As we reflect on the year, and all of the big and small moments that brought us joy and inspiration, we checked in with a group of folks that have inspired us at WBUR with their creativity, energy and passion: the members of The Makers and ARTery 25 cohorts.
Since the inception of this series in 2019, we have admired the tenacity these artists bring to their craft and all they have gone on to accomplish. Read on to find out what they’ve been up to and hear about what inspired them in 2023.
In early December, Nepali artist Sneha Shrestha, aka Imagine, returned to her Somerville studio “super energized.” This was after a month-long art-making trip to Cambodia, and a visit to her home country. Now, the prolific 36-year-old — who’s created eye-popping street murals on buildings around Boston, and beyond — is laser-focused on finishing work for her first solo show. Titled “Ritual and Devotion,” the exhibition opens Feb. 1 at the College of the Holy Cross Cantor Art Gallery. Shrestha is also pumped to be part of a group show of Himalayan artists in March at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.
Looking back on what inspired her in 2023, Shrestha shared two different artists and forms. One is the song “Easy” by Sri Lankan Tamil-Swiss singer-songwriter Priya Ragu. Shrestha said she found herself listening to Ragu’s R&B and electro beats all summer while creating the largest painting of her career (it’s 12 by 12 feet). “She carries her Tamil heritage proudly and strongly,” Shrestha said of Ragu. “And it’s inspiring to see another South Asian artist taking pride in their culture in different ways that also help empower me.”
Another artist who fueled Shrestha’s creativity is her collaborator and friend Anthan Rajaratnam. Like Ragu, he also has Sri Lankan Tamil roots. Rajaratnam owns Black Cat Labs in Somerville, a laser cutting and engraving studio, and he has fabricated all of Shrestha’s sculptures. She pointed to a sign he recently created for Remnant Brewing and said the metal piece’s chemically altered patina is, for her, a source of wonder. “It’s like, how did he do that?” Shrestha said, adding she hopes her own work incites a similar sense of awe for people who see it.
Fabiola Méndez takes an innovative (and virtuosic) approach to the cuatro, a Puerto Rican folk instrument related to the guitar. Méndez’s first two albums blended sounds from Latin, jazz and folk music, showcasing a knack for songwriting and tasty grooves. Now, she is hard at work on her third full-length album, which she plans to release in the spring of 2024. The album will “revisit some of these folk melodies, some of the grooves and rhythms that are traditional to the cuatro, to the music that I grew up playing and listening to,” Méndez said.
Of all the art she consumed in 2023, it was an album by her partner, the saxophonist Jonathan Suazo, that moved Méndez the most. “Ricano” explores the connection between Afro-Dominican and Afro-Puerto Rican music. Méndez, who plays and sings on the track “Ser de Aquí,” was privy to the album’s creation from start to finish.
“It gave me that sense of how powerful it can be when you dive deep into your roots and explore who you are, what your history is, and how you can use some of that to then ignite change a little bit,” Méndez said. “Not only in terms of how people perceive certain genres of music, especially in these places in the Caribbean, in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but also it kind of invites people to [say], ‘Oh, that’s awesome. What’s my story? Where do I come from?’”
Daniel Callahan uses a myriad of different art practices, including face painting and film, to explore various topics in the Black community, like mental health and religion. He is currently adapting his short film “Come On In” into a one-man show and an accompanying podcast. “Come On In” follows an artist through an eerie (and sometimes dark) journey to self-discovery. The show will debut in March 2024. “My favorite decision, by far, was giving myself this year to work on my art exclusively,” Callahan said.
Callahan had some memorable moments this year at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where he is a Neighborhood Salon Luminary artist — a program that brings local artists into conversation with the museum. “It’s allowed me to experience the museum in a different way,” he says. “They’ve really fostered a space of connection between artists, which I think is really dope.”
For poetry lovers, he suggests a book called “Rupture,” which was written by his sister, Monique Adelle Callahan. “It talks about her experience giving birth to her child,” he said. “But she also researched how enslaved women mothered children. She reflects on all the freedoms that she enjoys as a woman but also the threat of mortality because Black women have such high mortality rates when it comes to giving birth.”
