Tag: Greater Boston

  • Sotheby’s Real Estate Office hostsJP Tiny Desk Concert series

    Local real estate agent Brian Fizer has turned Sotheby’s real estate office into an intimate concert venue on select Thursday nights in Jamaica Plain. Free to attend, the “JP Tiny Desk Concert Series” features Boston musicians with a side of charcuterie boards and the opportunity to bring your own booze. 

    “Every event people say ‘Oh, this is the highlight of my week…it’s so nice to see this space right in the middle of JP used this way,’ ” said Fizer in a recent interview. “It’s all been great feedback.”

    Located at 673 Centre St., Sotheby’s doubles as a hub for neighbors to unite over local music that Fizer said feeds off community camaraderie. Just behind its reception desk wall, Sotheby’s office adds itself to JP’s reserved scene of daily shows at Midway Café and weekly sessions at Brendan Behan Pub.  

    “Community is really important in JP, but let’s do something just to give back to the community,” said Fizer on his motivations to create the concert series. “It was just a way for us to reach out to people.”

    Fizer called on Carol Palmer and Andrew Brilliant — his coworkers on the Brilliant Places real estate team — to help form the series. Palmer and Brilliant’s experience helping throw JP First Thursdays helped bring Fizer’s idea to life. Tiny Desk will have its third session Feb. 12 featuring the Sado Domestics, a grassroots trio that will bring an upbeat, rock-driven sound. Fizer has noticed the crowd grow to upwards of 40 people, spanning from children to retirees. 

    “I remember thinking like there’s just not a lot of instances in our current society where you get to hang out across generations,” said Fizer. 

    The Sado-Domestics will be the first group to break from the jazz theme lineup. According to the band’s website, their “sound is an acoustic-leaning blend of folk, roots and rock.” The group will perform as a trio, with lead singers and guitarists Chris Gleason and Lucy Martinez joining Jimmy Ryan on the mandolin.

    Åsa Runefelt, a jazz vocalist and Berklee College of Music graduate, highlighted Fizer’s commitment to creating the “intimate” and “live” space the poster tagline advertises. She said she felt thankful not only for his generosity to open up the office, but to the venue’s ironically good acoustics.

    “It happens to be a really great venue,” said Runefelt. “He thinks about the lighting, there’s some art on the walls, the chairs are comfortable, but it’s close enough to the musicians.”

    Runefelt performed alongside Brian Freeman, accompanying her vocals on the piano as she sang from her debut album “Night Flower,” released in December. Runefelt said the crowd responded with heartfelt claps to her new releases, whereas Tiny Desk fulfilled her wish to find a sharable concert building. It was just last year she walked the streets of JP to find an office that could benefit from hosting events after store hours.

    “I thought ‘maybe there’s a possibility here for sharing a space, and then he just comes up with his idea,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

    As a performer Runefelt elaborated on the freedom jazz breeds to create an improvised sound experience, especially when live. She said that music has a power to bring people together who may be strangers due to its finite lifespan.

    “Making a painting, this painting hangs there, you can enjoy it forever, but for musicians, it’s just a fleeting moment of living,” said Runefelt.

    Gleason, the co-lead singer of the Sado-Domestics, praised the mutual benefit to the audience and artist. Gleason performs all around Greater Boston, with monthly concerts at the Square Root in Roslindale and at the Sanctuary Cultural Arts Center in Maynard. He said that now more than ever in-person events can positively impact people who otherwise would stay inside.

    “Music is therapeutic, but it’s good for the audience, too,” he said. “We all spend so much time on our devices or watching television.”

    Fizer also said Tiny Desk can inspire a digital detox for attendees in its third space. He deemed  Sotheby’s intimate setup as an unplugged experience where people can socialize with less digital interaction.

    “It’s just, ‘you’re here to enjoy music, right?” said Fizer. “You see people talking to each other, which is really cool and doesn’t always happen in an East Coast city.”

    But as far as an official goal for Tiny Desk, Fizer settles on community. 

    “Human connection, interaction, community — and what better way to do it than listening to music that perhaps is a genre you’ve never listened to,” he said. “We feel that’s kind of the anecdote to a lot of our problems.”

  • No walls, no limits: LGBTQ+ museum plans to go statewide

    Portraits of Pride exhibition on display at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park, 100 Atlantic Ave,, Boston. Photo by Wen Qi

    The Boston LGBTQ+ Museum of Art, History & Culture had a big idea: bring the museum to the people.

