$82,500 In Art For Social Justice Grants Awarded By Cambridge Arts
3/18/2025 • 9 days ago
$82,500 In Art For Social Justice Grants Awarded By Cambridge Arts
Winners of Cambridge Arts’ 2025 Art for Social Justice Grants include public art installations that bring math into the city’s neighborhoods; a concert of new marimba and string quartet music highlighting spirituals and their enduring legacy; a mural by Cambridge Rindge and Latin School students addressing how climate change is hurting pollinators; photography recording the beauty and diversity of changing Cambridge; a play about Kittie Knox, a biracial cyclist in the 1890s who fought against race-based limitations against Black advancement; and a musical performance honoring the people who built American railroads, including historically marginalized communities of color and indigenous peoples whose lives and communities were displaced by the trains’ arrival.
These are among the
11 projects that have been awarded Art for Social Justice Grants totaling $82,500 by Cambridge Arts and the City of Cambridge in 2025. See full list of grants below.
This is the fourth year of the funding program—
grants are $7,500 each—which supports projects that present the themes and ongoing work of social justice to the Cambridge public through the arts.
Overall Cambridge Arts and the City are distributing more than $300,000 to more than 60 artists, cultural organizations and grant reviewers via grants and stipends this year through three funding opportunities offered by Cambridge Arts: Organizational Investment Grants, Art for Social Justice Grants, and Local Cultural Council Project Grants.
Each year, the City of Cambridge contributes substantial funding to support local artists, cultural workers, and arts organizations through the Cambridge Arts Grant Program. This support is coupled with funding received through the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s statewide Local Cultural Council Program. All these grants are awarded on an annual cycle, with the due date to apply usually in mid-October of each year.
2025 Cambridge Arts Art For Social Justice Grant Winners:
Abilities Dance
Grant Award: $7,500
Premiering April 25 and 26, 2025, Intersections v4 is a performance that brings BIPOC and disabled honorees’ lives, past and present, to the stage. We are honoring disability history through dance and music from Massachusetts-based and nationally recognized trailblazers. These honorees are changing the state and national landscape for deaf/disabled communities who want to feel seen both through their affinity to the work and their insurability that the work itself is accessible, which very few Massachusetts dance companies do. Additionally, so that the message is clear, we have audio descriptions, or words that explain movement for blind/low-vision audiences, over the music as a story for all to hear in universal design concepts to allow blind/low-vision audiences and novel dance audiences to understand these honorees' stories in movement and music. Because this project is created and led by a BIPOC/disabled MA based artistic leadership team committed to disability justice in Massachusetts, it is most effective.
Cambridge Hip-Hop Collective
Grant Award: $7,500
The Cambridge Hip-Hop Collective is seeking funding for a series of Bridgeside Cyphers, a monthly hip-hop event in Cambridge that has been operating since 2017. The Bridgeside Cypher is a live hip-hop experience for local rappers, singers, producers, musicians, and others who wish to collaborate in a public, improvised format. We define a cypher as a gathering of rappers, singers, beatboxers, and/or musicians taking turns freestyling and performing in a circle. What started as an informal gathering of street performers in Graffiti Alley has since transformed into a concert series with featured performances and live instrumentation, showcasing our commitment to diversity and inclusivity.
Cambridge Jazz Foundation
Grant Award: $7,500.00
The 10th annual CJF is set to be two days of an exhilarating celebration of jazz, featuring a dynamic lineup of musicians, delicious food vendors, and a variety of merchandise vendors that will enhance the festival experience. This multifaceted event aims to unite the community through the power of music while supporting local businesses and promoting cultural enrichment.
Front Porch Arts Collective
Grant Award: $7,500
The Front Porch Arts Collective (The Porch) requests funding to support the community engagement initiatives for the co-production of Her Portmanteau, by Mfoniso Udofia running at the Central Square Theater, March 27- April 20, 2025. Specific community engagement activities that align directly with the Cambridge Arts Council Arts for Social Justice Initiative include a ticket subsidy program for a dedicated Affinity/BlackOutperformance, the engagement of a native Ibibio speaking Consultant/Tutor, a Theatrical Dialect Coach to consult with the staff and artists during the rehearsal process; and two post-performance conversations featuring moderated conversations that augment the themes in the production and specifically amplify the perspectives and issues of local Nigerian communities as well as the immigrant experience.
Nicholas Johnson
Grant Award: $7,500
Boston Public Quartet and marimbist Steph Davis present Revival, a concert of newly crafted music for marimba and string quartet, focusing on spirituals and their enduring legacy. Throughout Summer 2025, three open rehearsals will be hosted at St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church in Cambridgeport. The ensemble will connect with the Cambridge public via Digital Advertisements, Flyers, and Email Campaigns dispersed through various local cultural and educational institutions. The community will be invited to attend, listen to the musicians, and offer their own feedback as the ensemble workshops arrangements of spirituals. Community feedback will directly influence programmatic choices for the culminating concert the following month at St. Augustine’s. The ensemble will also rehearse a newly commissioned piece for marimba and string quartet composed by Melika M. Fitzhugh. A graduate of Longy School of Music, Fitzhugh’s combination of historical practice and contemporary expression results in intricately designed, water-like, multidimensional sound worlds, promising an exciting and immersive new work for this unusual ensemble. Fitzhugh will also coach the ensemble at the two final open rehearsals, with the composer and ensemble facilitating discussion about the piece.