Erin Genia has been busy over the past year, with new public art installations going up across the country in Washington, Minnesota and South Dakota. One of them, a 25-foot banner hung from a watchtower on the Lake Traverse reservation (where Genia is from), honors the memory of her sister, who passed away in 2022. “It was really a wonderful thing to do some community healing around her passing,” said Genia. “We’ve lost a lot of people since the pandemic on the reservation. … It was nice to be able to think about how our art can be a focus for bringing folks together around things that are hard.”
Genia saw multiple exhibits in 2023, but one that really stuck with her is “Marking Resilience: Indigenous North American Prints,” on view at the Museum of Fine Arts through March 17. The show features work by emerging and established Indigenous artists. “They have a curator there who is focusing on expanding the collections to include more Native American artists,” Genia said. “And so this is part of that effort.” The last season of the television show “Reservation Dogs” (now streaming on Hulu) aired this year and was one of her favorite things to watch. “It’s one of the few pieces of media that shows Native Americans from a Native American perspective,” Genia pointed out. “I think it has really made an impact on the native community to be able to see our struggles and the image of our lives on screen.”
2024 will be a year full of art-making for Genia. She’s curating a show at the Boston Center for the Arts, participating in a residency at GreenRoots in Chelsea and will be showing her work in Venice at the European Cultural Center. “I feel very blessed and honored,” she said. “It’s what I’ve been working so hard to try to do my whole life. I feel like it’s finally starting.”
For years, Oompa has dreamed of assembling a collective of artists in Boston aimed toward creating financial stability. In May, it became a reality with the launch of the collective and cultural agency Outlaud (pronounced “outlawed”). Oompa says her team is like the Avengers here to make sure that artists cannot only survive but thrive in the city that they call home. The 12-person team is comprised of music creators, video producers, photographers and even spiritualists. They even welcomed seven artists into the family with a free year-long incubator program.
Outlaud has been taking a lot of Oompa’s time. When she’s not performing or creating, she’s making sure her people are getting to shine or grant writing for the organization. In her few moments of downtime, you’ll catch her bumping her favorite song “SkeeYee” by Sexyy Red. “I love her, I really do. Her new mixtape is called ‘Hood Hottest Princess’ and that’s exactly who she is,” Oompa said. Oompa and fellow ARTery 25 member Amanda Shea shared the same favorite show this year: Hulu’s “Black Cake.” “It has a good story and it’s a great unfolding of a mystery,” Oompa said. “It brought Caribbean culture to the mainstream while maintaining an American attitude. It really explores the depth of humanity.”
Alison Qu just wrapped the 2023 season at Chuang Stage, which included a workshop reading in the spring of the celebrated new play “Flight of a Legless Bird 無腳鳥的飛行” by Ethan Luk and was capped off by a recent Fall workshop production of “The Fortune Teller” at the Boston Center for the Arts. Qu serves as the executive director of Chuang Stage, and they’re looking ahead toward next year’s season. “I can’t tell you the exact title yet because we’re working on the details, but I’m so excited,” they said.
Qu found inspiration in a number of ways this year — the music of Boston singer-songwriter Maddie Lam; Ellen Pao’s book “Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change”; and the exhibit “After Hope: Videos of Resistance,” which will end its run at the Peabody Essex Museum on Dec. 31. “It was a collection of video archives of protests, specifically in the Asian American context then sort of greater Asian, Hong Kong protests,” they said. “I got really emotional seeing it. … I was so, so stoked to see PEM presenting that collection.”
Elisa Hamilton just completed work on “Jukebox,” a public art installation in Cambridge. Hamilton transformed a 1960 jukebox into a storytelling device, playing recordings from 100 local interviewees. In 2024, Hamilton will display her work at the ShowUp Gallery in the South End, including a new quilt inspired by and in response to a quilt that Hamilton inherited from her great-grandmother, whom she never met. “I’m telling her about who I am in conversation with this beautiful object that she crafted,” she said.
