A4A is delighted to introduce our 2022 cohort of Capacity-Building grantees in Western MA! These fifteen artists are based throughout Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden counties, and are uplifting their communities through work in theater, music, painting, social practice, writing, illustration, glass, movement, clowning, and more.

This is our third year of partnership with the ValleyCreates program of the Community Foundation of Western MA, a collaboration that has allowed us to connect with and support more than 100 artists in the Valley region of Massachusetts. In the second half of this post, you can find names of the grantees we worked with in 2020 and 2021.

Aria Acevedo (South Hadley)

Aria “Lune” Acevedo is a detribalized Indigenous Latine actor, designer, writer, and educator. Her work focuses on authentic intersectional representation of the Latine, specifically the Mexican-American diaspora and detribalized experience, Queer identity, and life with mental illness and disabilities in the U.S. media, by exploring and combining different mediums of storytelling and ritual. She graduated from Hampshire College with a BA in Theater and Creative Writing, and Mount Holyoke College with an MA in Teaching for Middle and High School Theater and Special Education. Lune has been chosen as this year’s resident playwright for Play Incubation Collaborative where she will be developing her play Return to Abya Yala.

Carlos REC McBride (Northampton)

Carlos McBride is an educator, community organizer, and social justice advocate, as well as a DJ and multidisciplinary artist working in audio, video, and photography. Carlos’ work often takes the form of creating spaces for people to develop and share their own narratives. For five years, he was the director of New England Public Radio’s Media Lab, a program that gave high school students from Springfield and Holyoke a platform to tell their stories. In his HEALERS project, Carlos documents the challenges men of color face in the streets, school, the workplace, and the prison system. He is currently a Language, Literacy, & Culture doctoral student at UMASS Amherst.

Chelsea Catherine (Springfield)

Chelsea Catherine is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. In 2018, they won the Mary C Mohr award for nonfiction through the Southern Indiana Review and their 2020 novel, Summer of the Cicadas, won the Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press. Most recently, Chelsea won an Emerging Artist’s Award from Creative Pinellas and spent a month in Alaska at the Alderworks Artists Retreat. Chelsea graduated from the University of Tampa with their MFA in creative writing.

Dani Schmidt (Holyoke)

Dani Schmidt is a queer, neurodivergent illustrator and painter. They use both analog and digital mediums to create narrative- heavy work with organic themes and varying styles. Dani considers themselves to be a multidisciplinary visual storyteller, seeking to forge human connection through their art. In their artwork, they focus on organic life and nature as a consistent theme that is explored. Other themes explored are queer identities, motherhood, grief, and power. They devote much time to their personal projects such as illustrations for books, comics, and pattern making. Dani graduated from the Institute of Art and Design at New England College in Manchester, NH in 2021. Their goal is to use their art as a function of storytelling; as one of the most time honored and important traditions of humanity.

Ebbie Russell (Holyoke)

Ebbie Russell is a self-taught artist whose writing, choreography and visual art is heavily rooted in African diasporic movements, belief in time travel, and exploration of how dance can address, heal, and honor intergenerational trauma and chronic illness. Their current mediums of focus include speculative memoir writing and poetry and hand-cut mixed media collages. Ebbie is also a teaching artist who designs arts-based popular education: zine-making and workshops with young people and community members in and around western Massachusetts. They are dedicated and drawn to spaces that center the lived experiences of QTBIPOC, Queer Trans Gender Expansive / Black / Indigenous / People of Color.

Gabriela Sepulveda (Springfield)

Gabriela Sepulveda is a painter and illustrator from San Juan, Puerto Rico, who graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has a Masters from Atlantic University College. Her work is influenced by pop surrealism, science fiction, and comics, and often studies organic subjects in conjunction with mechanical ones. Gabriela was a muralism apprentice and currently volunteers with Commonwealth Murals to create community projects all over the city of Springfield. Her work has been displayed in the The Trust Transfer Project and the Springfield Museums. She plans to continue working to better her community through her art while continuing to grow her visual language.

Jasper McCoy (Springfield)

Jasper McCoy is a creative whose work mirrors his cultural influences and experience growing up in Springfield, MA. He’s a graduate of Northeastern University with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Architecture. His paintings express African-American heritage, black thought and development through intergenerational lives. Painting is his current creative outlet but of his firsts were poetry, music, and writing. Jasper is also the founding leader of the LoveArtCollective, a nonprofit that offers training, business development, and creative outlets in Springfield for artists by artists.