Theia Lund
Grant Award: $7,500
As students at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, we were asked to bring awareness to a climate justice issue as part of a project in biology class. We collaborated and devised a plan to make a mural in the community garden space outside of the school. Our mural brings awareness to city pollution and how it affects the environment and our green spaces, particularly pollinators. With climate change, pollinators are dying and moving to cooler areas, reducing the number of flowering plants along with fruits and vegetables, a crucial aspect to community garden spaces. Community gardens can be a facilitator for involvement to grow fresh produce and be a part of the solution to eliminate food insecurity concerns in our neighborhood. Our mural will be beautiful public art, educate about our community’s need for gardens, and incorporate many student and community artists. We hope to collaborate with the school Visual Art Club and some local mural artists, such as Rosie Schrag, to assist in the planning and execution of this project.
MathTalk
Grant Award: $7,500
The Art for Social Justice Grant will fund the integration of public art installations on Math! Everywhere! platform and the development of digital media and immersive experiences that bring to life and make connections to the math embedded in the installations. Through these transformative learning experiences, we want children and parents to explore both the social (exterior) and human (interior) conditions that led to the creation of public art, the questions that the artists were exploring about themselves, their subjects and society, and their perspective on how math played a role in their process and is reflected in what they’ve created.
Carlos Paronis
Grant Award: $7,500
This project is a way to make a record of the changing community I grew up around. In this work I want to highlight the real people of Cambridge that are often hidden by the stereotypes of the city. It is a way to represent the beautiful, diverse and unique culture of Cambridge. By making this project I want to celebrate the community but also question the changes and issues (for example: gentrification) that are not always talked about or explained properly.
Plays in Place LLC
Grant Award: $7,500
The Kittie Knox Plays are a series of plays about bicycling barrier breaker, Kittie Knox. She was a young biracial cyclist in the 1890s who fought against race-based limitations in America’s post-Reconstruction reaction against Black advancement. The one-act plays will be performed three times in one day at 3 different locations within the central park at Cambridge Crossing. The outdoor performances will be accessible to folks who reserve a seat as well as those who find them unexpectedly. The cast will perform with bicycles and move the short distance from site to site on them. The audience can walk, ride bikes, or otherwise move from location to location as their needs require. The performance locations are accessed through well-maintained sidewalks and paved paths, allowing the easy use of wheeled accessibility aides.
Jessica Roseman
Grant Award: $7,500
Nourish: Your Portal is an interactive installation centering on self-reflection via a door-sized, two-way smart mirror. Participants see their reflection while listening to a recorded meditation guiding them to reflect on themselves as an act of social justice. Touching the mirror triggers a lighting change, revealing a set behind the glass. On the other side, a performer engages the participant in a movement exploration, transforming personal reflection into a shared experience. The mirror becomes a portal for endless possibilities, performances, films, and set designs.
Combining personal and communal engagement, participants see beyond their identity to appreciate another person’s moving body. Through this interaction, Nourish: Your Portal bridges the gaps between public performance and personal experience; performer, and passive audience; movement and visual art; theater and public art.
SilkRoad Project
Grant Award: $7,500
Silkroad, the music ensemble, social justice, and education organization created by Yo-Yo Ma and led by Rhiannon Giddens, is organizing a free-of-charge community concert on December 12 in Cambridge. The program consists of a trio performance with Silkroad musicians interspersed with music from the Latin Baroque ensemble Rumbarroco. This concert is part of Silkroad's major multi-year artistic initiative called American Railroad, which is designed, as Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens describes, to create the soundscape of the story of the building of the railroads in America, told from the point of view of the folks who are always left out of the photo.
The initiative illuminates and honors the enormous contributions of those who built the railroads in the US, including historically marginalized communities of color and indigenous peoples whose lives and communities were displaced by their arrival. As the railroads, including the Transcontinental and adjoining routes, transformed America and our world, they present an extraordinary lens through which we can better understand America’s history, values, achievements, and the many erasures that continue to reverberate today.
American Railroad includes new commissions of music, a multi-year touring program, deep engagement in communities in the Cambridge and Boston areas and across the country, educational programming and curricula for middle schools in Boston Public Schools, a PBS docuseries, and a soon-to-launch podcast. All of these facets of this initiative represent ways in which we are working to illuminate untold stories and celebrate the kinds of community and cultural resiliency woven throughout America.$82,500 In Art For Social Justice Grants Awarded By Cambridge Arts
Winners of Cambridge Arts’ 2025 Art for Social Justice Grants include public art installations that bring math into the city’s neighborhoods; a concert of new marimba and string quartet music highlighting spirituals and their enduring legacy; a mural by Cambridge Rindge and Latin School students addressing how climate change is hurting pollinators; photography recording the beauty and diversity of changing Cambridge; a play about Kittie Knox, a biracial cyclist in the 1890s who fought against race-based limitations against Black advancement; and a musical performance honoring the people who built American railroads, including historically marginalized communities of color and indigenous peoples whose lives and communities were displaced by the trains’ arrival.