The African American Master Artists in Residence Program at Northeastern University (AAMARP) has been a dynamic and unique nexus for artists of the African diaspora for 50 years, according to its current director, Dr. Reginald Jackson, himself a collagist, photographer, filmmaker, professor emeritus at Simmons college, and one of AAMARP’s original practitioners.
Some of the artists that AAMARP has fostered include John Wilson, who created the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Capitol Rotunda, and Theresa-India Young, celebrated in part for her multicultural weavings. Jackson said the program is unique in that it allows resident artists to stay as long as they want, “as they develop their craft, engage in community and mentor younger artists.” They’re provided with studio space and three large, beautiful galleries to exhibit in.
Its distinguished artists interact with the Boston, Jamaica Plain and Roxbury communities, bringing drumming, Kwanzaa celebrations, youth education, social justice actions, and of course art, to their neighborhoods. They’ve exhibited from Sudan and Ghana to London, New York, Cuba and the Caribbean — as a group and as individuals — constantly. They are collected globally, and locally, by museums such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Smithsonian Institute.
The facility and mission of AAMARP so impressed Ian Torney, the director of the Nesto Gallery at Milton Academy, as did Nesto’s solo exhibition of one of AAMARP’S artists, Marlon Forrester, that he decided to create an AAMARP Group Exhibit, with Forrester. “The prime mission,” Torney said, is student involvement, and to familiarize the community at large with AAMARP.