Hamilton cites an open rehearsal with Ayodele Casel for an upcoming 2024 dance performance in April at the ICA as a particularly memorable inspiration this year. “I was really struck by the vulnerability of opening up your process to people while you’re developing work,” she said. “Watching this artist work through her process in front of me made me realize that I have to be okay with making mistakes and failure — doing that by myself and being ok doing that in public sometimes, because that’s like part of being human. And that’s part of the work.”
Harley Takagi Kaner is halfway through production of the final season of “The Penumbra Podcast” as co-producer, director and sound designer. The podcast tells the story of Juno Steel, a queer private eye in space. “After so many years, we kind of fell into a rhythm of how long it would take to produce an episode and all the work that would go into it, but it’s really interesting — and also appalling — to see how much slower everything is becoming as we get to the end, because we have to make sure that we’re wrapping everything up,” they said. “Writing and creating everything takes so much longer because, you know, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, what if I forgot something?’ So it is an exciting and horrifying time.”
When asked what local art inspired them this year, Takagi Kaner spoke of The Huntington’s production of “The Band’s Visit,” which runs through Dec. 17. The play is about a band of touring Egyptian musicians who end up stuck overnight in a small Israeli town and have to rely on the kindness of strangers until they get the next bus back onto their route. “In this particular show, it’s often about an outsider perspective on your own life,” they said. “And even if that relationship with that person is not continued because they leave town the next day, that moment of interchange and that moment of being able to see yourself in your life in a new light, I think the idea is that it may change the course of your life, even if it’s in a way that is subtle.”
Kaner also said Anjimile’s new album “The King” was a significant source of inspiration in 2023, especially as one of the album’s tracks, “Harley,” is named after Takagi Kaner. “I think my favorite track on the new album is called ‘Anybody.’ And the reason that it’s my favorite is because there’s some really amazing synthesis of the words, the content that he is writing about, paired with the way he uses his voice which is, I think, just some of the best stuff you can do with songwriting.”
Haydee Irizarry is an ever-evolving chameleon. We got to know the now 28-year-old mezzo soprano through her work as the “metallista” lead vocalist for the heavy metal band Carnivora. Since then, Irizarry has been exploring other forms of expression, including leatherwork. Now she’s crafting clutches, bracelets, belts and under-bust corsets that also incorporate her love of painting. “It’s another canvas,” Irizarry said.
She’s seen a lot of change in 2023, including a move to Haverhill and having her own apartment and car for the first time. Her new mobility has allowed Irizarry to play more than 100 acoustic gigs at restaurants. She’s also been pursuing a solo project and alt-persona known as Zahra Lux. “There’s a lot of creativity brewing in this transitional phase,” she said, “It’s like the clay is starting to take shape. It’s exciting, and scary.”
A highlight this past year was Carnivora opening for Pantera, on a side stage, at the Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion. Irizarry wore a white, custom Haus of Zahra Lux leather piece while performing.
As for art that inspired Irizarry this year, she pointed to high fashion leather designer Zana Bayne, pop culture icon Kim Kardashian’s brand SKIMS and Vogue magazine. Irizarry was also psyched to share music by her friends in Girthquake and the funeral doom/sludge metal band Tears From A Grieving Heart. She said both, “have inspired me with their passion in the metal world.”
Amanda Shea bridged the gap between poetry and music this year with the release of her first EP, “GOD, Again.” Her standout track on the project is “Movin’ On,” which touches on perseverance and the power of choice. It features Roxbury artist Karim and Allston-bred producer GIB DJ. The first-time songwriter also co-produced a documentary that premiered this year: “BLACK. Narratives in Boston Black Queer & Trans History.” To cap off the year, she’s been selected as the 2024 curator of the Boston Center of the Arts Hella Black Series — an annual interdisciplinary exhibit that highlights black artistry in the commonwealth. Shea says this year’s theme is spirituality.
Something that helped fuel her this year was “Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry” by Adrienne Maree Brown. “Basically, it’s like short stories with a deep connection of nature, wisdom, spirituality, love and liberation. It’s just really really good,” she said. “[It] shows this woman’s survival guide to not only digging deep but being able to dispel social conditions and ills that society has placed on us as Black women. She’s just a dope author that I’m really enjoying.”
