Past Projects
100 Voices,
Our Collective Story
City Hall, Gloucester, MA - 2017
In collaboration with the City of Gloucester, Gloucester Public Schools, Pathways for Children, Sandy Bay Historical Society, The Open Door, Rhode Island School of Design Graduate Studies Grant Program, and the People of Cape Ann.
In the fall of 2017, Harbor Voices created its first community collaborative public art installation in the fishing community of Gloucester, Massachusetts. This community has centuries of rich immigration history from across the globe.
We held storytelling sessions at senior centers, the offices of public officials, public schools, nonprofit support groups, and historical societies to collect over 100 ancestral and recent local immigration stories.
The audio from the storytelling sessions was recorded and the stories were then condensed into an 8-minute sound collage, featuring a “babble” of languages overlapping into the sound of crashing waves. Short quotations from our diverse collection of stories emerged from the waves as the laser installation commenced. The sound installation immersed exhibition visitors in immigration stories, while the lasers visualized the web of connectivity between stories. In the exhibition, an ancestral immigration story would be heard in conjunction with a recent story and, eventually, the visitor could no longer discern which stories were recent and which stories were from the past. Lights from opposite corners of the room would connect and travel through space and time together, exemplifying the similitudes that exist amongst neighbors and community members.
100 Voices,
Our Collective Story
The Armory Show, Pier 94, New York, NY - 2018
Harbor Voices "One Hundred Voices, Our Collective Story" was shown at The Armory Show in New York, NY as part of Wang Xin's "The Gallery."
Image courtesy of de Sarthe Gallery. Visitors listen to Harbor Voices’ 2017 Cape Ann sound collage "One Hundred Voices, Our Collective Story" while submitting their own NY Harbor immigration stories to the Harbor Voices database for a future installation.
My Name Translated Is Strength
Illuminus Boston, Boston, MA - 2018
On November 2nd & 3rd, 2018 Harbor Voices created a community-specific artwork for the Irish Potato Famine Memorial Park in Downtown Crossing, in conjunction with students from Suffolk University and Illuminus Boston. Thousands of Bostonians visited “My Name Translated is Strength.”
Big Brother,
Big Sister
House of Blues, Boston, MA - 2019
Big Brothers Big Sisters of Massachusetts Bay commissioned an artwork to celebrate the stories of triumph over adversity with Bigs, Littles, Parents, Teachers, Volunteers, and Staff. These are their voices.
When my ELL students, who just arrived in this country, see their stories shared in the context of other stories about immigration and local history, I think they feel like part of a larger community and more welcome here.
— GLOUCESTER PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER, December 2017