The Crossroads:
the curatorial theme for 2025’s art residency program
About:
Crossroads present choices and transitions that we face both in our personal lives, and in the world at large. We are looking for artists to help us untangle the ethics of contemporary life, by digging into the grays, pauses, and in-between's- crossroads- that offer us tools, materials, and insights for building more empowered futures.
Crossing & Intersecting:
Crossroads & Personal Change
In the past 15years, Urbano's artists and participants have explored public art and activism across all media, always culminating in interactive and public art events. Our projects can be seen as a laboratory at the intersection of art, activism and education. We are interested in working with artists whose practice resonates with being at an intersection: exploring intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and the changing meanings of the concepts of art, audienceship, and artists.
Choice & Voice:
Crossroads & Social Change
In literature and art, crossroads symbolize a place of choice-making, a place of transition. This theme asks questions of modern day morality: what is wrong and right? Does such a thing exist? How have we come to live this way; at what costs? And who pays the biggest price? Do our individual choices matter? We invite artists with a social practice to explore the possible futures ahead of us, and empower our participants in shaping that future.
Intergenerational Think Tank:
Crossroads & Community Care
Crossroads can be meeting places: meeting between yourself and the other; meeting between past, present and future. In our short intergenerational projects (SIP), we invite artists and participants to enter the crossroads and explore the modern-day issues that confront all of us (climate change, war, housing crisis). What can we learn from each other? What experience from the past speaks to our present moment, and to the future? Do ethical concepts from the past still apply, or do we need new ones, in order to navigate this new world?
Programs:
We are hosting artists from all disciplines (visual; dance/theatre; spoken word; writing; film/photography; and especially artists with a social and/or transdisciplinary practice) in addressing a Crossroads through one of our three programs.
Youth Art Projects
YAP's are ten-week-long explorations of a particular social issue, through public and participatory art practices. They're both conceptualized and instructed by an AiR, and oriented in serving Urbano's youth demographic. Youth are Boston Public School (BPS) high school students between the ages of 14-19and Urbano alumni (many of whom are enrolled in college).
Structure:
- 10 weeks
- Two 2-hour studio session per week -1-2 Saturday field trips or site visits -12-15 participants
- Youth participants
- Culminating in a public project
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Community Art Projects
CAP's are intergenerational art workshops that invite makers ages 14-65+to work with an Artist-in-Residence in actualizing not only a public art-project, but a professional development experience. Onethat supports artists in advancing their creative practice within a community of artists who are learning and connecting through a shared creative process.
Structure:
- 10 weeks
- Two 2-hour studio session per week -1-2 Saturday field trips or site visits -12-15 participants
- Participants ages 14-65+
- Culminating in a public project
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Short lntergenerational Projects
SIP's are creative conversations that are idea-led but process-based. They're artistic meditations on a question that a SIP AiR leads their intergenerational group in investigating through transdisciplinary dialogue, process, and experiential learning. Building shorter but equally valuable moments at Urbano where participants can explore meanings, answers, and artistic approaches to learning from each other across age, space, and context.
Structure:
- 4 weeks
- 2-hour studio session per week
- 8-12participants
- Participants ages 14-65+
- SIP Artist presents their program wrap-up at a final event