Free First Thursday - November

crystal bi (she/they) is a multimedia artist working in the public realm. Her participatory art projects explore themes of imagination, creative archiving, and belonging. Her practice includes creating space for dreaming in public, engaging with archival materials, weaving with natural materials, designing printed media, installing interactive sculptures in public space, and sewing translucent fabrics to float on bodies of water. As a public artist, professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, former Boston Public School art teacher, and Creative Civic Design Lead with Design Studio for Social Intervention, crystal works with others to design interventions that practice possible futures. She is currently fulfilling a dream to build a Department of Public Imagination, which creates infrastructure for horizontal dream work in Boston.

Candice Hoyes is an award-winning soprano poised to “shape the artist-cum-activist role” (Tonya Mosley, NPR). Born to Jamaican parents, she uses the “chill inducing range” (Vogue Magazine) of her timbre to explore sounds in healing justice and the Black feminine divine inspired by Jessye Norman, Minnie Riperton, and Toni Morrison. As of 2025, Hoyes is a member of the world-renowned Harlem Chamber Players, where she is originating the principal role of Regina in Akua Dixon’s opera Marie Laveau. In opera and symphonic repertoire, Hoyes has graced stages including Detroit Symphony, Morgan Library, Opera Orlando, Carnegie Hall, Schomburg Center, Caramoor Music Festival, St. Petersburg Opera, Center for Contemporary Opera, North Carolina Opera, Akron Symphony, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and NPR’s This American Life.

This season, her main-stage debuts include We Out Here Festival (UK), Jacob’s Pillow, Guggenheim Museum, Logan Center for the Arts at University of Chicago, Boston Atheneum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Africa Center, and a composer celebration with the Harlem Chamber Players.

A 2025 DuBois Fellow and winner of the 2024 WNYC Public Song Project, Hoyes interprets songs through a lens of transformative community and ancestral legacy. She is a 2025–2026 Visiting Scholar at University of Chicago, in collaboration with the Black Baroque Project. She is an honors graduate of Harvard and Columbia Universities and a mother of two.