Two Jamaica Plain residents were among five Bostonians named as the 2020 Boston Artists-in-Residence.
Victor Yang
This is the fourth year of the Boston Artists-in-Residence (AIR) program. The artists will work with a "parallel cohort of city partners to explore, critique, and re-imagine city initiatives at the intersection of civil service, social justice, and artistic practice."
"We’ve seen great projects and powerful relationships come out of the Boston Artists-in-Residence program,” said Mayor Marty Walsh. “I look forward to seeing this new cohort help us think creatively about how we can enhance our services and programs for all Boston residents.”
The two Jamaica Plain residents are Victor Yang and Golden.
The following was provided by the city of Boston:
For the past decade, Yang has been working with people to tell their stories. Stories that articulate hard truths, demand change, and inspire others to do the same. As an artist-in-residence, he is excited to bridge City Hall and Boston streets in this project—to play accomplice to individual imagination and to collective vision. As an organizer, he has supported local community leaders to run national campaigns for immigrant rights, to stop ICE deportations, and to double voter turnout in communities of color. He is an MFA candidate in fiction at Boston University. He also has a PhD in Politics from the University of Oxford, where he studied movements for racial equity. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Boston Globe, Longreads, The Rumpus, and The Southern Review, among others. He received the 2018 Chertkov Fellowship for Labor and Justice at the Blue Mountain Center. Yang is an immigrant, and for immigrants, the notion of home can be complicated. Yet he unequivocally claims Boston as home, this place that has given him so much, and this place he hopes to give back to. As for his first home: his parents have and always will be his biggest inspiration.
Yang is working with the Boston Public Health Commission’s Violence Intervention & Prevention Initiative (VIP), which aims to prevent violence through building and sustaining strong communities where residents are knowledgeable about the root causes of violence and empowered to address them.
Golden
Golden (they/them) is a black gender-nonconforming trans-femme photographer and poet raised in Hampton, VA, currently residing in Boston, MA. Utilizing their lifelong proximity to bullying, homophobia, racism, and transphobia, Golden empowers conversations around trauma work, representation, blackness, Americanisms, and gender identity and expression. Golden is the recipient of a Pink Door Fellowship (2017/2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminary Fellowship (2019), the Frontier Award for New Poets (2019), and a Pushcart Nomination (wildness, 2019). Their work has been featured on/at the Shade Journal, the Offing, wildness, Button Poetry, i-D, Interview Magazine, & elsewhere. Golden holds a BFA in Photography from New York University.
Golden will be working with the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement, which seeks to promote gender equity by empowering women and removing systemic barriers to their advancement.
“I am so excited to build, challenge, and grow new understandings of community engagement and civic practice within a cohort of intentional artists through the City of Boston,” said Boston artist-in-residence Golden. “Alongside the Department of Women's Advancement, I know this opportunity to connect with women & femmes across the Greater Boston area, to further create more written & visual representations of black and POC trans/nonbinary femmes and their concerns, is going to be a fruitful experience. I can't wait to get started!”