NEFA Public Art Grant

In collaboration with local artists Anthony Romero (pictured above) and John Ewing, BNCLT has been awarded a grant to do public art on vacant lots near our property on Park Street in Dorchester. Placing Park is a collaboration between BNCLT, artists, and residents that brings neighbors together in solidarity to creatively and collectively imagine the transformation of vacant lots in connection with affordable, social housing. Click here to read the grant announcement.

New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) founded the Spatial Justice grants in 2020 to support Massachusetts teams of artists, creatives, culture bearers, cultural organizers, and community-based collaborators to imagine public art that fosters and contributes to more just futures for our public spaces and public culture. Each Collective Imagination for Social Justice team was awarded $5,000.

Initiated by Boston Neighborhood Community Land Trust (BNCLT), Placing Park Street brings together residents, artists, and neighbors in Dorchester to imagine alternative models of social housing, public art and popular education and to find new ways for residents to claim and control space, land, and homes. Through a series of workshops and onsite events, the Placing Park Street project will invite neighbors to connect social housing with neighborhood activity through public art. The process, as well as the vision, fortifies the community control of place, outside of destructive market forces.