The Collective Futures Fund is excited to announce the 2022 grant recipients.

Collective Futures Fund awards $80,000 per year to visual artists, collectives, and collaborators in the Greater Boston area for exhibitions, publications, research, and other public presentations with an emphasis on experimentation, risk taking, and unconventional view points.

2022 Grant Recipients

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

• Yuko Okabe| Art Is Work, illuminates issues around labor rights for primarily socially-engaged artists and community co-authors and includes a series of infographics and short animations that will help distill legal and ethical practices to socially-engaged creatives as well as a virtual and printed zine that ponders ideas about art under capitalism and its history.
• Ponnapa Prakkamakul | Boston Chinatown Guerrilla Cartography aims to recreate a virtual guerrilla garden in a form of illustrated maps as a starting point to find a potential space in the neighborhood for the Chinatown Backyard that was taken away as a result of gentrification this year. Through a partnership with youth artists from ACDC’s A-VOYCE program, Prakkamakul will conduct field research, including observations and on-site interviews with a diverse demographic of Chinatown residents.
• Karen Krolak| Dictionary of Negative Space (DoNS) illustrates challenges of mourning in a culture that refuses to name many ideas related to loss, grief, and trauma. This funding will support research time to identify Braille transcribers, Braille book designers, and user experts living with blindness, low vision, and/or cognitive disabilities.
• Anita Morson-Matra | Baldwin in the Park (BITP) centers theatrical performances that re-imagine James Baldwin’s work in meaningful park locations, live interpretations of Baldwin’s words that expose a search for self–across religion, origin, ethnicity and sexuality–that urgently needs airing today.
• Carol Stakenas: | Research project into the harm reduction landscape of Boston, connecting with artists, harm reductionists and people with lived experiences. Culminating in a series of group conversations to discuss what is needed to cultivate communities of care, and a public gathering inviting participants to share their work and envision a collective future.
• Kelly Slater| Researching for a multiyear project titled Old Growth Trees of Massachusetts: A Portrait of Ancient Trees as Healers and Teachers in a Warming Planet involving old growth trees in several documented locations in Massachusetts. The project will entail exhibitions and artists talk of work in progress; and free public art-making workshops that will include educational material on how trees can help ameliorate climate change.
• Feda Eid| Made in USA, ??? ?? ??????, is a visual story exploring the complexity of what is made, grown, cultivated and nourished in these lands. Through a reimagined red, white, and blue color palette, it explores personal experiences growing up as an Arab, Lebanese and Muslim American in a “melting pot” of assimilation, discrimination, orientalism, and dominating negative stereotypes perpetuated by art, politics and the media.
• Julia Cseko| Funding for the development of studio practice and upcoming exhibition that will involve creating more elaborate performances for the camera, researching and reading literary works to create word paintings, public murals, and textile works and a continuation of collaboration with contemporary writers.
• Pat Falco:| There Is No Place is an ongoing artistic project that is a combination of research, collecting, and creating based around personal narratives in the concept of home and displacement. Working towards an exhibition centered around this story of Boston, an archive without a hierarchy, a narrative without a structure.

New Works- $6,000 grants supporting the creation and public presentation of new work / projects

