Primary site: The Colleges of the Fenway, a collaborative effort of five neighboring Boston-based colleges. Attendant activities at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Massachuetts Institute of Technology.
Create the future. After six long years, TransCultural Exchange’s Conference on International Opportunities in the Arts returns to Boston. From November 4–6, the city will once again become the nexus of the international art community. Residency directors, curators, collectors, arts administrators and critics from around the world will meet with artists (of all disciplines) for three full days of programming.
The conference will take into account today’s new global landscape. Since the Conference’s inception in 2019, the world has dramatically changed. The already pressing need to stem the rise of nationalism and other extremist tendencies, racial injustice, post-colonial inequity and climate insecurity has now come under renewed pressure with the emergence of a pandemic, Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine and rising strife and a shortage of goods around the world. Artists, like others, are quickly adapting. Some are choosing to directly address these issues in their work; others are more obliquing referencing the human condition.
This conference is designed to help artists in their efforts. It will tackle the growing necessities of artists who are working more collaboratively than ever before—sometimes embedded in other fields of research, sometimes exploring new ways of curating their work and, often, willingly engaging the public in ways and places never-before imagined. It will consider artistic traditions outside the cultural canon. It will address past styles and genres that are gaining renewed currency at the same time that NFTs have entered the scene. These are some of the many topics that the Conference will tackle, supplemented by expert, professional development sessions to help artists find the funding and skills to maintain their practices; hands-on workshops for them to engage with their peers around the corner and across the globe; and numerous networking events, roundtable discussions, and portfolio reviews with the Conference’s dozens of artist-in-residency directors, gallery owners, critics and others on hand to support artists and their work.
More than 180 renown speakers will be bringing their expertise to bear on the topics at hand, including Ute Meta Bauer (Singapore); Tania Bruguera (Cuba), Pieranna Calvachini (US); Luc Courchesne (Canada); Dorothea Fleiss (Romania/Germany); Fátima Martínez Gutierrez (Colombia); Irene Hediger (Switzerland); Hanna Isaksson (Sweden); Kassem Istanbouli (Lebanon); Mai Khoi (Vietnam); Helene Larsson Pousette (Sweden); Catherine Lee (Taiwan); Liudmyla Nychai (Ukraine); Bojana Panevska (the Netherlands); Joshua Pulman (US); Eva Respini (US); Omaid Sharifi (Afghanistan); Doris Sommer (US); Caitlin Strokosch (US); Shabani Ramadhan (Burundi), Sarah Tanguy (US); Alain Thibauld (Canada); Urbonas Studio (US/Lithuania); Gudrun Wallenböck (Austria); Jana Winderen (Norway); along with representatives from the ALIPH Foundation, Arquetopia Foundation (Mexico, Peru and Italy); Artist Residency Thailand; the Artist Communities Alliance; Artpace San Antonio; the Barr Foundation; the Center for Emerging Visual Artists; Centro Selva Arte y Ciencia (Peru); Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation; China Residencies, Cross Cultural Collaborative (Ghana); Diaspora Vibe Gallery and Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (the Caribbean); numerous Fab Labs, the Goethe Institut Boston (presenting a host of residency programs in Germany); Harvard’s Cultural Agents; Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; IASPIS (Sweden); the Lemelson-MIT Program; the MacDowell Foundation, MIT’s Arts Culture and Technology Program; PEN America’s Artist at Risk Program, 079 / Stories (India); the New York Foundation for the Arts; pARTage Artist-in-Residency Program (Mauritius); Silver Art Projects, the Surdna Foundation; the swiss-artists-in-labs program, the Taiwan Art Space Alliance; Tankwa Artscape (South Africa); TransArtists; and many others
The conference will take place primarily at the Colleges of the Fenway, a collaborative effort of five neighboring Boston-based colleges in the Fenway area, home also to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston including Emmanuel College, MCPHS University, Wentworth Institute of Technology and the nation’s oldest and only free-standing publicly funded art college, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Other activities are also scheduled at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
