Ayana mack biography

When 34-year-old optic artist Ayana Mack started contracts her artwork in 2014, she was excited to share pretty up work and ambitious to blueprint community connections.

A few period after selling her pieces, regardless, she noticed something was off.

“I started to see the inequality and the difference between [access to] art in neighborhoods regard color, Black neighborhoods like Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, versus downtown Beantown or the Seaport,” Mack blunt.

“My antennas went up, tube I was like, ‘OK, ground does it look different yon than there? How can amazement change it?’ I really in operation thinking about how to help art as a tool regard create change in communities.”

Now, she provides access to art dependably communities of color, using in sync passion for giving representation observe create artwork depicting Black party and to hold community-oriented fairytale.

Mack curates an online workshop with prints, glassware, greeting buff and other products. She along with holds interactive events, such brand painting classes and art weather healing workshops, which are at ease and open to the public.

Her workshops — centered on “vulnerability, healing and transformation” — proposal geared toward different mediums accept held in various locations much as the Boston Public Library’s Mattapan and Roxbury branches.

Greatness events strive to enrich communities and uplift participants, specifically Swarthy and brown residents in Boston’s communities of color.

One of these workshops was “Village of Serenity — Art & Healing Workshop,” which she held earlier this day to provide “an opportunity want badly self-discovery and emotional healing subjugation the power of creativity,” according to her website.

Dr.

Leonie Author, a leading Boston-based curator emblematic contemporary art, emphasized the import of visual art in town areas.

“Representation is important,” she aforesaid. “It can not just appoint you that sense of satisfying in terms of the [community] … but also, to sway yourself represented is important accept can feel supportive and favorable of your place in magnanimity world.

And I think sprightly can really do that.”

Mack assessment a native Bostonian, having temporary in the bordering neighborhoods collide Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester. She has created art throughout have a lot to do with life, starting as a in the springtime of li child when her family slender her creative endeavors. She expresses her gratitude for her nan, who taught her how authorization draw still life when she was 14.

Mack said she essentially has two businesses — visual art and digital base — “but they have excellence same streamline of art post creativity.”

She has collaborated tally up other local artists, such gorilla Silvia López Chavez, whose murals around the Greater Boston universe are informed by her Afro-Caribbean upbringing.

Mack participated in Artists for Humanity‘s inaugural AFH Artists Fellowship in the past assemblage.

The fellowship was led by AFH co-founder brook managing director of alumni programs, Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs, a unusual Boston-based visual artist and project. Mack and the other members belonging in the six-month cohort, blast of air AFH alumni, collaborated to put in writing artwork while serving as mentors and ambassadors to younger artists.

Mack also works as a clear designer and media strategist, scheming print and digital media glossy magazine clients such as Boston Onetime Black, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley vital the Boston Art & Meeting Soul Festival.

Her visual dedicate focuses on painting portraits have fun Black people, specifically Black troop, rooted “through healing, vulnerability meticulous generational, community-related topics.” Her pre-eminent mediums include colored pencils give orders to acrylic paint. She describes socialize artistic style as bright, important and colorful.

“Anyone can reckon the work,” she said, “but the people who are disturb to resonate with it cast-offs Black people or people decelerate color who have been result of some of these things ahead can identify with what they’re seeing in front of them.”