Artists in Residence

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The Eliot School Artist in Residence program engages a Boston-based artist each year to work closely with a group of art-passionate teens, from our Teen Bridge Program, to produce a body of public art with thoughtful community engagement at its core. Teen Bridge is a year-round, multi-year program combining art education and experience, life skills, mentorship, job training, and employment, for student artists in our community-based programs.

Teen Bridge’s pedagogy is deeply rooted in the belief that art and creative skills serve as a foundation for success no matter what path students choose. Teen Bridge students come from a wide range of backgrounds and life experiences. Our goal at Teen Bridge is to create an environment where teens can connect across difference and be empowered to express themselves creatively, think critically, and use their voices to be agents of societal change.

 

Thank you to our funders

Teen Bridge and Artist in Residence programs are made possible through the generous support of The Adelard A. and Valeda Lea Roy Foundation, Boston Private Industry Council, BPS Arts Expansion Fund at EdVestors, City of Boston Department of Youth Engagement & Employment, Deborah Munroe Noonan Memorial Fund, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee, The Joe Kalt & Judy Gans Family Foundation, Linde Family Foundation, Maureen and David Moses Family, National Endowment for the Arts, New England Foundation for the Art’s Public Art for Spatial Justice program, with general support from the Barr Klarman Massachusetts Arts Initiative, Boston Cultural Council, Mass Cultural Council, and individual donors. 

Teen Bridge and Artist in Residence are also funded in part by Boston Public Schools (BPS) Arts Expansion, a multi-year effort focusing on access, equity, and quality arts learning for BPS students. The BPS Arts Expansion Fund, managed by EdVestors, is supported by the Barr Foundation, The Boston Foundation, Katie and Paul Buttenwieser, The Klarman Family Foundation, Linde Family Foundation, and other individuals. BPS Arts Expansion is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Teen Bridge and Artist in Residence 2022 were made possible with funding from the New England Foundation for the Arts' Public Art for Spatial Justice program, with generous support from the Barr Foundation.

  


Current Residency

2023 • Feda Eid

"Made in USA"

The 2023 Artist in Residence project will explore themes of home, nationalism, borders, pride, and the creation of all things made in the USA. The project builds on Artist in Residence Feda Eid’s Made in USA series, an ongoing exploration into her upbringing as an Arab and Muslim in America, and into the up-rooting and re-planting of her parents from seeds of civil war. Through photography, this series delves into questions of intergenerational trauma, inheritances, and the blooming of self from the complex soil of the past. Feda’s Artist in Residence project will expand this exploration in collaboration with young artists from our Teen Bridge program. Teen artists will use portrait photography to engage critically with what it means to be American in the “melting pot” of assimilation, discrimination, surveillance, orientalism, and the dominating negative representations of marginalized groups perpetuated by the state, societal norms and popular media; asking the questions: what will we continue to plant here? What will the future of all things made in the USA be? Do we have the courage to change, to transform, to stitch a new tapestry of collective liberation?

“Community members engaged with the themes of the residency by creating their own self-portraits inspired by صنع في أمريكا (Made in USA). The result is صنع في أمريكا (Made in USA): Crafted Visions, a revelatory glimpse at the self-reflective artistry across our community.”

About the Artist: Feda Eid

Feda Eid is a Lebanese-American visual artist living on occupied, unceded territory of the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Massachusett People (Quincy,MA). Her work explores heritage, tradition, culture, identity, and the often tense but beautiful space between what is said, what is felt, and what is lost in translation. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, and adornment linking the past and present. As the daughter of Lebanese parents who fled the country's civil war in 1982, Feda is guided by her family's American journey and her own childhood growing up as an Arab and Muslim in the US. She believes in the telling of personal narratives to broaden our perspectives and to ultimately help us feel the universal emotions that connect us all. 

 

Feda studied Sociology at Regis College and photography at New England School of Photography. Her work has been featured and exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and The Shed NY among others. She was awarded the Museum of Fine Arts Boston Emerging Studio Artist Fellowship in 2018, was a Luminary and 2019 Visiting Studio Artist at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and was awarded the 2022 Artist Residency Fellowship at MASS MoCA studios. 

 

2022 • TakeOne + GoFive

"Spaces of Belonging"

How do we shape the spaces that shape us? The 2022 Eliot School Artist in Residence Project—“Spaces of Belonging”—will explore this question by engaging Teen Bridge fellows, students from English High School, and members of the surrounding community in the process of planning and creating a public mural at The English High School in Jamaica Plain. Artists in Residence GoFive and TakeOne will engage the community in a process of active place-making that invites them to celebrate the beauty of their community, reconnect with their physical space, and build a sense of belonging amidst the pandemic’s fragmentation.The residency will culminate with the unveiling of the mural and an accompanying exhibition at Piano Craft Gallery.The final artwork will be a lasting reminder of the power of creativity and the resilience of the school community, young artists, and the surrounding neighborhood.

About the Artists: GoFive and TakeOne

2022 Artists in Residence GoFive and TakeOne are muralists and graffiti artists who frequently work together as a two-person mural crew. Having grown up in Boston, they bring lived experience as Afro-Latin youth finding their way through this city.

