Dig Boston: Making Oasis

With their summer efforts winding down, Urbano is planning a three-day showcase, “a series of three events celebrating artwork created by youth artists and community participants” from August 18 to 20

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Boston Globe: Create, Connect, Catalyze

At Urbano, a scholar connects young artists with ‘deeply local’ educators

“There are people who believe art is art — that we shouldn’t expect anything other than an aesthetic experience,” Jimenez observed. “So I think the question becomes, how can we learn to shape or perhaps even advocate for the kinds of experiences we want to see in Boston.” Jimenez, 35, spent over 20 years working as a professional musician. Now a PhD candidate in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, she’s turned her focus to studying and creating entirely new kinds of learning opportunities, specifically ones that are less white-washed than what she experienced as a young artist.

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Boston Globe: We Heal

Artist Nora Valdez lets cancer patients light the way with ‘We Heal’

In a year of pandemic-induced trauma and isolation, Nora Valdez wanted to create a physical representation of healing. The Boston-based Argentinian artist is the brains behind “We Heal,” a project that encouraged local cancer patients — many of whom are immigrants — to answer two questions: What images, words, people, and foods bring comfort? And what inspires and brings hope?

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Jamaica Plain News: Airplay by Rachel Allen

Native American Artist Rachel Allen’s airplay Opens at Urbano Project

Allen aims to unsettle the air we breathe and otherwise manipulate. If we think about our experience through the air-the ubiquitous material we are suspended in-then we can contemplate what decolonization requires. If decolonization is not a metaphor or symbolic act, then we must reassess the entire environment we occupy. Allen invites the audience to intentionally interact with air, understand its agency, and be reminded of our interconnectedness.

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Boston Globe: Okoŋwaŋžidaŋ by Erin Genia

At Urbano Project, artist Erin Genia ties together ‘everything in the universe’

In the studio at Urbano Project, a nonprofit art space in Jamaica Plain, teens are filling in pastel outlines of their bodies with rivers, animals, and forests. Benard Nina’s drawing has a tropical green landscape and a cooler blue one. “It’s a world where animals and people are united. We treat the animals like family. We don’t destroy the land. We embrace everything the land has for us,” said Nina, 18. Urbano’s youth artists are paid stipends to spend six hours a week in the studio working with the agency’s artist in residence. This fall, that’s Erin Genia, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate of the Dakota tribe, who also has artwork on view.

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Art Fix Daily: Nathalia JMag

Nathalia JMag’s Map This: Sustainable Fashion Featured in Art Fix Daily

Nathalia JMag's 'Map This: Sustainable Fashion' at Urbano Project Gallery, June 6-August 30

BOSTON, Massachusetts / May 16, 2019 Urbano Project welcomes Artist-in-Residence Nathalia JMag , a Colombian-American contemporary fashion designer who believes in sustainable and ethical approaches to apparel. Her work centers the intersection of design and eco-sustainability alongside an internal reimagining of the factory-labor driven fashion industry.