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COMMON/ƎƆIꓕƆⱯꓤԀ

@commonpracticema

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Experimental, kunsthalle-style cultural workforce development lab for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts curated by @theglamorousacademic

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When I arrived in Boston in 2024 to become Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the Museum of African American History, I soon realized that the Boston I was encountering was not necessarily the Boston most people knew.

As I moved through neighborhoods, institutions, and cultural communities—meeting artists, curators, writers, organizers, and residents—I began to recognize how many other Bostons existed beyond the city’s dominant cultural geography.

That curiosity took me into the archives. Over the past year, I’ve been piecing together the intellectual and civic projects of Black Bostonians who imagined, mapped, preserved, and worked to shape this city differently.

The result is “When the Margins Become the Map,” published in Issue 17 of the Boston Art Review.

This research is far from finished. In many ways, it’s only beginning.

My thanks to the Boston Art Review (@bostonartreview) team for the opportunity, the thoughtful editorial process, and the space to bring this work into public conversation. I’m looking forward to seeing the essay in dialogue with the rest of Issue 17.

Boston Art Review’s fall/winter 2026 issue is coming on November 13 and available for preorder now!

With contributions by:
Dalia Al-Dujaili (@dalia.aldu)
Jorge S. Arange (@jsawriter)
Mary Bergman (@north_country)
Marcus Civin (@marcuscivinwriting)
Melaine Ferdinand-King (@melaine.mp3)
Cristela Guerra (@stela84)
Copenger (Miguel Caba, An Hà, Vivian Tran) (@c0penger)
Carmen Hermo (@chermosa)
Cierra Michele Peters (@earthaclit)
Angela T. Tate (@theglamorousacademic)
Alex Valenti (@alex.valentii)
Juchen Zhang (_juzhang)

Featuring:
Sascha Braunig (@saschenke)
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (@maria_magdalena_campos_pons)
Coop Social Club (@coopsocialclub)
Anthony Discenza (@yourethinkingofabrickwall / @lower_cavity)
Double Edge Theatre (@doubleedgetheatre)
The Heavy Culture Cooperative (@thcc413)
Arnold J. Kemp (@arnoldjosephkemp)
Robert Lazzarini (@robertlazzarinistudio)
Daniela Rivera (@driveraclerfeuille)
Kiyan Williams (@kiyanwilliams)
.. and more!

Cover: Portrait of Arnold J. Kemp, 2026. Photo by Kevin White for Boston Art Review. by @commonpracticema

For some time, I had been developing another organization around what I thought I should build and whom I thought I should serve. But after losing my institutional position this year, many of my assumptions about work, institutions, ambition, and place changed.

People began sending me jobs around the country. I am grateful for them. I am still open to the possibilities my career may take me toward.

But I kept thinking: I don’t want to leave Boston.

And rather than treating that as sentimentality—or assuming that serious ambition inevitably means being willing to go wherever the next job is—I became interested in the question itself.

Why might I have to leave?

Massachusetts has extraordinary cultural wealth. We have world-class museums, universities, archives, libraries, historic sites, artists, scholars, foundations, galleries, performing arts organizations, cultural agencies, and cultural workers.

But having cultural assets is not the same thing as having a durable cultural workforce.

I’ve become increasingly interested in the gaps between our institutions: how information circulates, how people discover careers, where professional development happens, how cultural workers encounter one another across silos, how careers survive institutional disruption, why talented people leave, and what conditions make it possible for people to build not simply a job here, but an entire cultural life.

I realized I don’t only want to study those questions.

I want somewhere to experiment with them.

COMMON/PRACTICE is an experimental cultural workforce development lab rooted in Massachusetts. It will be a place for encounter, field study, professional development, experimentation, research, and eventually interventions into the institutional and civic conditions that shape cultural work.

I don’t know every form it will take yet.

That’s intentional.

A lab should be allowed to experiment.

What I know is the question I want to spend time with:

What makes a cultural workforce durable—and what makes it possible to stay?

Welcome to COMMON/PRACTICE. by @commonpracticema