Neighborhood Salon Luminaries

The Neighborhood Salon is a gathering of Boston's select artists and cultural luminaries. Neighborhood Salon cohorts nurture an active exchange of ideas between Boston's most innovative and thoughtful creatives, fostering collaborations and artistic networks while shaping Gardner Museum programming.

Modeled after Isabella Stewart Gardner’s legacy as a curator and hostess of artist salons around the turn of the century, the primary goal of the Neighborhood Salon is to exchange creative ideas and dialogue with Boston’s most innovative and thoughtful luminaries as a means of informing programming at the Gardner. The Neighborhood Salon is led by Damaris Calderon and Luana Morales.

2022-24 LUMINARIES

Rayna Lo

Rayna Lo is a Chicago-born, Boston-based calligrapher, illustrator and educator.

Skooby Laposky

Skooby Laposky is a sound designer and artist based in Cambridge.

Arielle Gray

Arielle Gray is a Black queer writer, reporter, and artist currently based in Boston.

Johnette Marie

Johnette is a medicine maker, thinker, and creator, experimenting with literary and visual arts.

Luciano Aimar

Luciano is an Italian born, Boston-based ballet educator.

Daniel Callahan

Daniel Callahan is a multimedia artist, filmmaker and designer.

2019-20 Luminaries

Jean Appolon

Jean Appolon is a successful choreographer and teacher based in Boston and Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Golden

Golden is a black gender-nonconforming trans-femme photographer, poet, and performance artist who archives the black past to (re)envision new landscapes for black queer futures.

Kevin Harris

A distinctive trait of New York/Boston-based jazz pianist Kevin Harris is his desire to constantly grow, evolve, improve, and advance.

Keith Mascoll

Keith is an actor who uses his unique and innovative style of black storytelling about trauma, while creating spaces for male healing through the use of art.

Elizabeth Pabon-Szebeda

Eli Pabon is a multi-talented dancer, singer, lyricist, instructor/educator, grant writer, and percussionist.

Veronica Robles

Veronica Robles is a Mexican singer-musician and the founder of Boston's First Female Mariachi.

Sneha Shrestha

IMAGINE, also known as Sneha Shrestha, is a Nepali artist who paints mindful mantras in her native language and meshes the aesthetics of Sanskrit scriptures with graffiti influences.

Robert Stull

Rob Stull is an accomplished illustrator, curator, teacher, designer, and comic book industry veteran.

Matthew Zaremba

Matthew Zaremba is a published visual artist whose work has been exhibited across the United States and abroad.

Luna Del Flor

Liza Zayas, also known as Luna del Flor, works with the power of poetry as a mirror and healer.

Facilitator

Luana Morales

Luana is a Birth, Death, and Ancestral Healing Arts Practitioner devoted to the reclamation of our ancestral practices to restore all of us to wholeness and to experience liberation in these bodies and this lifetime.

2018-19 Luminaries

Feda Eid

Feda Eid is a Lebanese-American photographer and visual artist from Boston.

Sara Hendren

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and educator at Olin College of Engineering.

Chimel Idiokitas

Chimel Idiokitas, also known as ReaL P, tells stories through music and social creativity.

Brian McGinnis

Brian McGinnis is a dancer and associate professor at Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

Fabiola M. Méndez Quiñones

Fabiola is the first student to graduate from Berklee College with the Puerto Rican cuatro as her principal instrument.

Porsha Olayiwola

Porsha Olayiwola is a poet and hip-hop feminist, who writes infra-politically to tell the stories that are silenced, erased, or difficult to release from the tip of the tongue.

James Adius Pierre

James is a passionate advocate for access to the arts for all of Boston's communities, linking young people to creative opportunities.

Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez

Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez is a street artist who works at the intersection of graffiti, vinyl toys, contemporary art, fashion, and design.

Paloma Valenzuela

Paloma Valenzuela is a Dominican-American writer, director, and actress originally from the city of Boston.

2017-18 Luminaries

Kadahj Bennett

This millennial man of mystery is a rapper, singer, actor, writer, teacher, brother, and Bostonian on a mission.

Will Dailey

Will Dailey is an acclaimed independent recording and performing artist and artist advocate.

Sabrina Dorsainvil

Sabrina is fascinated by people: the way they move, speak, and touch, and the way they interact and experience objects, environments, and each other.

Tai Jimenez

Tai Jimenez (Black Light) is haunted by a voracious Jinni.

Nathalia JMag

Nathalia JMag is a contemporary fashion designer who is on a mission to honor people, animals, and the earth through her work.

Silvia López Chavez

Interdisciplinary artist Silvia López Chavez believes in the power of the creative process as an agent for positive change.

Luana Morales

Hana Quon

A Maryland native, Hana attended the University of Maryland for literature and linguistics before finding and pursuing her passion for pastry arts.

2016-17 Luminaries

Olivia Ives-Flores

Olivia Ives-Flores is an artist, curator, and designer—living and creating in Boston.

Black the Creator

Black the Creator is a renaissance, finding liberation in balancing different art forms including poetry, theater, and music.

Josh Knowles

Josh Knowles is a talented violinist, singer/songwriter, and music educator based in Boston

Obehi Janice

Obehi Janice is an award-winning actress, writer, and comedian.

Elisa H. Hamilton

Elisa Hamilton is a multimedia artist whose practice focuses shared experiences and the inherent joy of our everyday places, objects, and experiences.

Ryan Dias-Toppin

Ryan Dias-Toppin is a producer, vocalist, performance artist, and multi-disciplinary visual artist.

Reynolds Graves

Reynolds is the Director of Government Relations for the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department.

mar parrilla

mar parrilla is an award-winning choreographer and the founding artistic director of Danza Orgánica.

Matt McArthur

Matt McArthur is the founder and executive director of The Record Co.

Learn More

Learn more about how the Neighborhood Salon Luminaries impact programming and more at the Gardner.

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