Newell Flather Award for Leadership in Public Art

Public art has the power to inspire more just, vibrant, and welcoming public spaces and public life. The Newell Flather Award for Leadership in Public Art honors and celebrates the individuals behind this good and important work in Massachusetts.  

This year, we are particularly looking to honor unsung and emerging leaders in the field of public art. 

About

The Award is named after the late Newell Flather (1938-2021) for both his relationship with NEFA since 1993 and his leadership in establishing and championing the Fund for the Arts, which was established in 1981 to advance and provide visibility for the arts in Boston and expand public recognition of the contributions the arts and artists make to the quality of life in our communities. 

Newell was a champion for the arts in the greater Boston area who believed in the power of the arts and artists in shaping the quality of life in our communities. At NEFA we also believe that public art has the power to inspire more just, vibrant, and welcoming public spaces and public life, and through the Newell Flather Leadership Award in Public Art, we hope to celebrate and lift up leaders, artists, and arts administrators in the field who are helping us live into these new realities. 

Founded in 2020, the Newell Flather Award for Leadership in Public Art annually honors two Massachusetts artists/curators/arts administrators in public art who embody different aspects of leadership and are contributing to more just, vibrant, and welcoming public spaces and public life through the evolving field of public art.  

Each recipient is awarded $5,000 of unrestricted funds in celebration of their leadership and impact in the field.  

Nomination Criteria 

Nominees must be an artist, curator and/or arts administrator who resides full-time and works within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and creates/curates/supports public art that aligns with NEFA’s public art vision and values.  

Strong nominees may be creating/curating/supporting public art that:  

• Helps us to see, feel, experience, and imagine more just futures for our public spaces and public culture.  
• Addresses the intersectionality of spatial justice and racial justice as critical to cultivating a more vibrant public art ecosystem.  
• Recognizes the importance of context in public artmaking.  
• Inspires more just, vibrant, and welcoming public spaces and public life in Massachusetts.  

This year we are particularly looking to honor unsung and emerging leaders in the field of public art. 

Unsung leaders in the field of public art may be individuals who have been doing the work for a while and may have been ahead of their time as they paved the way for others. In retrospect, their leadership has cultivated more just, vibrant, and welcoming public artmaking, and may deserve more recognition today. 

Emerging leaders in the field of public art may be individuals who are newer to creating and/or supporting public artmaking.  And their leadership is currently paving the way for more just, vibrant, and welcoming futures for our public spaces. (These are the folks we want to keep an eye on! They are shaping our future for the better with the work that they are doing today!) 

Self-nominations are welcome. Nominators may submit up to two nominations.

Nominations for the 2023 cycle were accepted through February 27, 2023.

Newell Flather Award for Leadership in Public Art Recipients 

2023 Unsung Leader Awardee - Jeena Chang

Jeena Chang  is the Director of Community Programs & Design at Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC). Over the last eight years, Jeena has been building power among residents, especially working-class youth and immigrant families, to re-imagine land use in Boston’s Chinatown and Malden. She leads ACDC’s “ANCHOR” placekeeping strategy, which uses arts and culture to shape policy, planning, and development, with the goal of community self-determination. Under Jeena’s leadership and vision, artists and residents of diverse ages and cultural backgrounds across Chinatown and Malden have co-created vibrant public artworks within these communities. In 2019, Jeena received the Rising Star Award from the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations for “demonstrating potential, outstanding innovation, and leadership and achievement in Community Development.” Massachusetts Promise Fellowship, an AmeriCorps network of youth workers, honored Jeena with the Supervisor of the Year Award in 2018.