Co-Lead Artist Genaro Ortega (aka GoFive) has been providing Boston with creative and inventive public art for more than 10 years. Using paint and aerosol, and drawing on Boston’s rich mural traditions, GoFive has created a lively body of art that pays homage to the unique qualities of the communities in which he works. By painting murals within communities where he has ties, he provides artistically resonant experiences and permanent artistic resources for those neighborhoods. GoFive also teaches design and visual arts at Madison Park Vocational High School. He was recently featured in Underground at Ink Block, organized by Street Theory, and has been described by Boston Magazine as having “serious street art credentials.”

Co-Lead Artist Luis Taforo (aka TakeOne) grew up immersed in hip hop culture as a member of the Latinx community in Boston neighborhoods including Dorchester, Roxbury, and the South End. Starting in the early 90s, he became part of the African Latino Alliance, which brought together teens and young adults from various neighborhoods and blocks in Boston for positive art experiences at a time when gang violence there was surging. As he developed increased skills with paint, the scale and scope of his art grew, leading to murals of varying size and themes.

 

2021 • Chanel Thervil

"Feel the Flow" 

Haitian American artist and educator Chanel Thervil was our 2021 resident artist. Her project, Feel the Flow, guided teen Fellows on an investigation of the body as a vessel, in three parts. Feel the Flow first explored adornment—how we decorate our vessels, with a focus on Aesthetics/Appearance; then Movement—how our vessels move, with an emphasis on the mechanics of the body and how we move through the world; and finally Resilience—how we feel inside our vessels, with a focus on how internal feelings correlate with the external. Each week, she explored these themes via drawing, collage, and fibers. The residency culminated with the creation of mixed media banners that represent each of the teen Fellows.

About the Artist: Chanel Thervil

Chanel Thervil is a Haitian American artist and educator that uses varying combinations of abstraction and portraiture to convene communal dialogue around culture, social issues, and existential questions. At the core of her practice lies a desire to empower and inspire tenderness and healing among communities of color through the arts. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Pace University and a Master’s Degree in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She's been making a splash in Boston via her educational collaborations, public art, and residencies with institutions like The Museum of Fine Arts, The Boston Children's Museum, The DeCordova, and The Harvard Ed Portal, and The Cambridge Public Library. Her work has been featured by PBS Kids, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Bay State Banner, WBUR's ARTery, WGBH, and Hyperallergic.
Find out more about her work by visiting her website chanelthervil.com.

 

 

Past Residencies:

2020 - Carolyn Shadid Lewis, "InterGeneration"

Carolyn Shadid Lewis, a multimedia artist and filmaker, was our 2020 resident artist. Her work, InterGeneration, brought two generations together (teens on the verge of adulthood and seniors later in life) through dialog and through collaborative art-making.

InterGeneration is a series of conversations and a joint creation between teens and their elders that enlivens memory and hope through audio recordings and hand-made, stop-motion animation embedded in a longer film. The project brought these two generations together through storytelling, attentive listening, and a collaborative creation. The word “generation” refers to different age groups, but it also refers to art making, production, invention. Through animating stories of the past and expectations for the future, InterGeneration initiates creative ways of seeing our current moment.

Watch the InterGeneration trailer

About the Artist: 

Multimedia artist and filmmaker, Carolyn Shadid Lewis, records oral histories with individuals who have a personal and political story to tell. Her interdisciplinary approach to documentary storytelling often incorporates stop-motion animation, surround sound and installation. Lewis’ art gains inspiration from her family’s military history, from her Irish and Lebanese ancestry, and from her experiences of growing up and working on military bases.

Seams, Lewis’ current film-in-progress, is an installation, a personal essay film and an animated oral history of women from Ireland and Northern Ireland who worked in Britain during the Second World War as factory workers, medical professionals, and soldiers in the British Forces. Currently part of the Women Make Movies Production Assistance Program, the film has won the support of the Irish Arts Council (2013), Cork County Council (2013) and Mass Humanities (2014).

Lewis exhibits her work nationally and internationally, including venues such as the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, Ireland, The Attleboro Arts Museum in Attleboro, MA, and The National Military Cemetery in Fort Leavenworth, KS. Her debut film, From Twilight til Dawn, won the award for best documentary at the 2015 Glovebox Short Film and Animation Festival in Boston, MA. Her awards also include a St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award (2012), a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Film/Video (2011) and a Puffin Foundation Artist Award (2010). Lewis holds a BA in piano performance and visual art from William Jewell College in Liberty, MO. She also received an MFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

She is a working artist and teacher who has taught digital media, video production and animation courses in the Visual Communications Department of Endicott College, in the Communication Arts Department of Gordon College, and in the Studio Foundation Department of Massachusetts College of Art & Design. She lives in Jamaica Plain with her husband and their 3-year-old daughter.

 

2019 - L'Merchie Frazier, "New Urban Monuments: Stand Up Inside Yourself!"

