UPCOMING
From The Page To The Stage
July 10 – December 5, 2025
Pulled from the page and brought to life, this site-specific mural installation by Dr. Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs with Michael Talbot, Ayana Mack, and Square (Lee Beard) is the culminating project of a four-part masterclass series designed to nurture the next generation of creative changemakers.
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Developed in partnership with Converse and The New Commonwealth Fund and led by artist-educator Gibbs, the program invites young artists to explore identity, purpose, and storytelling through the medium of mural-making, creating powerful visual narratives shaped by collaboration, reflection, and the belief that art can transform both space and self.
It all starts with an idea.
That idea sparks a conversation.
The conversation leads to action.
Action evolves into a composition.
That composition, we hope, activates and empowers a community.
And that community goes on to contribute to the world. – Street Theory Collective
Street Theory Collective is an artist-led nonprofit committed to cultivating creativity as a catalyst for personal growth, community connection, and cultural transformation. Opening a new project space in Central Square, Cambridge, the organization provides emerging and underrepresented artists with access to mentorship, professional development, and public art opportunities that build lasting skills and amplify authentic expression. Through cross-sector collaboration and a deep commitment to equity, STC serves as a creative incubator—empowering artists to ideate, create, curate, and share work that reflects the spirit and resilience of their communities.
ARTISTS
Dr. Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs is a visual artist, organizer, and community builder from Roxbury, MA. He transforms Boston’s cultural landscape, focusing on beautifying Black and Brown communities. As co-founder of Artists for Humanity, he devoted over 30 years to teaching creative skills to youth and partnering with institutions to offer real-time opportunities for emerging artists. Gibbs has been recognized as one of Boston’s most influential people and has received numerous awards, including the Boston Celtics’ Hero Among Us Award and the MLK Drum Major Award. He was the first local and Black artist to paint the coveted Dewey Square Mural on the Rose Kennedy Greenway and has been an artist-in-residence with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and MassArt. Gibbs’ continuing practice is expansive and prolific. He envisions graffiti and hip-hop as ways to educate young people and create images of beauty and resilience through murals and contemporary fine art.
Michael Talbot is a Jamaican-born, Boston-based freelance artist and visual storyteller who has worked on a wide range of projects, murals, exhibitions, and showcases since 2012. His work, often narrative-driven, is most characterized by the keen use of motion, negative space, as well as a limited palette reminiscent of graphic novels and other forms of sequential art. Michael believes that all art is inter-connected in some facet; informing, complimenting and/or enhancing each other. And although his passion and interest for storytelling is forefront in his practice and craft, he tends to draw from his knowledge in multiple areas of study to help strengthen this process. Whenever possible, he uses his rich cultural background from his early life in Jamaica to infuse, improve, and “season” whatever project he tackles, often mixing both digital and traditional media.
Ayana Mack is a multidisciplinary artist and creative storyteller dedicated to using art as a catalyst for change. She recently completed Closer To My Dreams, a 45-foot mural celebrating transformation and joy. Her work has been exhibited at Artists for Humanity and the Multicultural Arts Center, earning honors such as the Black Excellence on the Hill award and the Ashe Ashe grant, which supported her art and healing workshops at Boston Public Libraries. Ayana serves on the boards of the Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston and Boston Arts Academy, advocating for increased art access in communities of color. She has also contributed to Boston’s neighborhood activation initiatives as Marketing Director for Open Streets Boston and a Creative Entrepreneur Fellow with the Arts and Business Council.
Square (born Lee Beard in 1986), also known as SOEMS, is a multidisciplinary artist based in Boston with over 17 years of professional experience. A Boston Arts Academy graduate, he began in the early 2000s graffiti scene and has since developed a career spanning fine art, design, and public space. His work includes large-scale murals, custom lettering, graphic illustration, brand development, and stage design. Known for his precision and distinctive style, Lee has collaborated with businesses, institutions, and communities to create visually striking and meaningful projects. A proud member of the ALA, and GN Crew, he’s helped shape Boston’s urban landscape through public art, reinforcing his belief that art brings people and ideas together. Whether partnering with corporate clients or local groups, he brings creativity, professionalism, and a deep commitment to each project. His work blends craftsmanship and purpose, always aiming to inspire and connect.
Organized by Street Theory Collective
VISIT
Wagner Foundation Gallery, 485 Massachusetts Ave, 2nd Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139
Wagner Foundation Gallery, located within the Foundation’s office, is open to the public by appointment only on Thursdays, 12–5 p.m. To arrange an individual self-guided visit, please visit this link. If you would like a group visit or tour, email gallery@wfound.org. Admission is free and this venue is fully accessible.
