City Hall Galleries

• Location: The Scollay Square Gallery, 3rd Floor Boston City Hall
• Dates: July 18 - August 30, 2023

There are eight artists in The Chinese American Fine Arts Society who are exhibiting their artistic spirit in different media, including oil painting, watercolor painting, and Chinese painting. This exhibit also includes works of Chinese calligraphy.

To learn more or inquire to purchase this art, contact: Mikemei88@yahoo.com

• Location: The Mayor's Gallery, 5th Floor Boston City Hall
• Dates: July 18 - August 30, 2023

Janet Hansen Kawada's work explores the relationship of texture, color and narrative through fibers.  She is presenting her fiber work alongside the family influences of her mother, the late Charlotte Lockwood, a painter also influenced by nature. Both are life-long residents of the Boston area.  

Janet Kawada has a lifelong love of the Fiber Arts.  She shares:  "Being taught by my grandmother to sew, knit, crochet, embroider, etc., as a child, I was never without knitting needles or needle and thread all through my early and teenage years."  She then embarked on a journey as a professional quilter for about 10 years in her 20s.  Although she spent her childhood years at museums with her mother, Charlotte Lockwood, looking at art, she was self-taught, and in her 30s decided to go to art school.  Kawada studied at MassArt, graduating with a BFA in Fibers, and attended Vermont College earning an MFA in Visual Art.  In the 1990s, Kawada taught at New England School of Art and Design and taught at MassArt  for 25 years in the Fibers area of the 3DFA Department.  She was a member of the Kingston Gallery from 1998-2012 where she was director for 4 years.  A member of Studios Without Walls, an independent group of artists from around the Brookline area, she has been showing outdoor, environmental work since 2001.

Charlotte Lockwood received a BA from Jackson College (part of Tufts University) in Psychology.  She studied art at Wellesley College and with Priscilla Ordway.  She ran the Lockwood-Golub studio in Newton MA from the 1970s to the 1990s and taught privately until the early 2000s.  Lockwood was one of the few woman artists to compete in the Massachusetts Duck Stamp competition in early 2000.   A life-long observer of nature and painter, she summered in Rockport MA where she was a member of the Rockport Art Association.  She passed away in 2010.

To learn more or inquire to purchase this art, contact:  Jkawada@usa.net 

Website: janetkawada.com

Instagram: @cameinlikeawrappingball

• Location: 3rd Floor Mezzanine, Boston City Hall
• Dates: July 18 - August 30, 2023

Since the 19th century South Boston remained a predominantly Irish Catholic working-class neighborhood, where for 30 years my grandmother lived and my father worked in the Gillette factory. I lived in “Southie” in the 1980-90s, documenting the community via photography and film. This exhibition reveals the neighborhood transformation, from a mostly low-to–moderate income community with industrial areas, to today’s gentrification with luxury condos and a radically shifted neighborhood identity, all while used as a Hollywood setting.

Community Forum on July 26, 2023 from 12 - 2 p.m. (Open to all to attend.)

• Location: The Emerging Gallery, 8th Floor Boston City Hall
• Dates: August 1 - 30, 2023

Fen specializes in landscape photography and her purpose for taking photography is to capture fond memories for herself, her friends, and family. In 2005, she started studying photography. In 2014, she joined The Chinese American Fine Arts Society, assisted Mr. George Moy to carry out photography classes, organized local outdoor photography trips and several photography trips to National parks. Within one year of joining CAFAS, she was nominated as president because of her strong passion for photography and the greater community．

• Location: 3rd Floor Mezzanine, Boston City Hall
• Dates: Ongoing

We Belong is a light-based public art installation with the intent to promote ideas of belonging and inclusion among communities in Boston. In LED neon, the work forms the text “We Belong – here – together – guided by the same stars” in a circular format, with a constellation that maps and connects Boston’s neighborhoods.

With the support of a City of Boston Transformative Public Art grant, the installation will travel to multiple Boston neighborhoods in 2022-2023, beginning with the East Boston Social Centers from July-September 2022. Local residents are invited to participate in the project by sharing what the concept of “belonging” means to them.

Yu-Wen Wu is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Boston. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Wu’s subjectivity as an immigrant is central to her artwork. Arriving in the United States at an early age, her experiences have shaped her work in areas of migration—examining issues of displacement, arrival, assimilation, and the shape of identity in a new country. Passionate about data, mapping, and its storytelling, Wu’s work lies at the crossroads of art, science, politics, and social issues. Her wide range of projects include large-scale drawings, sculpture, site- specific video installations, community-engaged practices, and public art. Wu has been awarded numerous grants, exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is included in several private and public collections.

The Mayor's Poetry Program is an annual program in which Boston residents are invited to submit poems to be displayed throughout City Hall and in an online gallery for one year. The theme for 2023, selected by Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola, was "Love".

Read the 2023 Poems

• Happening virtually

Artist Sophia Ainslie brightened up the eighth floor of City Hall with a new mural this past summer. As an extension of her project, she documented the reactions of City employees who walked by, and took photos of them with the mural.