We are thrilled to welcome twenty-six artists into the 2023 Massachusetts Statewide Capacity Building Grant Program. Representing a diverse array of talent from across the state, these emerging and mid-career artists have been split into two cohorts. Our first cohort starts their program in July and the second, in early October.
Here we highlight the first cohort of thirteen. Stay tuned in the fall, when we welcome and highlight Cohort #2. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to read, meet and follow these artists as they progress through our program!
alex terrell (GREENFIELD)
alex terrell (she/they) is a Black Southern writer and thingmaker. She graduated from University of Massachusetts Amherst with an MFA in creative writing. alex is a recipient of the 2018 Robert J. Dau/PEN America Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her short fiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Offing, Puerto del Sol, Best American Experimental Fiction, Kenyon Review (forthcoming) and elsewhere.
beatriz whitehill (JAmaica plain)
Beatriz Whitehill (she/her) is a visual artist and creator based in Boston. Beatriz's practice encompasses painting, collage, and stop motion animation and is inspired by the intersection of traditional painting and contemporary art forms. Drawing upon her Puerto Rican heritage, she incorporates symbols like the vejigante masked monsters, symbolizing resilience and the inner struggles we all face. Beatriz's art weaves multigenerational narratives influenced by magical realism. By merging diverse artistic traditions and cultural symbolism, her work invites viewers to contemplate their own stories and connections to the world. Beatriz earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2022. She is invested in creating collaborative opportunities between different artists and creative industries.
bithiah holton (Medford)
Bithiah Holton (she/they) is a queer, Black and Mexican American, multidisciplinary artist and educator. Their work explores the reimagination of liberation, especially through the embodiment of emotion, vulnerability, and the lenses of wellness. Bithiah's creative process is largely influenced by her interest in emotional growth, and the interplay between color and raw emotions. Drawing inspiration from personal and community histories, these elements converge to inform Bithiah's work, thoughtfully visualizing narratives portraying the emotional truths that often coexist with the various aspects of everyday life within QTBIPOC communities. Bithiah graduated from Boston University with a BFA in Art Education. She has taught visual arts at schools and programs in the greater Boston area for more than 3 years working mostly with PreK-8th grade.
deborah johnson (boston)
Deborah Johnson (she/they) is a queer Indian-American multidisciplinary artist, social worker, and yoga teacher based in Boston, Massachusetts. She works predominantly in digital illustration, gauche, textiles and has an affinity for designing spaces and community rituals. Each of her practices—dance, painting, writing, and music-making—all feed into one another. Deborah utilizes bright and joyful colors and written affirmations to address issues of mental health, the importance of intimate friendship and the beauty of queer relationships. The emotions of pleasure, grief, and love are inherently political and she hopes her art provides a rest stop for individuals to reflect on their own values. Both as an artist and mental health professional, they think it is imperative to be multi-disciplinary and a lifelong student. Deborah believes their work is a vessel for their ancestors, a reflection of their personal connection to nature, and a practice that allows them to strengthen their relationship to their intuition. Through returning to ancient South Asian iconography, history, symbolism, and ways of being and integrating them into their artistic practice, Deborah seeks to create art that holds something holy and ancient while being firmly rooted in the present needs of the body.
delano mills (springfield)
Delano Mills (he/him) is a digital illustrator, character designer, and comic artist who is primarily focused on bringing black representation and visual aesthetics like Afro-Punk, Afro-fantasy, and Afro-Surrealism into the forefront of sequential art and storytelling. Delano received his BA in Studio Art and minor in Arts Management from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and is currently working on completing his first 60+ page comic, "Desert Sunflower".
deyaniera claudio (lawrence)
DeyCloud “Deya” (she/they) is a Latinx artist based in Lawrence, MA. Their multidisciplinary focuses include handmade jewelry, digital and traditional art, using an array of mixed media. By using materials from resin and polymer clay to 2D and 3D painting tools, she works on stylized themes of Mental Health and Identity, connected to her personal journeys. Deya believes in using art as the catalyst for change. Along with this studio practice, she has extended into a social practice, inspiring youth and community voices. Deya currently works as a Teaching Artist Fellow at Elevated Thought, a social justice org based in Lawrence, MA.
dominic quagliozzi (jefferson)
Through various media, with a focus on drawing, painting and performance, Dominic Quagliozzi's (he/him) work deconstructs his lived experience with chronic illness and disability to explore social relationships of the domestication of illness. His work aims to highlight the interdependence needed for healing and notions of longevity within personal and shared experience. Using medicalized materials such as hospital gowns and clinic table tissue paper, Quagliozzi references his de- and re-constructed body, often present through its absence. By repurposing and re-coding these medical materials as art making materials, he explores the emotional and psychological space in those moments of vulnerability, anxiety, fragility and resilience. Parallel to his art practice, Dominic uses art as a method of teaching for medical students and health workers.
geraldine barney (sharon)
Geraldine Barney’s (two-spirited) artwork explores the relationship between the traditional Navajo values and beliefs she grew up with on the Navajo Reservation in Northwest New Mexico with contemporary city life off the reservation. Living in two cultures is a prominent theme in her art and her music.