K Adler (Greenfield)

K Adler is an artist whose work draws from the study of movement and theatrical expression, creating and collaborating in immersive performance work as well as more traditional theater environments. Since 2017 K has worked as their persona "Karl", a silent vaudevillian who uses humor and absurdity to address and abstract social commentary including gender politics, climate change, capitalism, and oppressive institutions. K has a BFA in Modern Dance from the University of Utah.

Lora Talbot (Williamsburg)

Lora Talbot is an abstract painter whose works convey a distillation of lived experience. Physical engagement with materials and an elegant economy in composition are signature aspects of her larger-than-life-sized oil paintings on canvas. Lora’s paintings, in her words, are “energy, expression, and communication.” Lora earned an MA at Lesley College and studied at the Penland School of Craft and the Appalachian Center for Craft. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout New England.

Malaika Ross (Easthampton)

Malaika Ross is a Caribbean American artist who makes contemporary botanical paintings of native and introduced flora. In her words: “The act of observing and documenting nature through painting and drawing as a black woman, is a form of liberation, environmental stewardship and anti-oppression work.” Malaika earned her B.A. from Hampshire College with a focus in soil microbiology. She studied Painting and Drawing at RISD and completed intensive coursework in sustainable faming, ecological restoration and Hawaiian ethnobotany at the University of Hawai’i, Hilo.

Marc Austin (Springfield)

Marc Austin is a visual artist whose mediums include canvases, walls, apparel, utility boxes, and pianos. His current practice revolves around creating emotive color combinations, conveying the beauty of the melanated female form, and questioning ideals based in archaic beliefs. He is fascinated by ancient ways of creating, as well as finding innovation in the junctions between disciplines.

Maya Cunningham (Springfield)

Maya Cunningham is a "triple threat" - a jazz vocalist, visual artist and scholar. As a vocal artist, she is in the lineage of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Etta Jones. She is a master storyteller through song, a virtuoso improvisor and has a shimmering five octave range. Her approach draws on the emotional delivery of the Holiday lineage and the improvisational spontaneity of Vaughan. She sings in several African languages, including Ewe, Bamana, and Setwana. Maya is also a composer and fuses her music with visual arts works in collage/montage, fused glass, paint, monoprint and mixed media. As an ethnomusicologist, her research focus is on African American cultural identity and traditional African and African American musics.

Meem Carry (Amherst)

Meem Carry is a performance artist and, foremostly, a clown. They create clown performances as a highly expressive, nonverbal character named Moimus who is constantly experiencing conflict, failure and injustice, as a way to generate empathetic dialogue between the performance and audience. This conversation points people towards tools they have within themselves to grapple with the anthropocene, bringing intention and resilience into their communities. Meem is a Hampshire College graduate and is also a preschool teacher who teaches clowning to children.

Mydalis Vera (Springfield)

Mydalis Vera is a writer, educator, and podcaster. Born to a Puerto Rican mother who spoke little to no English, Mydalis is dedicated to intertwining English and Spanish. She is motivated to create pieces that acknowledge her Guerrera foremothers and create visibility for the Guerreras of today. Mydalis has published essays at Multiplicity Magazine and The Nasiona. She created the Guerrera Writer LLC to encourage self-identified women to reclaim space, reclaim their position in history, be visible in their present/future, and appreciate their worth.

Sunny Allis (Westhampton)

Sunny Allis is a non-binary multidisciplinary artist, musician, designer, and educator. Many of their projects focus on community and connection through different forms of play and storytelling. In their paintings, Sunny explores consciousness through dynamic motion and transformation. They have created interactive public art installations that take people through imaginary worlds, and their animations have won awards internationally, including at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Sunny recently released a gender-inclusive, bilingual children’s book called Hooray, What A Day!/¡Viva, Qué Día!, as well as a dance remix album of lesbian anthems from the 90s called LEZ DANCE.

2020 + 2021 ValleyCreates Grantees

We began our partnership with ValleyCreates at the height of the pandemic, providing grants to 87 Valley artists over 2 years. This was during our busiest period ever at A4A, and we fell behind (way behind) on some of our usual marketing! We’re excited to make this very belated announcement of our previous three ValleyCreates grant cohorts.

2020 ValleyCreates Community Practice Cohort

2o20 ValleyCreates Cohort

2021 ValleyCreates Cohort #1

2021 ValleyCreates Cohort #2