BOSTON, MA—Boston Art Review (BAR), an organization committed to facilitating discourse around contemporary art in Boston and beyond, is pleased to announce the appointment of Nakia Hill, Courtney Jacobovits, Beau Kenyon, Cher Krause Knight, Mallory Ruymann, Gabriel Sosa, and Gloria Sutton to the inaugural board of directors. This group of artists, scholars, community leaders, writers, and editors bring a wealth of experience connecting communities to art and guiding emerging organizations through moments of key growth.
Founder and editor-in-chief Jameson Johnson commented, “We are all energized about this next step in BAR‘s journey. I hope it will cement the organization’s place in Boston’s cultural ecosystem and in turn, make this work more sustainable for years to come.”
The board will guide the future of the organization, including growing the print magazine’s reach, introducing new programs, and expanding fundraising capabilities. Most importantly, their leadership will shape the organization’s commitment to uplifting diverse and historically marginalized voices, and ensuring that BAR is a leader in equitable publishing and programming practices.
Boston Art Review’s 501(c)(3) status was achieved through the generous support of the outgoing Big Red & Shiny board of directors. BAR is honored to carry on the legacy of Big Red & Shiny—an online publication that served a crucial role in Boston’s art criticism landscape between 2004–2019—and plans to announce a long-term project to archive and preserve that work soon.
Boston Art Review would also like to recognize its ex officio founding board members, Karolina Hać, Jacqueline Houton, Jameson Johnson, and Sarah ‘Val’ Valente for their tireless dedication to the organization and planting the seeds for this new chapter in its growth.
CURRENT GOALS
Financial sustainability and growth: Secure funding models that will ensure the next five years of BAR’s future
Operational sustainability: Hire our first full-time staff member to support our programs and publications
Community impact: Increase writers, readers, partners, and programs while ensuring W.A.G.E level compensation for everyone who works with the organization
CURRENT BOARD MEMBERS
Nakia Hill is the director of communications for Mayor Michelle Wu’s Cabinet of Community Engagement for the City of Boston. She edited “Revel in Black Excellence,” a section in Boston Art Review’s sixth issue celebrating Black artists in Boston. In 2018, she was named one of seven Boston Artists-in-Residence by Mayor Marty Walsh, exploring how art influences government policy impacting our community. As a writer, her work focuses on how women can use writing as a tool for healing and advocacy. Her first collection of poetry entitled Water Carrier inspired by Solange’s “A Seat at the Table” was released in October 2018. She is the creator of the Boston’s Most Resilient Women project, which tells the resiliency stories of women of color. She developed the Boston Women in the Workplace survey. She is also the founder of Girls, Write! a creative writing and publishing program for girls of color in Boston.
Courtney Jacobovits has a deep love for people and culture. Art—expressions of what communities deem worthy of exploration, documentation, and/or celebration—has provided a refuge through which she has frequently found relief as well as a deeper understanding of the world. A wealth advisor at Goldman Sachs, Courtney is also an urban planner by training. She previously served as the Senior Urban Planner for the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Mattapan, Back Bay with the Boston Planning & Development Agency and later as the city’s Director of Cultural Planning within the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture. Jacobovits is an undergraduate alumna of Northwestern University. She earned her Masters in Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. She also serves on the Board of Governors for the Harvard Club of Boston and in her free time enjoys reading, eating, and traveling.
Beau Kenyon is founding principal at The Oakley Collective for Arts + Research, a non-profit consulting firm that designs sustainable audience engagement strategies, innovative operational systems, and cross institutional partnerships for public and private organizations. The Oakley Collective has built toolkits, strategies, and programs for Now + There, the Boston Public Library, Ballet Des Moines, Mainframe Studios, and Iowa State University. A practicing composer, Kenyon has received support from NEFA, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mass MoCA, and Northeastern Center for the Arts. His interdisciplinary, collaborative work has appeared at SITE Santa Fe, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Des Moines Civic Center, and MFA Boston, with public artwork installed at Governors Island, Emerald Necklace, Des Moines Water Works Park, Boston Public Library, and Fenway Park. Kenyon’s contemporary ballet and concert score, Of Gravity and Light (premiered by Ballet Des Moines, 2022), interprets the science of the solar system through music, dance (Tom Mattingly), and projection (Yu-Wen Wu) and received support from PBS, GBH, and NASA. His interactive AR piece, ReachYou (in collaboration with Jonah + Katrina Goldsaito), premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Kenyon currently teaches graduate coursework in arts administration and cultural entrepreneurship at Northeastern University, College of Arts, Media + Design.
Cher Krause Knight is Professor of Art History at Emerson College. Her publications include the books: Museums and Public Art? (co-edited with Harriet F. Senie); A Companion to Public Art (co-edited with Senie); Power and Paradise in Walt Disney’s World; and Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism. She is the co-founder of Public Art Dialogue, an international professional organization providing an interdisciplinary critical forum for the field. Professor Knight also co-founded the journal Public Art Dialogue (Routledge/Taylor & Francis), was its co-editor through Spring 2017, and now serves on its editorial board. Additionally she is on the advisory board of Now + There (a nonprofit bringing temporary and site specific public art to Boston). Knight served as the Memorial / Public Art Research Advisor for the One Boston Resilience Project (Boston Art Commission and Mayor’s Office of Arts + Culture, City of Boston), as well as the Public Art Scholar for the King Memorial (Boston Art Commission, City of Boston, jointly with Embrace Boston nonprofit). Her current book project, Memorials Now, is under contract with Wiley (co-authoring with Senie).
Gabriel Sosa is a Cuban-American artist, educator, linguist, and curator. Often drawing upon his upbringing in Miami and over a decade of work as a court interpreter in Boston, he uses legal proceedings, personal archives, and contemporary visual culture to explore the mutability of language, the imperfection of memory, and the misinterpretation of both. His work has been shown at Tufts University Art Galleries; O, Miami Poetry Festival; A R E A, Boston; Lugar a dudas, Cali, Colombia; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; and Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana, Cuba. He has organized exhibitions at Haley House in Roxbury, and the Nave Gallery in Somerville. He was also part of the curatorial team of Area Code, the first art fair to showcase artists with ties to New England. Sosa teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is Deputy Director of Essex Art Center in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Gloria Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University. A research affiliate in the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sutton also serves on the Advisory Committee of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Voices in Contemporary Art. In 2017–19, she collaborated with the artist Renée Green on a series of interlinked public programs and exhibitions at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, culminating in the volume Renée Green: Pacing (D.A.P., 2021). In 2021, she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her book Against the Immersive: Shigeko Kubota’s Video Sculptures and her a French translation of her book, The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie Drome was published by Éditions B2 in 2022 with a foreword by Olafur Eliasson.