Geraldine studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM and at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO. A printmaker at heart, Geraldine’s mixed media collages begin with designs on paper created through various print-making techniques such as silk screen, linocut, and mono-print that are then cut or treated with other media such as paint, ink, stitching etc. and collaged together to create complex layered imagery and patterns. Finished works often re-interpret traditional Navajo motifs creating Navajo textiles in paper form. Geraldine is currently working on a series of landscapes (both real and imagined) that invoke her passion for the land of the Southwest and her connection to the Navajo reservation.
Geraldine is also a singer and song writer whose work is included in two Smithsonian Folkways CD’s; “Music of New Mexico: Native American Traditions” and “Heartbeat: Voices of First Nations Women”. She performs her music to both local and national audiences and is currently a sound scape artist for a local theatre in Cambridge, MA. You can listen to an excerpt of her music here.
kiara brito (worcester)
Kiara Brito (she/her) is a self taught Crochet Designer and Prime Mover of my own business: Made A Manos. Kiara began crocheting back in 2018 as a hobby and eventually transformed it into the growing business it is today. Incorporating a medley of materials from crochet to denim to pieces found in everyday thrifted items, Kiara’s designs are executed through crochet with a modern urban polish that are aesthetically pleasing and on trend with today's fashion.
martin gonzales (clarksburg)
Martin Gonzales (he/him) is a multi-disciplinary artist who makes drawings, sculptures, videos, installations, paintings, and performance. His practice is rooted in a desire to understand, challenge, and reshape the narratives he occupies in order to find belonging in the world. Though hegemonic narratives of dominance and colonization pervade our thinking and shape our identities, these notions of self are malleable and it is through the creative practice Martin finds the most freedom in being. His work has most recently taken the shape of piano, animations, paintings, and calisthenic exercise, but has looked like steel regalia, land art, and haunted installation spaces. Though his interests and the threads he pursues are constant, Martin’s work changes shape based on the container it is within.
michael talbot (belmont)
Growing up in Jamaica, Michael Talbot (he/him) always had a strong desire to inspire and speak to others through art. In 2012 he left his home country to live in the United States and began pursuing his artistic dreams doing Illustration, Graphic Design, and Animation, and has since been working as a Boston-based Freelance Artist on a wide range of projects, murals, exhibitions, and showcases. Michael believes that all art is inter-connected in some facet; informing, complimenting and/or enhancing each other. And although his passion and interest for storytelling is forefront in his practice and craft, he tends to draw from his knowledge in as many areas of study as possible to help strengthen this process. Whenever possible, he uses his rich cultural background from his early life in Jamaica to infuse, improve, and “season” whatever project he tackles, often mixing both digital and traditional media.
nnenna loveth (dorchester)
Nnenna Loveth Umelo Uzoma Nwafor (they/them) is a queer Igbo poet, dancer, and facilitator, who descends from a powerful ancestry. Nnenna’s matrilineal history has led them into deep inner-healing and ancestral veneration work. This healing journey has been nurtured and catalyzed by Nnenna’s studies of Black Feminist thought and Odinala.
In this process of healing the inherited pains of patriarchal violence within their lineage, Nnenna has been teaching, dancing, and facilitating since 2017 for the ultimate purpose of addressing the disconnect that white-hetero-patriarchal-coloniality has created between us and our sensual nature, and between us and our pleasure-compasses. Nnenna brings these frameworks of Odinala, Black Feminist thought, and Somatic exploration of trauma with them into their daily art-making practices.
Nnenna published their debut chapbook, Already Knew You Were Coming, with Game Over Books in January of 2022. Their work explores Nonbinary Black gr*lhood, Black queerness, Igbo Cosmology and Spirituality, Sensual play and rituals of healing. Nnenna believes in using art as a conduit for healing, that healing is political, and they speak to reconnect to their authenticity and to traditions of Igbo Orature. When they speak, their ancestors are pleased.
y-binh nguyen (lawrence)
Y-Bình Nguyễn (they/she) is a communal mythology storyteller, multi-media artist, budding agriculturalist, and avid eyeliner enthusiast. Y-Bình’s writing focuses on eco-resistance sci-fi, transgenerational trauma & healing, critical compassion, queer coming of age love stories, diaspora hustles and bustles, and visionary fiction by way of recognizing the power of making space for past, present, and future ancestors to heal and build new worlds. Y-Bình likes to find the heroes in the esoteric aunties, shy siblings, and liberated queer cousins–while unearthing stories of resistance and solidarity.