Monuments stand to materialize memorial practices that shape the American landscape.  Recent calls for the literal destruction of certain public monuments respond to ideals for American democracy. Why do these hard relics, which represent a divided America and frame challenges to democratic possibilities, remain to shape public memory in our neighborhoods and parks? How do we create new monuments that engage new ideas emerging from our communities? Through this project, L’Merchie Frazier and Teen Bridge youth collaborated on a project that investigated these questions and engaged the larger public in the process.

Community-based workshops took place in the summer at JP Porchfest and Egleston Farmers Market. The final work was unveiled during Jamaica Plain Open Studios, and a final presentation—an exhibition, reception and artists’ talk—took place at our partner gallery, Galatea Fine Art, in the fall. Portions of the installation continued on view at Egleston Square Branch Library and will travel in 2020 to the Museum of the National Center for Afro-American Artists, as part of Violence Transformed.

About the Artist:

L’Merchie Frazier, the Eliot School’s 2019 Artist in Residence, is a public fiber artist, innovator, poet and holographer, and Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket. For fifteen years she has been engaged in highlighting and curating the Museum’s collection and exhibits, in providing place-based education and interdisciplinary history programs, projects and lectures, most recently promoting STEM/ STEAM education pedagogy, and in managing the successful Faculty/ Teachers’ Institutes and their extension, The Cross Cultural Classroom, a benefit marketed to independent education entities, municipalities and corporations. Since 2007 she has designed and delivered history and art-making projects every summer with MLK Scholar high school students for the Museum of African American History.

 

2018 – Nora Valdez, “Home/Hogar”

Nora Valdez has worked and exhibited as a sculptor and public artist since 1977. In 1982, she graduated from the College of Fine Arts (Mercedes San Luis, Argentina) with the title of Professor of Fine Arts. From the beginning, she has used sculpture and installations to create images that reflect on the nature of change, the life of the individual and the natural or societal forces that buffet our souls. Most recently her focus has been on the nature of home, the immigrant experience and roots/rootlessness. Her thematic concerns are also reflected in her involvement with the community: doing public art projects and giving workshops at a variety of institutions.

Nora kicked off our 2018 residency on the theme of home/hogar. She and our Teen Bridge youth initiated a public dialogue by exploring the questions: What makes a place home? What makes home safe, comforting? How do we create a sense of home, claim a place as home? They created an installation that illustrated these themes and collaborated with the community to tell various stories of home.

View our "Home/Hogar" photo-book on Shutterfly

 

2016 − Elisa H. Hamilton and Silvia Lopez Chavez, “Lemonade Stand”

How do you turn lemons into lemonade?

Elisa Hamilton and Silvia López Chavez inspired conversations about resilience as they brought their participatory printmaking cart to four housing developments, in collaboration with our community partners:

  • Boys & Girls Club at Franklin Hill
  • The Nurtury at Mildred C. Hailey Apartments
  • Roxbury Tenants of Harvard
  • South Street Youth Center

Read their blog here.

View our "Lemonade Stand" photo-book on Shutterfly

A Creative City Grant Public Art Project funded by New England Foundation for the Arts

 

2013 − Beth Ireland, “Turning Around Boston”

In October 2013, we sent woodturner Beth Ireland in her mobile woodworking van to 21 different Boston Public Schools, low income housing projects, the Boy Scouts' annual Pumpkinfest and other places where children gather. There, 1,048 children each made a wooden pen or whistle by hand with Beth. In a few cases, we brought out mini-lathes for children to do some wood turning as well. Read more in the Jamaica Plain Gazette.

Beth's first visit was to South Street Youth Center, in Jamaica Plain. The Director wrote: “It was GREAT! The kids loved it. It was such a nice shift from what we’re normally able to offer and the mixture of focus, physical activity and concentration and artistic engagement was really wonderful to behold!”

We believe children benefit enormously from hands-on learning. Woodworking – “shop” – was gone from Boston’s public elementary and middle schools. Along with others, we are working to bring it back. Making things by hand changes children’s relationship to their world, teaches them real-life math and conceptual skills, and engages them in problem-solving and creative risk-taking.

By providing this taste of woodworking, we showed children, parents, teachers and principals its value – and promoted hands-on learning in our schools. Private schools have it, fancy summer camps have it. Let’s bring lifelong learning in craftsmanship and creativity to all, regardless of income or ability to pay.

Beth Ireland has become a passionate advocate of hands-on learning for all. She spent 2012 traveling across the United States in her van equipped with a mini workshop and a personal living space. She stopped at schools and art centers, in small towns and big ones, covering 25,000 miles and teaching over two thousand people how to turn wood. Jenn Moller collaborated with digital support. Ireland and Moller then traveled to Guatemala, teaching people in a small village to make windows, doors and household items out of wood.

Beth has written, “I was just going to teach as many people as I could how to make a simple wooden object. It became so much more.”

View our "Turning Around Boston" photo-book on Shutterfly.

See work by Beth Ireland and learn more about Turning Around America.

American Woodturner Journal published this article about Turning Around America in their August 2012 issue.

Read more about Turning Around Boston in the Jamaica Plain Gazette.