Listen to or read our interview with Jeena

2023 Emerging Leader Awardee - Rixy

Rixy (she/her, b. 1995) is an Interdisciplinary Street Artist from Roxbury, Massachusetts, bred by Latinx Caribbean blood. Her self-taught and formal education is focused on a sensually sculptural awareness, worldbuilding through painted installations and public art. The legs of Rixy's works are exhibited on street-wide walls, currently from her base in New England, across borders, and rooted back in her Latin American cultures.  Recently, she introduced her exploration "Enter the Cúcala," a collection of new upcycled stories reflecting the raw footing of its’ femme inhabitants. Materials such as recycled bodega boxes, found wood, and memorabilia adorn the works' presence, as an act of empowering the survival of our beauty. Shown at Simmons University's Trustman Gallery, Montserrat College of Art & Design, Chicago's Woman Made Gallery, and MECA Art Fair in the Dominican Republic. This practice has inspired her positions in Social Justice, Education, and Programming. Rixy attended TheCreateWell’s Converging Liberations Residency at Mass MoCA, a Ruth Butler Fellowship to Mexico, recently completed her Now + There's Public Art Accelerator Program and is currently a Resident Street Artist with Elevated Thought.

Listen to or read our interview with Rixy

2022 Awardee - Christa Brown

Christa Brown (she/her), Lowell, MA: Founder and executive director of the Free Soil Arts Collective, Brown leads with creativity and a vision for inclusive community building while amplifying the voices and experiences of POC artists in the Merrimack Valley through artmaking. Brown brings performance and theater into public artmaking that fosters social capital for Black Lowellians through storytelling projects such as “Hidden in Plain Sight,” and the Juneteenth walking tour and historic reenactments of Black leaders in Lowell's history. 

Listen to or read our interview with Christa

2022 Awardee - Rob "Problak" Gibbs

Rob “Problak" Gibbs (he/him), Boston, MA: Roxbury native, artist, educator and co-founder of Artists for Humanity, Gibbs is shaping the cultural landscape of Boston as he bridges the worlds of graffiti and public artmaking. Gibbs has and continues to inspire and mentor fellow Black and brown creatives formally as well as informally, while also keeping community at the center of his own artistic practice. Gibbs latest commission by the Rose Kennedy Greenway is a testament to his commitment to community-centered leadership.

Listen to or read our interview with Rob

2022 Awardee - Catherine T. Morris

Catherine T. Morris (she/her), Boston, MA: Director of arts & culture at The Boston Foundation and founder of BAMS Fest, Morris is a proud mother, entrepreneur, and visionary, who works at the intersection of arts, culture, creative placekeeping and movement building. Morris, leading with a spirit of collaboration, founded a wide-reaching platform through BAMS Fest that centers and celebrates Black and brown creatives and engages the public in experiencing live performance and visual arts from Black perspectives. 

Listen to or read our interview with Catherine

2022 Awardee - Marquis Victor

Marquis Victor (he/him), Lawrence, MA: Founder and executive director of Elevated Thought, an art and social justice organization that centers creative youth development through the lens of art's liberating power. Victor leads with a "by the youth" philosophy. Together with the youth and team at Elevated Thought, Victor is anchoring and affirming BIPOC stories and visions for Lawrence through public artmaking, including a recent mural project on the Lawrence Public Library.

Listen to or read our interview with Marquis

2021 Awardee - Ekua Holmes

Ekua Holmes’ work is collage based, and her subjects, made from cut and torn papers, investigate family histories, relationship dynamics, childhood impressions, the power of hope, faith and self-determination. Recalling a quote from American Artist, Romare Bearden, "I do not need to go looking for 'happenings,' the absurd or the surreal, because I have seen things that neither Dalí, Beckett, Ionesco nor any of the others could have thought possible; and to see these things I did not need to do more than look out of my studio window," Holmes has looked out of her window for the subjects of her collages too. Remembering a Roxbury childhood of wonder and delight she considers herself a part of a long line of Roxbury imagemakers. In this spirit, she supports those who have a calling in the arts as well as keeping her own studio practice ignited. She has created and led workshops, been a visiting artist and lecturer, and held artist residencies in public and private institutions throughout New England.  In her first public art initiative, she received a Now + There Public Art Accelerator Fellowship and launched The Roxbury Sunflower Project (#RoxburySunflowerProject), in which she facilitated the planting of 10,000 sunflower seeds in her native Roxbury, MA.

