Every year since 2015, a cohort of artists are selected to participate in a 15-month residency program at the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture. As a part of the Boston Artists-in-Residence program, artists are invited to collaborate with various city departments to promote and strengthen equity initiatives through art and community engagement.
The application for this year’s cohort of artists closed Feb. 18 and six applicants will be selected by the end of April to co-design projects with the Boston Transportation Department, Boston Parks and Recreation, the Boston Planning & Development Agency’s planning and research divisions and the Environment Department.
Sharon Amuguni, the program manager of Boston AIR, discussed how unique the program is compared to other residency programs and the ways it benefits the community.
“AIR can help us all learn to value the expertise that artists bring to civic service and municipal work,” Amuguni wrote in an email. “Artists provide a unique lens both through their creative practice and also through their role as active community members.”
Boston AIR engages artists with municipal work and city officials in creative ways to enhance policy outcomes for the community, and “seeks to connect and foster a collective of creative Bostonians in and out of City Hall,” Amuguni wrote.
Ty Furman, the managing director of the BU Arts Initiative, said the Boston AIR program is “amazing” and creates the kind of community-based art that is inspirational.
“It’s not just a way to highlight arts and the visibility in the community, but it’s also a way to help city administrators and city leaders rethink sometimes the role of the arts in community, in cities, in their department,” Furman said.
Furman commissioned a Boston AIR artist from 2020, Erin Genia, to work on a sculpture for BU to increase the visibility of indigeneity in the arts.
Genia’s work led to a public art installation at the George Sherman Union Plaza titled “Caution: Cultural Emergency” — a sculpture of Unktehi, a mythological Dakota water monster, angered by “a cultural and environmental emergency,” Furman said.
Pat Falco, a Boston-based artist, participated in the Boston AIR in 2020 and worked with the Boston Housing Innovation Lab and the ICA Teens program. With ICA Teens, Falco developed the “Common Ground Zine,” a collection of interviews and photos taken by ICA youth in their neighborhoods.
Falco held weekly workshops with alumni teens from the ICA to discuss youth engagement and their relationship with their neighborhood and space, as well as with the City.
“This was just like an experiment of kind of figuring out how to engage with youth and getting them to be involved in … municipal government practices,” Falco said. “It’s kind of like a pilot or smaller scale of imagining what it could look like.”
The youths were provided with photography and filming equipment to use in their neighborhoods, Falco said.
“Each one of them came back with a really beautiful and kind of very different interpretation of that,” Falco said.
The hope is that physical copies of the youths’ work will be distributed in neighborhood libraries by the summer.
Falco also worked with the Housing Lab and the Boston Society for Architecture on the “Future-Decker” project, where he designed a sculpture on his own in Seaport representing the history of the “three-decker” — a New England building type — in Boston.
“There’s two times in Boston’s history where they had an empty swath of land and one time they developed working class housing and the other time they developed the opposite, the Seaport, so it’s kind of just putting those histories alongside each other,” he said.
Falco’s sculpture, “Mock,” sparked the Future-Decker conversation series with the Housing Lab focusing on housing and affordability in Boston.
Amugini said other past projects can be found on the Boston AIR website.
“I hope to see more impactful and unexpected projects between artists and their city partners, and more opportunities for community members to play a role in the systems that are meant to serve them,” Amuguni wrote.
