Urbano Project to Present Free 3-Day Art Showcase This Month

Urbano Project has announced the culmination of its Summer 2022 art programs with a 3-Day Showcase: a series of three events celebrating artwork created by Youth Artists and Community Participants in each project, August 18-20. The three projects are "Performance: History/Ritual/Identity," a Community Art Project with Artist-in-Residence (AiR) Lani Asunción exploring place-based histories and identity through collaborative performance; "Making Oasis," a Youth Artist Project with AiR Joseph Madres exploring placemaking through environmental installation art; and "Through Our Eyes," a Youth Artist Project with AiR Sarah Plotkin investigating climate justice through performance & theater. These are the inaugural programs in Urbano's 2022-23 curatorial theme - Our Planet, Ourselves - a year-long series of arts programming exploring ideas of ecology, wholeness, and oneness through artist-led projects focused in placemaking, performance, and creative justice.

Register here for any or all of the three showcases. Every event is free and open to the public. Please see below for each event's location and time.

Thursday, August 18. 2022

"Making Oasis" Final Celebration

6:00-8:00 PM

15 Pleasantview St, Boston, MA 02136

Youth Artists in the "Making Oasis" project with Artist-in-Residence Joseph Madres will present their transformed green space in Hyde Park, tour us around their art installations (sculpture, mosaics, and more), and lead artmaking activities with the public. Closed-toed shoes are highly recommended.

Friday, August 19, 2022

"History/Ritual/Identity" Final Performance

6-9:00 PM | Doors at 6, Performance at 7

Cultural Equity Incubator, 5 Channel Center St, Suite 103, Boston, MA 02210

Adult Participants from the "Performance: History, Ritual, Identity" Community Art Project with Artist-in-Residence Lani Asunción will present their final, collaborative performance exploring identity and place-based histories in Boston.

Saturday, August 20, 2022

"Through Our Eyes" Community Sharing

11:00AM-12:00 PM

Egleston Square Public Library, 2044 Columbus Ave, Boston, MA 02119

Youth Artists in the "Through Our Eyes: Reflections on Climate Justice" project with Artist-in-Residence Sarah Plotkin will perform stories of climate justice in Boston and invite audience participation. Artwork created by older adult participants will also be presented.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Lani Asuncion is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist creating socially engaged art in both private and public spaces. Weaving a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance connected to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx-American. Asuncion integrates new media technologies and transmedia storytelling through ritualized performance to encourage conversations that magnify connections to facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives. Asuncion received their Master's Degree in Fine Arts in Performance and Video at the University of Connecticut. They are founding member and Director of Digital Soup who are core members of the Cultural Equity Incubator (CEI) partnering with Arts Connect International (ACI). Their work has been exhibited in Honolulu, Boston, Philadelphia, and Houston, and they have been awarded artist residences at the Studios at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Vermont Studio Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, I-Park, Elsewhere, The Wedding Cake House, Queer.Archive.Work, Caldera Arts Center, and BigCi in Australia. For more information, visit Asuncion's website. (Photo credit: Sasha Pedro)

Joseph Madres is passionate about teaching, learning, community-cultivating, and forms of collaborative cultural production and symbolic creativity. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Teaching, Curriculum, and Society department in the Lynch School of Education & Human Development at Boston College. He is particularly interested in the transformative potential of the arts in providing possibilities for natural communities (the human and more-than-human) to imagine and realize alternative ways of living justly and equitably. Madres considers himself an a/r/tivist -- a lived practice merging artmaking, research, teaching, and activism -- and encourages the youth and communities with whom he works to join him in becoming co-a/r/tivists to provoke transformative change at the local level. For more information, visit Madres' website.

Sarah Plotkin is a director, divisor, educator, and cultural worker based in Boston. She collaborates with community artists and professional artists of all ages to build original theater that celebrates stories of community, connection, and creation. Her work sits at the intersection of theater, storytelling, and community organizing, and uses tools from those fields in service of liberatory, collaborative art-making. Plotkin was the Founding Artistic Director of Electric Eye Ensemble, a collaborative theater company exploring American myths through a revisionist, feminist lens. She is also the founder and lead facilitator of Artist Gym, a creation and creativity workshop series for adults and teens. Plotkin works as a freelance director and teaching artist in the Greater Boston Area with organizations like ArtsEmerson, Wheelock Family Theatre, Open Door Arts, and Arlington Children's Theater, among others. She also facilitates anti-racism workshops with Jewish communities through Kavod. She holds an MA in Theater Education and Applied Theatre from Emerson College, and a BA with a focus on Directing from Sarah Lawrence College. For more information, visit Plotkin's website.

ABOUT URBANO PROJECT

Urbano Project is an arts non-profit that brings together practicing artists across disciplines, local youth, and community members to learn and experiment through multidisciplinary and socially-engaged art projects. Through artistic collaboration, participating youth and adults are challenged to create projects that span diverse artistic disciplines and curatorial themes, all rooted in the fundamental principles of collaboration, risk-taking, and creative and critical expression.

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