Artists were selected through a competitive juried process led by Mosesian Arts staff in collaboration with two distinguished guest jurors:
Layla Bermeo is the Kristin and Roger Servison Curator of Paintings, Art of the Americas, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She previously held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Williams College Museum of Art, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Interested in artistic and political exchanges between the United States and Latin America, Layla has organized several installations and exhibitions at the MFA, including Collecting Stories: Native American Art and Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular, for which she also authored the accompanying bilingual publication. She has led language access initiatives and developed the “Curatorial Study Hall” program for local high school students. Layla holds an MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
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Archy LaSalle is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Early in his career, Mr. LaSalle received national and international attention for his artistic documentation of the M.B.T.A. Orange Line Southwest Corridor subway system project in Boston. He was awarded an artist's residency at the Foundation Karolyi in Vence, France, which subsequently earned him a residency at Cite Internationale des Artes in Paris. Mr. LaSalle’s work is included in Black Photographers: 1945-1985, published by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His photographs can also be found in the collection of many art museums including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the DeCordova Museum, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
In conjunction with his artistic career, Mr. LaSalle has been a committed and dedicated educator who lectures frequently at art institutions here and abroad. For three decades, he taught in the photography department at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As an art educator, he was the recipient of an ART grant from The Philanthropic Initiative for a photographic project in South Africa and was the 2009 winner of the Excellence in Teaching National Award by CENTER in Santa Fe.
In the past few years, he began to focus on the considerable lack of representation of Black visual artists in the permanent collections of art museums. He founded a grassroots organization to address the lack of representation of Black and Brown artists in the permanent collections of our art museums. The mission of “WHERE ARE ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE AT” is to work directly with Museum Directors and Curators to help change the process and balance of acquisitions to more fairly represent our diverse world. Partnering with the Fitchburg Art Museum, WAATBPA created a residency and collaboration with emerging artists in a generative mentor-mentee relationship that resulted in a multi-disciplinary exhibition in 2023, Dialogues, Diasporas, and Detours Through Africa.
Archy is currently on the Board of Advisors for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and on the Board of Advisors at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.
