Liv Cappello is an oil painter who has received multiple grants from the Somerville Arts Council and has exhibited at Logan Airport, Aeronaut Brewery, and elsewhere. She's also the developer of the online resource Gesso, a studio management and website-building tool. As part of our series on Creative Entrepreneurialism, we asked her about her creative practice, the online tool … [Read more...]
Interviews
Arts & Business Insights: Likemind Design
Artist and business owner Amanda Beard Garcia on shaping meaningful local collaborations Creative entrepreneurs – artists, designers, performers, makers, cultural innovators – are business owners who generate revenue, employ workers, pay taxes, and strengthen local and state economies. As part of our series on Creative Entrepreneurialism, we spoke with Amanda Beard Garcia, … [Read more...]
Learning to Be Auntie’s Baby
Artists Simone John (Poetry Fellow '20) (aka Simone Ivory) and flowerthief (one half of the music duo Optic Bloom) collaborated to create the audio poetry project, Auntie's Baby. Auntie's Baby draws on the artists' multidisciplinary background, using family phone calls, poetry, music, and sound to "open a portal into Black storytelling." Recently, Simone and flowerthief … [Read more...]
Heather Kamins, Author of The Moth Girl
On March 8, 2022, 7 PM ET, Heather Kamins (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow '16) has a virtual book launch event for her young adult novel The Moth Girl (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books 2022), hosted by Odyssey Books in South Hadley. We asked the Western Massachusetts author about the origins of her new novel, the twists and turns of writing it, and her inventive work as a literary … [Read more...]
Miki Sawada: Gather Hear
Miki Sawada is a classically-trained pianist. Since 2017, she's been traveling with a piano, in a van, to community spaces throughout the country, to perform classical music for free. Called the Gather Hear Tour, Miki's project has traveled from Alaska to West Virginia to an upcoming tour in Massachusetts. We asked Miki about the tour, her work, and her life as an artist … [Read more...]