For her work in illustrating children’s literature, Holmes is the recipient of a Caldecott Honor, Coretta Scott King’s John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator award, Robert Siebert and Horn Book awards for her illustrations in “Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement," by Carole Boston Weatherford, her first illustration project. In 2018, she won the coveted Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration for the book, "Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets."  In 2019 she won the 2019 Coretta Scott King Award again for her illustrations in “Stuff of Stars,” written by Marion Dane Bauer.

Ms. Holmes currently serves as Commissioner and Vice Chair of the Boston Art Commission, which oversees the placement and maintenance of public works of art on and in city of Boston properties. She is also currently Associate Director at the Center for Art and Community Partnerships at MassArt where she manages and coordinates sparc! the ArtMobile, an art-inspiring, art-transforming vehicle retrofitted to contribute to community based, multidisciplinary arts programming currently focused on Mission Hill, Roxbury, and Dorchester, MA. Ekua Holmes received her BFA in Photography from MassArt in 1977.

2021 Awardee - Rosemary Tracy Woods

Rosemary Tracy Woods is the executive director of the Art for the Soul Gallery in downtown Springfield. Her gallery has a purpose: to showcase artists from diverse cultures and backgrounds and to make art accessible to everyone. She has been managing galleries for over 15 years.  In 2010, the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women awarded her the Unsung Heroine Award. Rosemary was appointed by Deval Patrick as Advocate for the Arts of western Massachusetts. More recently, she received a fellowship to study in Paris. She currently serves as a commissioner for the Springfield Cultural Council. Through her gallery, Woods has brought some of this country’s most renowned artists of color to the attention of Springfield’s art loving community. Notable exhibitions include Larry Poncho Brown’s “Stronger than Pride,” Ten Little Nigger Girls: A Works-in-Progress/Open Studio Exhibition with Dr. Imo Nse Imeh, 7th Generation: Contemporary Native American Artists of the 21st Century, Tango: Contemporary Art of Argentina, Roots/Raices, and, most recently with Larry Poncho Brown, the Creative Quarantine Springfield exhibit.

2020 Awardee - Kate Gilbert 

Kate Gilbert is on a mission to transform Boston into a public art city. As artist, curator, and cultural producer, Kate sees contemporary art as a catalyst for transformation. In 2015, she launched Now + There, the reinvigoration of UrbanArts Institute, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to delivering impactful, accessible, and temporary public artworks that challenge Boston’s cultural identity by taking artistic risks and consistently producing compelling projects that engage the public. As one of the original program staff at the Greenway Conservancy, Kate developed a vision for how the Greenway could deploy public art as a vehicle for community connection and public expression. Her vision included using interactive and temporary work which is now the pillar of the Greenway’s long-range public art strategy. In 2013, she was tapped by the Massachusetts Convention & Exhibition Center to curate artLab, an exploration of public art and a key contributor to the success of the Lawn on D, Boston’snewest outdoor event space. Curating 40 different artists over two seasons for Lawn on D inspired Kate to bring art deeper into Boston neighborhoods and prompted her to found Now + There. Through her leadership, Now + There is producing high-impact temporary artworks in Boston while also supporting a pipeline of local artists and neighborhood-centric projects with a first-of-its-kind Public Art Accelerator. Kate holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and in her own multi-disciplinary artwork, focuses on the nature of consumption and the exploration of distinct alternates.

2020 Awardee – Silvia López Chavez 

With roots in the Dominican Republic, Silvia López Chavez holds a BFA in Illustration from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. She is a seasoned community-based artist and collabo-rator who uses art as a vehicle for connection. Public art projects include murals on the Charles River Esplanade, Northeastern University, Punto Urban Art Museum, Harvard University, Boston Children’s Museum, Underground InkBlock and Central Square, Cambridge. Silvia’s work has received recognition through grants and residencies including New England Foundation for the Arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Children’s Hospital, Vermont Studio Center and Google. In addition to her fine art practice, she is an award-winning design professional and works with high-profile local and national companies and institutions. She continues her studio work at the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End.

Read or watch the conversation between the 2020 and 2021 recipients

 

To learn more about Public Art at NEFA visit the Public Art Program Page.