The Studios at MASS MoCA welcomes twelve Massachusetts artists for the first ever Converging Liberations Residency organized by the Boston-based CreateWell Fund.
CONVERGING LIBERATIONS is an experimental and community-informed project committed to the belief that artistic practice is key to imagining and practicing liberatory futures for Massachusetts-based artists of color. Artists receive a fully funded 1-month residency, plus living and travel stipends. The residency's design is informed by community feedback, carried out by members of CreateWell's Co-Tending Designers, and hosted by the Studios at MASS MoCA. The residency is designed to provide resources, time and space for community building, research and artistic experimentation across disciplines.
ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
Anukriti Kaushik
(they/them/theirs)
Predominantly working with drawing, painting, sculpture, video, writing, and photo, Anukriti’s practice involves rendering the female and queer body to recontextualize it as sacred and sublime. Drawing from personal experiences, Anukriti generates visual narratives that challenge rigid norms and traditions pertaining to beauty, gender, and sexuality. Elaborate mark-making of body hair and intricate imagery is a symbolic reinvention of prayer and devotion to their Gods as it requires intention, focus, and repetition. By contrasting spontaneous, expansive mark making with controlled microscopic ones, they integrate comprehensive and simplistic linework to generate ornate patterns that exude grandiosity. Thereby, embellishing their creations with abundant patterns by mere repetition and detailing of simplified shapes.
Didi Delgado
(DiDi/they/them/theirs)
DiDi Delgado is a Radical Visionary and Philanthropist, Award-Winning Author and Poet, Experienced Anti-Racism Educator, Engaging Public Speaker, and a Passionate Advocate and Activist for Black women, non-men, and MaGes (Marginalized Genders).
Jaypix Belmar
(they/them/theirs)
Identifying as a nonbinary black, Indigenous person of color, I have a special way of using the lens as a tool for storytelling. Born & raised in Boston, Ma. I am a graduate of New England Art Institute with a B.A. in Photography and have worked with clients in both private and commercial industries known for embedding emotion through light and color for an eye-popping reflection. My photography teaches you the importance of the soul.
Keysha Rivera
(she/her/hers)
Keysha Rivera is a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist originally from Holyoke, Massachusetts. Rivera's practice currently focuses on Puerto Rican futurism using textiles and family photos. Rivera is building anticolonial narratives by using crafts such as sewing to stitch together intergenerational experiences that act as a form of resistance to U.S occupation in Puerto Rico. Rivera hopes to continue to uphold the importance of craft as a language and as a way to heal.
Perla Mabel
(they/them/theirs)
Perla Mabel is an Afro-Caribbean multi-disciplinary artist, born in Boston, MA, raised in the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. They deeply identify with their Dominican heritage, channeling themes of survival and recalling historical events and figures from their culture. Their practice reclaims their Blackness by incorporating satin fabrics used in rituals practiced in Santeria. Mabel honors the people they paint by using the fabric as their canvas, along with other materials, beads, and objects. In their 2D and installations, they incorporate Afro-diasporic practices passed down from previous generations. By reclaiming spaces of vulnerability and trauma to highlighting joy and resilience, Mabel’s portraits expand the possibilities of Blackness in art as a healing and empowering act. Currently, they have been developing an extension of this project titled, Rhinoceroses Womxn/Armor. This project invites Black femme-identifying community members to join in Mabel’s movement to embracing the self, Blackness, liberation from societal expectations and the colonizer’s gaze, and inspire others to do the same, through painting, performance, and custom apparel.
Lolita Parker Jr
(she/her/hers they/them/theirs)
As a photographer, oral historian and artist Lolita Parker, Jr. creates in the broadest sense of the word. Co-creating community, public art installations, historical archives, garden beds, and personal/political imagery. With a wave of a library card, she rolls up her sleeves, encourages like minds along the way, and together they work till the magic happens. Originally from the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, CA, she calls Boston her intellectual homeplace where smart, striving scholars from every-which-where gather to try harder and get smarter. As a rising elder and matriarch of her small clan, Lolita is currently on a quest to decolonize her mind.
