About
ABOUT
Audrey N. Lopez, Ph.D. is a curator, researcher, writer, and connector working at the intersection of public art + installation and spatial + aesthetic justice across New England and Southern California. She is currently the Director & Curator of Public Art at The Greenway, a large public park in downtown Boston.
Grounded in participatory, decolonial approaches to public space, Lopez’s curatorial practice works to strengthen communities’ relationships to public land and ecologies through art that inspires sustained civic engagement and creative collective action.
Her curatorial work has been featured in Artforum, ARTnews, ArchDaily, designboom, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, KCRW, The Boston Globe, WBUR, and Boston Art Review. Lopez earned her PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara and has taught courses on language, power, activism and public art at UCSB and RISD.
QUIERES SABER MÁS?
Curator. Researcher. Writer. At the heart of each of these roles, I draw on my skills and joy as an interdisciplinary creative producer. I excel at this work by connecting and leading innovative constellations of ideas, people, and resources and by building effective collaborations and reciprocal relationships with a broad range of project stakeholders and partners.
As a multiracial Filipina American woman raised in a rural area of Maryland crossed by three state lines (MD, PA, DE), I’m most at home working at unexpected intersections and in borderlands of all kinds. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Doris Sommer’s book The Work of Art in the World (2014), and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017) have been key touchstones for me along the way.
The daughter of an artist and engineer, I grew up in a family of creative problem solvers, immersed in a mix of artistic imagination plus the practical project planning skills necessary to make things happen. My siblings, Chris and Elana, formed my very first creative team. Some of our earliest projects included making several stop-motion films (shout out to the OG Logitech QuickCam), building a treehouse with a spiral staircase, and running art direction from behind a camcorder to capture stunts on Razor scooters.
These early creative experiments taught me the power of engaging the questions of “How?” and “What if?” and the importance of collaboration in community. Since then, I’ve lived, worked, and led community-engaged art and research initiatives across South America, Ghana, and Southern California.
I acknowledge, thank, and honor the Lenni Lenape lands of Maryland where I was born and raised, as well as the Chumash lands of Santa Barbara, California, where much of my creative career was shaped. I’m grateful for the Massachusetts, Wampanoag, and Nipmuc peoples, whose land holds many of the current projects I currently work on in Boston.
If you’re a creative passing through the Northeast, I invite you to get in touch!