Welcome! It’s time to take action. We (NCFA staff and board) suggest that people visit the following websites and donate money, purchase artwork or tickets, attend performances and openings, and continue to follow these artists and their work.
*This is a living document. If you identify as BIPOC and would like your artwork or organization/project to be represented here, please email us your name, website, and brief bio at ncfa@nohoarts.org.
Organizations and projects:
The Embodied Leadership Project
The Embodied Leadership Project (ELP), founded and directed by Jamila Jackson, is a trauma-informed mindfulness, wellness and inclusion organization. The ELP approach integrates body-based practices, such as dance and horsemanship, with the community practice of storytelling. It is their mission to use story, contemplative practice, rhythm & movement to invite community members to authentically express, to deeply listen & to build languages of belonging and embody the wisdom and power of the African Diasporic community circle.
Scapegoat Garden is a New England-based creative engine, established by Deborah Goffe in 2002 as a vehicle for ever-evolving practices of dance making as world making that center the transformative power of expressive bodies in relationship to place, collaborative processes, interdisciplinarity and nurtured imagination. Scapegoat Garden seeks to nurture and contribute to the vitality of local arts ecosystems, and to encourage interconnectedness across perceived borders⎯because everywhere is local and we need each other. In this way, we strive to forge relationships with artists and communities, helping people see, create and contribute to a greater vision of ourselves, each other, and the places we call home.
The Performance Project/First Generation
The Performance Project is an arts community of many ages and ancestries that engages young people in intensive artistic training, inter-generational mentoring, leadership development, and community building through the arts. The Performance Project began in September of 2000 as a theater and movement workshop at the Hampshire Jail and House of Corrections in Northampton, MA. Eight men incarcerated at the Jail collaborated with dancer/choreographer, Amie Dowling, and visual and theater artist, Julie Lichtenberg, to create a performance piece, “Works in Progress.” Julie Lichtenberg founded First Generation in 2008 in response to Performance Project participants saying they wished they had been able to participate in a community like the Performance Project when they were growing up. First Generation brings together young adults ages 15-24 who identify as "first generation,” for intensive artistic training, leadership development, and inter-generational mentoring. Forming an artistic ensemble, members create and perform original multi-lingual physical theater with a focus on social justice. Ubuntu Arts Community brings together children, age nine to thirteen, with First Generation members, college interns and artists, in a caring community that focuses on intergenerational mentoring, leadership skills, the arts, social justice, and community engagement.
El Corazón/The Heart of Holyoke (Public Art Projects)
As a creative placemaking project, El Corazón / The Heart of Holyoke, aims to develop spaces and places that are reflective of the communities surrounding Main Street and promote economic opportunity.
Founded in 2016 by poet Alexandra Woolner, illustrator Jennifer Wagner, and artist Jason Montgomery, Attack Bear Press is a BIPOC led community arts and engagement collective. Located in Easthampton, Massachusetts, Attack Bear Press works with local artists and writers on collaborative, creative projects.
Make It Springfield
Make It Springfield is a maker space that supports the creative need of a diverse Springfield community. Its dynamic, eclectic learning environment invites people of any background or skill level to explore and create, while promoting inclusion and collaboration in all forms of culture, art and technology.
Individual artists:
Kathleen lives and creates her artwork in Western Massachusetts. Influenced by African art as well as art traditions of other indigenous world cultural groups Kathleen uses various techniques common with other mediums to create patterns in polymer clay. Her favorite is the intricate glassmakers technique murrini cane work. Over the last few years Kathleen has been creating what she calls the kdqCane. Another favorite is the mokume gane technique common with metal work. Kathleen strives to bring clearly her artistic voice into form and to discern and describe "Black American" as wearable and functional art. A standout design is her functional sculpture, The Original HeartBox™. Over the years Kathleen's work has been included in such national Exhibitions as Art Basel Miami, the American Craft Council's St.Paul Show, Paradise City Art Festival, the Museum of Science and Industry's Black Creativity exhibition, Mead Museum at Amherst College multiple New England art galleries including Louisa Gould Gallery on Martha's Vineyard and two Smithsonian Institution Folklife Festivals. Kathleen's jewelry is a five time top award winner in the Springfield, MA Mattoon Street Art Festival. Multiple publications have spotlighted Kathleen's artwork. These include Polymer Clay Daily website, Preview Massachusetts magazine, MVTimes Martha’s Vineyard and American Artwork: Carefully curated, original art & craft magazine.
