrie and Stace Brandt | Gallery VERY supports local artists and fosters an intergenerational creative community as a queer artist-run gallery and exhibition space in Boston. The gallery is committed to resourcing independent artists to show and document unseen work while cultivating immersive curation that expands beyond white cube conventions. Funding will support a digital publication inspired by the “In The Studio” series as a way to experiment stylistically, incorporate multidisciplinary approaches, and nourish the Boston art ecosystem. The publication will engage diverse voices throughout the community including emerging and mid-career artists, writers, and designers and featuring creative critical writings, finished and in-process artworks, interviews, and poetry.