Mercedes Loving Manley
(she/her/hers)
Mercedes D. Loving-Manley is a performer and storyteller born and raised in Dorchester, MA. With a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing and film, the stories she writes center the lives of Black people, especially Black trans people. Her forthcoming film 'The World and Then Some’ highlights the experiences of Black LGBTQ+ folks from her hometown, a community near and dear to her. Mercedes’ hope is that her art can be a tool in the process of healing and community cultivation for folks from various intersections within Black identity/ies.
Nia Holley
(she/her/hers they/them/theirs)
Nia Holley is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is deeply influenced by what survival and healing look like within Black and Indigenous communities. Her work ranges from printmaking, ceramics, metalsmithing, and traditional arts to bringing tribal communities together around food justice, agroecology, land, and history. She has actively engaged with Indigenous-led grassroots organizations as an outreach and project coordinator and has participated in Nipmuc programs since before she could walk and talk. Nia is a co-founder of the Eastern Woodlands Rematriation collective.
Noriyoshi (Nori) Needle
(they/them/thiers)
noriyoshi wakabayashi needle is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer currently living in Boston, Massachusetts.
Shantel Miller
(she/her/hers)
Shantel Miller’s figurative paintings create a visual language to transcend the lived and imagined experiences of her inner world. While exploring constructs of race, gender, and religion, she pulls from personal narrative as a departure point for understanding broader social realities. Since receiving a BFA from OCADU in 2013, Shantel has exhibited in group shows and art fairs across Toronto, Alberta, and Miami and has placed work in numerous private collections. She is the recipient of the 2021 Dedalus Foundation MFA Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant, and the Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Career Entry Award.
Rixy
(she/her/hers)
Moving through her own jungles of identity, Rixy conceptualizes Feminine divinity in their various forms and characterizations. Working primarily through Painting, Sculpture, & Public Art, her tool belt of disciplines help reinterpret stories of agency – like episodes of a never-ending cartoon. The work often plays on the range of sensual femininity.
Vick Quezada
(they/them/theirs)
Vick Quezada is an Indigenous-Latinx artist, they queer the archaeological through hybrid forms and aesthetics. Inspired by the guiding principles of Aztec Philosophy, Quezada integrates the theory of interconnected matter and how it’s embedded in the cosmos, planet earth, ecology, and all lifeforms.
Converging Liberations Co-Designers
Converging Liberations is designed and led by a team of co-tenders from The CreateWell Fund:
bashezo
(ze/zir/zirs, they/them/theirs)
bashezo was born and raised in South Philadelphia, PA and currently lives in Medford, MA. Ze is a Black trans/non-binary transdisciplinary installation and movement performance creative that blends race and queer theory with African diaspora spiritual traditions and aesthetics. Soil, textiles, audio/video elements, clay, mesh, and wood are common materials in zir’s work. These materials are then aggregated as a means to create immersive ephemeral 3rd spaces that centralize Black Indigenous and PoC queer and trans (QTBIPoC) bodies, narratives, and experiences. The core of bashezo’s work revolve around spiritual explorations into/around Blackness, queer Black liberation/futurity, anti-Blackness, trauma, and healing.
Nadroj
(any pronouns)
Nadroj Nina Holmes has worked with CreateWell to craft frameworks and develop language for various aspects of the organization's functionality. Nadroj has also coordinated events and performed outreach for the award program. As an artist they use a lens shaped by decolonization theory and Black liberation traditions to construct works that critically analyze antiBlack propaganda + paradigms. Works often allow for the adoption of counternarratives of resistance. Mediums include sound, video, animation, graphic design, photography, performance, and installation.
Cierra
(she/her/hers, they/them/theirs)
Cierra’s practice includes video, sound and durational performance. She works as an artist, dj, and organizer with projects that attempt to examine visual, spatial and sensory representations of blackness. Under the moniker earthaclit, she uses electronic sound and spoken word to foster meaningful conversations around diasporic longings and cultural disruption. Cierra is the co-founder of Print Ain’t Dead, a bookstore and publishing platform for literary and text-based artifacts produced by black, brown and indigineous artists.
The Converging Liberations Residency is made possible with support from The Barr Foundation.