David is a Chicago-born artist currently living and working in Western Massachusetts. He calls his work a fluid elegance turning 2D drawings into 3D pieces of sculpture on paper. His art work originally started with just pencil on 140lb watercolor paper but has evolved into so much more, incorporating materials such as sycamore tree bark, chem chi tree bark, and even hornet's nest. Support his work through Venmo @upncominart.
Skye Baptiste is a Haitian American artist, born and raised in Brooklyn NY with her twin sister. In 2019 she received her BFA in sculpture from Purchase College SUNY. She works mostly in mixed media sculpture, with a focus in metal work, fibers, and ceramics. Through exploring the connections between comfort and discomfort, found and created objects, natural and unnatural, she is able to find grounding through interaction, balance and love in spite of perceived chaos. Visit her instagram @ skye_evan_art, and support her work through Venmo @Skye-Baptiste.
Shakia Barron is a choreographer, performer, and dance educator whose work is rooted in the African Diaspora, focusing on Hip-Hop, House and other African diasporic dance forms. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Dance at Mount Holyoke College. She graduated with her MFA in Choreography at Wilson College, she holds an Associate’s degree in dance and psychology from Dean College, a Bachelor’s in liberal arts from Westfield State University, and she received the National Dance Institute’s teaching artist certificate in 2009. She graduated with her MFA in Choreography at Wilson College, she holds an Associate’s degree in dance and psychology from Dean College, a Bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Westfield State University, and she received the National Dance Institute’s teaching artist certificate in 2009. Her other dance training includes the Bates Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, and Pioneer Valley’s Performing Arts Charter School.
Chelvanaya Gabriel (they/them) is a multimedia art activist/storyteller and resilience facilitator with a background in the sciences. They were born and raised first in the Pacific Northwest then here in Western MA. A self-taught artist, they found an Audre Lorde-inspired form of self-care and healing-survival in creating visual work after the 2016 election. They create space within their work, and in community, where stories of wellness, trauma, disability, and neurodiversity, especially of QTBIPOC folx, can be witnessed and collectively processed. Decolonizing contemplative practices and an embodied awareness of ancestral knowledge guide this aspect of their work. Creative Resilience, their latest project, is a series of art-based dialogues about wellness and identity developed within an anti-oppression and liberation-centered framework. Support their work through Ca$hApp: $Chelvanaya | Venmo: @chelvanaya | Instagram: @scifilens
Jason Montgomery: Jason R. Montgomery, or JRM, is a Chicano/Indigenous Californian writer, painter, public artist, and playwright from El Centro, California. In 2016, along with Poet Alexandra Woolner, and illustrator Jen Wagner, JRM founded Attack Bear Press in Easthampton, MA. Jason’s work engages the cross-section of Chicano/Indigenous identity, cultural hybridization, post-colonial reconstruction, and political agency. His writing and visual art bridges the aesthetics and feel from the early cubist collage movement and the Russian abstract movement of the 1920s with living and historical Native/Indigenous Californian and Chicano art traditions to explore the Post-colonial narrative through active synthesis and guided (re)construction. Along with numerous public grants from the Mass Cultural Council and the Community Foundation of Western Mass, Jason is the recipient of both the New England Foundation for the Arts Spatial Justice for Public Arts, and Collective Imagination for Spatial Justice Grants. JRM’s art has been displayed at the Augusta Savage Gallery, the Creative Arts Workshop, Umass Boston and many others. JRM’s work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Storm Cellar, Ilanot Review, and other publications. They are also the founder of the annual Holyoke Community Ofrenda, the police transformation group A Knee is Not Enough (AKINE), and various public engagement projects.
Lourdes Morales is a Colombian artist who came to Massachusetts in 1986. She has been painting professionally since 1981, and has studied in Colombia, Belgium, Spain, and Mexico. Her work dips freely into realms of abstraction, figuration, surrealism, pop art, and spiritual expression, evoking spaces which respond to visual and sensitive images in our beings.
Trenda Loftin is a Western Mass-based consultant, actor, director, playwright, and activist. She is the Co-chair and Youth Engagement and Arts Integration Specialist of GLSEN Massachusetts, and a governing member of Real Live Theatre. Body-centered and collaborative, Trenda utilizes interactive and creative approaches to support individuals, theatre companies and organizations with addressing inequity within programs, practices, and policies. As an artist, Trenda has been working to integrate understandings of social issues and performance techniques since 2005. As a facilitator, she is committed to providing various strategies for critical thinking, self, community, and world reflection, and instigating positive change. She believes very much in the power of storytelling not only to shed light on reality but also as a way to envision the world we wish to live in. Support her work through Venmo @Trenda-Loftin or Ca$hApp $TrendaLoftin.