    Jean Dolin, a Haitian immigrant raised in Dorchester, got the idea for the museum in 2020 after years working in politics and journalism. The museum doesn’t have a physical space and instead brings exhibits to places around the city, from Boston Common to the Seaport District. But while it lacks a building, Dolin has grand plans for his museum: He wants to take exhibits all across Massachusetts and build a statewide presence within four years.

    “I emerged out of COVID wanting to do the thing that moves me, the thing that I feel like would inspire, would inform, but would also empower,” Dolin said.

    He began with a documentary on the LGBTQ+ community called “Rainbow Tales” but decided it wasn’t reaching enough people.

    “And then something kind of sparked,” Dolin said.

    Inspired by a photography exhibition he’d seen in the streets of Boston, he created “Portraits of Pride,” which is now in its fourth round. The exhibit features 10-foot-tall portrait banners of people who have stood out in their communities. Printed on durable fabric and suspended from custom-built frames, the portraits spotlight leaders and figures in the LGBTQ+ community.

    Above, Susu Wong’s portrait on display at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park. Photo by Wen Qi

    “So to me, this was a way of saying thank you to all of those who fought for those decades, because I’m a beneficiary of all their work,” Dolin said.

    He held his first “Portraits of Pride” on Boston Common in 2022, and then started raising money so they could keep creating similar projects as part of a formal museum. And it was finally declared as an established institution in October 2023.

    Since that initial exhibit, the museum has held three more: on City Hall Plaza in 2023, in Sea Green in the Seaport in 2024, and the current one in the Connector/Winthrop Center Park.

    The new exhibit contains 20 portraits, photographed by John Huet, including Gretchen Van Ness, executive director of LGBTQ Senior Housing, Paul Glass and Charles Evans, founders of LGBTQ+ Elders of Color, and Jerome Smith, a Dorchester resident who is the senior manager of external affairs at Amazon and Boston’s former chief of civic engagement.

    Arline Isaacson, the board chair of the museum, was featured in the first Pride Legacy Exhibition. “It’s an important recognition of the work that our community has done over the years and especially young folks in our community,” she said.

    Their locations are crucial, Isaacson said. The museum chooses public spaces where all sorts of people walk by. The Winthrop Center faces the Connector building, which holds 4,000 people, including major employers like McKinsey & Co. and Deloitte.

    “It’s a great way to honor people,” said Aadya Gadkari, a solutions engineering analyst at Deloitte.

    On Wednesday the museum opened a new exhibit, a collaboration between the two artistically renowned cousins, Paul Firmin, a queer Haitian artist widely known as KINI, and Rejeila Firmin, the exhibition’s curator, as the artist in residence. The exhibition is at the Pryde Gallery, at 59 Harvard Ave. in Hyde Park. Inside the LGBTQ+ senior housing building, with which they have been partnering since last year.

    “I think I’m also excited that this is a Haitian queer artist that is doing it,” Dolin said. “There is a very long history of homophobia in Haiti. So that’s easy for these two identities to be held in one body. ”

    KINI is known for his lively, colorful paintings, but he decided to work in black and white for this exhibit to symbolize good and evil, and grays to represent the blurry lines in life. His goal was to blur the lines between the past, present and future.

    “Create a place where a kind of everything can exist,” KINI said, “and there’s like no objectivity really, and it’s just, that’s why I call it the void, because I feel like anything can happen in a void.”

    The exhibition will be up until mid-September, and then will be followed by another, Dolin said.

    In addition to “Portraits of Pride,” the museum commemorated 20 years of marriage equality in May 2024 at the State House and partnered with LGBTQ+ Senior Housing to create the Pryde Gallery. It also hosted the weeklong Queer Arts Festival last October and organized a National Coming Out Day celebration.

    The museum launched an artist-in-residence program with Rejeila Firmin and plans to introduce a fellowship next year. The first initiative, “Queer Youth Creative Writing & Poetry,” will recruit high school seniors and college freshmen in Greater Boston to develop their writing.

    The museum’s 2026 project is still in the works, but it plans to have a commemoration of the United States’ 250th birthday in the spring, and then travel with it through the whole state in 2027 and 2028.

    “So at that point, we’re going to be evolving the name of the institution from Boston LGBTQ to Massachusetts LGBTQ,” Dolin said, “because ultimately, we’re telling the history of the state, and we want to go and evolve into a statewide institution.”