Featuring five decades of work by 39 artists, the exhibition illuminates a living archive of creative resistance, cultural memory, and Black artistic excellence
(Boston, MA—December 3, 2025) In February 2026, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now, an exhibition dedicated to Boston’s African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program (AAMARP). A vital outgrowth of the Black Arts Movement, AAMARP was founded by artist, educator, and activist Dana C. Chandler Jr. at Northeastern University in 1977, making it one of the first in-residence programs for Black artists in the United States. Tracing the evolution of AAMARP through the artists’ voices, their engagement with global artistic and political movements, and their deep-rooted sense of community, the exhibition illuminates a living archive of creative resistance, cultural memory, and Black artistic excellence over five decades. Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now features more than 50 works by 39 artists spanning generations and mediums, including figurative and abstract painting, collage, woodworking, experimental textile art, street photography, public murals, and more. Accompanied by a scholarly publication, the exhibition is on view from Feb. 12—Aug. 2, 2026, and is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, the Mannion Family Curator at the ICA, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant at the ICA.
“AAMARP was created to be a center of excellence in multicultural visual and performing arts, and an enriching environment to nurture and support artists of African descent,” said artist and AAMARP Director, Reginald L. Jackson, PhD. “AAMARP continues to be a visual arts resource and ambassador of goodwill to the local, national, and international art community, and remains a prominent center for discussion of African diasporic cultural growth and development.”
“AAMARP proudly continues the legacy of earlier Black artistic guilds—including the Harlem Renaissance, Spiral, Weusi, Obassi, and AfriCOBRA—to intentionally utilize aesthetics and creative expression to advance Black liberation across all periods of time and geographic locations,” said L’Merchie Frazier, an AAMARP artist and educator.
“The ICA is very proud to present the first museum survey of AAMARP, which highlights the diversity of approaches long championed by AAMARP artists and positions Boston as a key nodal point in the regional histories of the Black Arts Movement that scholars are charting today,” said Nora Burnett Abrams, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA.
In founding AAMARP, Chandler’s vision was for a Black artist-run visual arts complex—including exhibition and studio spaces as well as a community center—whose program would provide a “living focus” on the “diverse dynamics of African American aesthetics.” He selected an initial group of artists for the program “with an eye towards a diversity of visual arts disciplines and aesthetics,” and included some of the Boston area’s most prominent Black artists, such as Ellen Banks, Calvin Burnett, and John Wilson. Now housed in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, AAMARP’s programmatic offerings include dance, poetry readings, artist talks, workshops, award ceremonies, and, as in the past, regular student group visits.
Embodying the program’s ethos of collaboration and exchange, the exhibition curators worked alongside Chandler before his untimely passing in June of 2025, AAMARP’s executive committee, and active members to plan Say It Loud and its accompanying publication. The book features never-before-published archival materials; new scholarly essays by De Blois and Faye R. Gleisser; a robust annotated chronology compiled by Considine and De Blois; a coda by Connie H. Choi that considers the importance of sustaining Black-run arts spaces; and personal reflections by AAMARP-affiliated artists and community members.
“When we first discussed the possibility of doing an exhibition about AAMARP with Dana Chandler, he immediately said: ‘Hurry up and do it.’ This sense of urgency, informed by the fact that in-depth institutional recognition was overdue, informed every aspect of our endeavor to highlight the powerful and historically important body of work created by artists affiliated with AAMARP,” said De Blois and Considine. “The exhibition and publication reflect the program’s vibrancy and vitality, highlighting Chandler’s original vision of an artist-run alternative art space, free and open to everyone, where Black art and culture could flourish.”
Spanning multiple galleries, Say It Loud follows AAMARP’s rich history from its founding in 1977 to today, and the loosely chronological installation echoes the vibrancy of AAMARP’s programmatic offerings. Works in the exhibition include:
- Benny Andrews, Nene, 1978. Nene is a collaged oil portrait depicting the artist’s future wife, Nene Humphrey, leisurely resting against a tree at MacDowell, an artist retreat in New Hampshire, where the pair met. In 1980, the work was included in an exhibition of the renowned artist’s work curated by Chandler. The ICA worked closely with the Benny Andrews Estate to identify Nene from archival images. The work has not been presented since the artist died in 2006.
- Ellen Banks, Scott Joplin, 1982. An original AAMARP-affiliated artist, Banks was trained in both painting and piano. Her painting, Scott Joplin, is emblematic of her geometric abstractions derived from musical scores, in which colors correspond to pitches, and shapes to durations and tempos. Banks’s commitment to non-figurative painting during AAMARP’s early years was notable because she positioned herself in opposition to the dominant strands of politically-engaged practices that characterized the Black Arts Movement.
- Rudolph R. Robinson, TRY BLACK, 1983. Robinson, another original AAMARP affiliate, was a fine arts photographer for the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Robinson’s works include a wide range of subjects, from the nighttime scene TRY BLACK to his Invisible Man/Europe series documenting the growing Black communities there. Robinson was an influential member of the AAMARP program and a mentor to many, including Hakim Raquib, one of the photographers still working at AAMARP today.
- Keith Morris Washington, George Armwood: Front Lawn of Judge R. Duer’s Home; Princess Anne, Maryland, 1999. In the late 1990s, thanks to his generous studio space at AAMARP, Keith Morris Washington began an ongoing series of large-scale paintings he called Within Our Gates: Site and Memory in the American Landscape. Each work takes as its subject the site of an American lynching; as the artist says, he is “mediating spaces, investigating a past still present, interrogating tradition, questioning discrepancies extolled in Hudson River / Luminist Painting.”
- Susan Thompson, Call of the Ancestors 1 and 2, both 2017. Thompson, a pillar of the program today, has been working at AAMARP since 1985. With Allan Rohan Crite as her mentor, Thompson went from creating wall hangings and costumes for her child’s grade school play, to mastering a range of artistic techniques, especially transforming various fabrics into narrative quilts. Call of the Ancestors 1 and 2 are pieced quilts with applique that are both abstract and meditative. The works feature shadowy, featureless figures against a patchwork landscape, and are strong examples of the creative innovations in fiber arts that have been present at AAMARP since its inception.
Artists in the exhibition: Benny Andrews, Ellen Banks , Gloretta Baynes*, Calvin Burnett, Ambreen Butt, Dana C. Chandler Jr., Jeff Chandler*, Allan Rohan Crite, Milton Derr, Sharon Dunn, Marlon Forrester*, L’Merchie Frazier*, Tyrone Geter, Ricardo “Deme5” Gomez*, Paul Goodnight, Reginald L. Jackson*, Michael Jones, Shea Justice*, Kofi Kayiga*, Khalid Kodi*, Marcia Lloyd, Vusumuzi Maduna, Bryan McFarlane*, Stanley Pinckney, Hakim Raquib*, James Reuben Reed, Rudolph R. Robinson, Renée Stout, Edward Strickland, Susan Thompson*, Arnold Trachtman, Wen-ti Tsen, Barbara Ward, Keith Morris Washington, Don West*, Rene Westbrook, John Wilson, Richard Yarde, and Theresa-India Young.
*Current AAMARP members
Credits
Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Mannion Family Curator, with Meghan Clare Considine, Curatorial Assistant.
Support for Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Kristen and Kent Lucken Fund for Photography, and The Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Exhibition Fund.
The publication is supported by Wagner Foundation.