PAST
Slow Loops: Luís Arnías
October 11, 2024 – March 28, 2025
Through an interdisciplinary practice that includes experimental films, Luis Arnías explores his experience as an immigrant person of Afro-Caribbean descent living in America, examining the connections between his own life and Black and African diasporic consciousness. Originally from Venezuela, Arnías currently lives and works in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston. He uses 16mm film to visualize everyday life, investigating the conceptual layers of neighborhood, wilderness, borders, and boundaries through the lens of race, immigration, and identity. Subjects range from his home life, where his family participates in the making of his films, to contested social spaces for communities of color in Boston, to street life in Brazil, Senegal, Venezuela, and elsewhere.
The solo exhibition Slow Loops presents two recent films by Arnías, Bisagras (2024) and Noise Cloud (work in progress), in addition to sculpture and drawings that illuminate the films’ thematic connections. Bisagras, is an impressionistic experience of Arnías’s visits to the House of Slaves in Gorée Island, Senegal, and the port of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, major sites of the transatlantic slave trade where the artist imagines his ancestors’ history. Noise Cloud is an experimental film that Arnías started during the pandemic, finding inspiration in the shared spaces of public parks and how they became heightened grounds for protest, partying, and leisure across racial lines in a time of crisis. The two films come together in his enduring study of Black life in all of its exuberance and expansiveness, as well as the slow and ongoing effects of structural racism, colonization, and the slave trade across locations, contexts, and time.
ARTIST
Luis Arnías is a filmmaker from Venezuela who moved to Boston to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. After completing the diploma program there, he received a master’s in film/video from Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College. His work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York Film Festival, Punto de Vista, Berlin Critics’ Week (Woche der Kritik), and BlackStar Film Festival. He was a fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard University, a recipient of the Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship in 2022, and most recently a 2023 Boston Artadia Awardee.
Organized by Abigail Satinsky, Program Officer & Curator, Arts & Culture
ARTIST PUBLICATION
VISIT
Wagner Foundation Gallery is located at the foundation’s office at 485 Massachusetts Ave, 2nd Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Wagner Foundation Gallery is open to the public by appointment only on Thursdays, 12–5 p.m. To arrange an individual self-guided visit, please visit this link. If you would like a group visit or tour, email info@wfound.org. Admission is free and this venue is fully accessible.
PAST
speech lives in a series of
daily attempts: artists & publishing
March 7–August 1, 2024
Ulises Carrión inside of Other Books and So Archive, the second iteration of his Amsterdam-based bookstore, 1979. Courtesy of Ulises.
Steffani Jemison, Same Time, 2017. Installation View, The Inconstant World, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
Joseph Grigely, Songs Without Words (Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Krakow Witkin Gallery.
Adam Pendleton, Anthology, 2018. Image courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery
Kimi Hanauer, how is speech a desire a hope a promise, 2021. Courtesy ofthe artist.
Gabriel Sosa, Take One #1, 2021. Installation View, Exposed 2021, The Current, Stowe, Vermont, 2021. Courtesy the artist.
An exhibition featuring artists who make publications and establish platforms for publishing. This presentation marks the first exhibition at Wagner Foundation Gallery and celebrates the foundation’s grantmaking support of artist publications.
Why do artists publish? An oft-repeated phrase is that to publish is to make public. When artists make a public, they are not only producing a feedback mechanism for their work to be seen, heard, digested, and responded to, they are also making new discourses and contexts for their work to be understood. These publics can include the widest possible audience of willing participants or manifest as an intimate, direct exchange. Through publishing, artists can speak in code, sending secret missives to those who most need to hear them; they can quietly resist being legible, creating a space for withdrawal and rest, a space to escape being read in order to read. Publishing is a process of self-determination, a political practice of building new ways of speaking, a way for artists to find and support each other and to create cultural access beyond traditional exhibition contexts.
The artists in this exhibition, who address the forms and performativity of speech through drawing, photography, poetics, and text, are all also publishers. In their extended bodies of work, they gather and disseminate new publics and ideas; they engage in mark-making, obfuscation, having a voice, and hearing and seeing each other. Their work lives in this everyday negotiation of public and private exchange, of refusal, and insists on the necessity of shaping the discourse towards what demands to be said. By creating spaces of connection through the act of publishing, establishing platforms for artists’ ideas to emerge, they each build new worlds of social and political exchange and possibility.
As Kimi Hanauer writes in how is speech a desire a hope a promise, from which the title of this exhibition is drawn:
speech lives in a series of daily attempts. speech tries to mark impossible to reach destinations. speech tries to shift and bend the structures that be. attempting to mold them into streams that pull and push some formations of an us into the horizons we desire.
This exhibition marks the first in a series of exhibitions and public programs by Wagner Foundation that highlights how arts and culture are essential to our collective wellbeing. We support visionary artists and arts organizations that believe in expanding cultural access in service of a healthy society, including through artists’ publications.
ARTISTS
Joseph Grigely, Kimi Hanauer, Steffani Jemison, Adam Pendleton,Gabriel Sosa, Ulises
Organized by Abigail Satinsky, Program Officer & Curator, Arts & Culture
VISIT
This exhibition is showing at Essex Art Center Sept 7 – Oct 19, 2024
Click here to access the exhibition pamphlet.
