ANNUAL PROGRAM
Lot Lab
Welcoming collaboration
shaping Boston’s public space
Lot Lab is an outdoor, 24/7 experimentation zone for site-specific contemporary public art created with the Boston community. Activating underused parcels across Boston, Lot Lab provides opportunities for local and visiting artists to present multimedia installations in a community gathering space. Join us in the Charlestown Navy Yard for this year’s theme: Presence and works created as part of the City of Boston’s Un-Monument program.
One 5th Street Boston, MA, 02129
Learn about Lot Lab 2023
CURATORIAL THEME
Presence
Assistant Curator Jasper Sanchez selected Lot Lab 2024’s artists and invited them to imagine beyond categorizing people and stories as “untold,” instead framing their projects around a theme of Presence. Challenged with creatively and programmatically honoring those who have always been, the presented artworks and free public programs promote a shift in storytelling focus from absence into presence.
LOT LAB 2024 ARTISTS
Meet the Lot Lab 2024 Artists
Ifé Franklin
Ifé Franklin’s practice involves several genres of artmaking inspired by slave narratives, dreams, dance, song, dreams, and visions. Over the last decade, she has been developing The Indigo Project, which honors the lives and history of formerly enslaved Africans/African Americans who labored to produce materials that generated the wealth of nations. At the center are Franklin’s Ancestor Slave Cabins, which often incorporate Adire fabric, an indigo-dyed cotton cloth decorated using a resist technique from the Yoruba culture. These assemblages are built in collaboration with the community and cultivate connections that promote understanding and healing from the hard history of enslavement. In 2018, Franklin published “The Slave Narrative of Willie Mae,” a fictional account of her great-grandmother’s escape from slavery to freedom. The work was adapted into a short film in 2021.
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Hugh Hayden
Hugh Hayden’s practice considers the anthropomorphization of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Hayden transforms familiar objects through a process of selection, carving, and juxtaposing to challenge our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the environment. Raised in Texas and trained as an architect, his work arises from a deep connection to nature and its organic materials. Hayden utilizes wood as his primary medium, frequently loaded with multi-layered histories in their origin, including objects as varied as discarded trunks, rare indigenous timbers, Christmas trees, or souvenir African sculptures. From these, he saws, sculpts, and sands the wood, often combining disparate species, creating new composite forms that also reflect their complex cultural backgrounds. Crafting metaphors for human existence and past experience, Hayden’s work questions the stasis of social dynamics and asks the viewer to examine their place within an ever-shifting ecosystem.
Hugh Hayden was born in Dallas, Texas in 1983 and lives and works in New York City.
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Matthew Akira Okazaki
Matthew Akira Okazaki (b. Oakland, California) is an artist, designer, and educator based out of Boston, Massachusetts. His research and work centers around a creative practice of “making do.” Through the specific selection of sites, materials, archives, images, and construction techniques, Okazaki embraces the ordinary and readily available in the hopes of uncovering and constructing new meanings and modes of understanding in our everyday lives. Privileging tactics over strategies, his work explores ideas of authorship, memory, identity, and heritage to amplify stories less told.
In addition to his art practice, Okazaki is a founder of the architecture practice Field Office LLC and a principal at Architecture for Public Benefit, a benefit corporation providing design services for mission-driven organizations in the Greater Boston area.
Okazaki received a Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics from UCLA. He is currently a Professor of the Practice in Architecture at Tufts University and has previously taught at Northeastern University, Brandeis University, and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
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COLLABORATORS, CONTRIBUTORS, SUPPORTERS
We are grateful for our ongoing collaboration with the National Park Service (NPS) through the National Parks of Boston and Boston Harbor Now. A special thanks to the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture for their continued support.
Key contributors and supporters of Lot Lab 2024
PROGRAM PARTNERS
AfroDesiaCity
Kennedy Center of Charlestown
Mobile Makers
Ride for Black Lives Boston
LOT LAB SUPPORTERS