• William Nelson, Patrick Campbell (Videographer), Eric Eramo (Shop Owner):| Clippers & Conversation | An interview series that captures the life experiences of the everyday man. Through casual conversation in the barber chair, our goal is simply to create a platform that allows men to be vulnerable. By discussing their victories and defeats, it gives the next man an advantage at overcoming life’s obstacles. Interview candidates will be men from all walks of life in effort to create diversity in the value we offer on this platform.
• Orbis editions: Jessica Hankey, Ozlenen Ozbicerler, Lara Baladi, Sophie Hamacher, with Viva Ruiz | Orbis Editions | An artist’s run small press that integrates publications with performance and participatory actions. With support from the Collective Futures Fund, Orbis will be able to create a performance action with the artist Viva Ruiz as part of her ongoing project “Thank God for Abortion” in conjunction with the launch of the publication Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance, to which she is a contributor; support a series of performances by the artist Lara Baladi in conjunction with her artist’s book Anatomy of Revolution: An ABC Primer, which traces its origins to the eruption of protest and dialogue in public space in 2011 in Tahrir Square in Egypt; and create an open call to work with a new Boston area-based artist.
• Dan Borelli and Marco Kaltofen – Unfriending the Atom, a collaboration between an artist and a scientist who’s gathered objects across thirty years of field work, evidencing the exotic data of nuclear particles on everyday objects. The art is using the color chart of radionuclides to precisely communicate the radioactive contamination on these objects. These hundreds of objects reveal a portrait of nuclear presence across the globe and positions this project as a critique of the greenwashing underway that nuclear production of energy is ecologically sound. The artistic intent of this proposal is to prototype a display system that will make these objects public, safely, to show the lurker danger that persists across nuclear sites and beyond the current human forms of timekeeping.
• AOA Supply Collective, Mar Chapman, Natas Mann (JB), Ivan Rickiez (Eyevan), Doe-Fernando:| Virtual Reality (VR) painting school in Boston, their mission as a collective is to use art and technology to fill the digital divide gap between white and Black artists through encompassing and passing knowledge and experiences along with the newest visual artistic technology to low-income marginalized artists to help bridge the technology divide between white and black households. We intend to experiment with future technologies that meet at the intersection of art and tech in future sessions.
• Whitney Mashburn Holding Space Archive is a burgeoning, yet long-term curatorial project which aims to bear witness to the lived experiences of those marginalized by chronic illness. It is Boston-based, disability-centered and led, and manifests through dialogue/interviews, presentation of and engagement with art works, and written texts/manifestos by chronically ill creators. It is a “living archive,” meaning that it is an archive centered around the lived experiences of artists, rather than simply the art itself. Whitney Mashburn was a 2021 Sustaining Practice grantee.
• Sarah Kanouse and Nicholas Brown: Public Parks/Native Lands (working title) maps the settler colonial present of Greater Boston’s celebrated parklands through three interlocking components: a video installation, a public walking tour, and an artist’s guidebook. Specifically, the project documents the convergence of modern-day public parks and 17th and 18th century “bounty” land grants awarded to colonists by the British crown for service in wars against Indigenous nations. Public Parks/Native Lands contributes to an ongoing reckoning with the legacies of colonial violence and a re-imagining of public space in pursuit of social, environmental, and spatial justice.

Ongoing Platforms – $6,000 grants sustaining long-term projects

• bashezo, Kamaria Weemz, Simone John, Golden:| Roots + Futures (R+F) is an iterative multi-year exploration into Black Queer Trans (BQT) futurity, liberation, and active archiving through the creation of Living Altars. The 2nd iteration of R+F will focus primarily on research (informal kiki sessions + archive review), Living Altar design and installation as a method to publicly commemorate our BQT participants/collaborators and deepen our interpersonal connections while moving at a pace of trust.
• Golden: | A DEAD NAME THAT LEARNED HOW TO LIVE, will extend the Juneteenth Neighborhood Salon commission in collaboration with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to new venues, to showcase the intimacy of Black queer & trans community within the Greater Boston area. With chosen & birth family, Golden has re-purposed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s collection as backdrops to collaborative photographic portraits that ask: What does freedom mean within & to a museum? What is possible when Black queer & trans folk are allowed to bridge, beacon, & be?
• Ngoc-Tran Vu| 1975: A Healing Memorial Project, an ongoing visioning project to create a permanent public memorial based in Dorchester for 2025 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and the beginning of the Southeast Asian Diaspora. The artist will research and study memorials and monuments in order to build a 3D model that will be presented to the local community of Dorchester to cultivate support and awareness for the project. Ngoc-Tran Vu was a 2021 Sustaining Practice grantee.
• Catherine Siller, Betsy Goldman, Melissa Mirza, Abby Swidler:| The Mysteries of Life: a Queer Nature Walk is a multimedia installation and performance that uses true stories of animals’ social interactions and mating rituals to challenge heteronormativity and affirm queerness and trans-ness as natural. The performance celebrates gender diversity in the natural world, and reminds us that we’re a part of the natural world too – gender diversity in humans is just as beautiful, normal, and necessary as it is in snails and sunfish.