The Better Angels maquette, out on a site visit.
Friends, I’m so glad that you’re here reading this because it is kind of a momentous moment. As many of you know, it’s often been a struggle for me to find my footing as an artist in Boston, even though Boston is my hometown. But right now, big (and sometimes puffy) things are happening for me here and I really want you to be a part of it all!
The photo above is a tiny version of a giant thing that will be landing in Boston, on Congress Street, right across from the Boston Tea Party Museum, on June 26th. That giant thing is a project called Better Angels, lovingly and generously brought into being by The Boston Public Art Triennial. The piece was commissioned in response to the USA’s semiquincentennial and builds on a much smaller one called Validated that I made in 2025. It’s an exchange between two strangers, facilitated by an angel (“Pete, Head of Security”) at the gates of heaven, about our efforts (and failures) to be our best selves as individuals and as a nation.
You can read a full explanation of the piece in the press release here (and learn how to followup with The Triennial if you happen to be a member of the press working on a semiquincentennial roundup and want to include Better Angels!)
I have a long list of people to be grateful to for this project and I’ll thank you all in person for the most part, but here I want to explicitly call out the whole very-hardworking-but-still-deeply-playful Boston Public Art Triennial team, especially Jasper A. Sanchez for his abundant faith in my work and Kate Gilbert for choosing me not once but twice (I was a performer in Paul Ramirez Jonas’ project Public Trust in 2016) to be a part of this hugely-important-to-Boston endeavor of hers; Mobius and Tom Johnston in the Mayor’s Office for Arts and Culture for the opportunity to make the pre-cursor piece that led to Better Angels; Pneuhaus for taking what was pretty much a napkin sketch and converting it into a larger-than-life inflatable world; and the entire cast and crew of Better Angels to be named publicly soon!
But that is not even all of my good news! I am also beyond excited to be working as the City of Cambridge MA’s first-ever “Artist in Government” (artist in residence) embedded within the Cambridge Public Health Department. It gives me chills to be invited to do at a small scale what one of my biggest art heroes, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, did at a large scale, and I cannot even begin to express how tenderly and enthusiastically I’ve been welcomed into CPHD’s world. I’m looking forward to diving in deeper, and I’ll update this blog post with a new instagram handle where you can follow along with my experiences there shortly. I’ll also share some offerings specifically for Cambridge residents through this work, so if you are a Cambridge resident, drop me a line so that I make sure to let you know about them. Once again, I offer the press release for more details (and for following up on for any of you that are members of the press covering art, cities, public health etc.)
More on all of this soon. I just wanted to offer a mid-year update on 2026, and let you know about the first few Better Angels events (there’s a panel discussion on June 16 and a chance to experience the piece in person from June 26th - 28th.)
Peek at my website events page for announcements about current and upcoming events in Boston and beyond, and thank you for reading!!