In 2020, the artist tenants at Humphreys Street Studios in Dorchester started work on an unusual canvas, spray painting letters across the complex’s rooftops to spell out the message #ARTWORKSHERE and #ARTSTAYSHERE. These bold statements foreshadowed the beginnings of the Art Stays Here Coalition, which grew out of the threat of displacement that Humphreys Street Studios’ artists faced, fought, and eventually overcame. Their hard-won victory is one bright chapter in the unending battle over securing and maintaining space for artists to live and work in Greater Boston. The path to success might lie in the power of collective action and visibility.
“We coined that word—#ARTSTAYSHERE—and we had signs up on our building,” said Cristina Todesco, a stage designer on the steering committee at Humphreys Street Studios. “We put a sign on our roof, all in hopes to let people know what was going on, that more artists were going to be leaving our city. It’s just too expensive. That was a way that we could telegraph what was happening.”
As a coalition that believes in placekeeping, or “the active care and maintenance of a place and its social fabric by the people who live and work there,” and supporting development without displacement, Art Stays Here is committed to fighting on behalf of artists being pushed out of their spaces. It was founded in 2022, the same year that Humphreys Street Studios tenants, troubled by the looming sale of their building, formed a nonprofit, the HSS Artist Collective, and bought the property for $2.8 million, with help from a developer and the City of Boston. The success of the tenants and the evolution of Art Stays Here demonstrates that artists have the power to assemble in the struggle against displacement and pursue impactful change.
The displacement problem in Greater Boston has intensified over the past ten years, according to Kara Elliott-Ortega, chief of arts and culture for the City of Boston. This is largely due to gentrification and the development of luxury apartments, lab spaces, and offices. The industrial buildings that artists have historically occupied have become more desirable, and the mounting pressures of affordability have driven artists outside of Boston to cities nearby. Locations include Lowell, Fitchburg, Lynn, and Providence, Rhode Island, according to Ami Bennitt, an arts marketer and founding member of Art Stays Here. In recent years, we have seen the disappearance of creative spaces in neighborhoods including Allston/Brighton and Jamaica Plain, with the closure of spots like 119 Braintree Street and 128 Brookside Avenue. Notable institutions such as the Piano Craft Guild building in the South End and the EMF Building in Cambridge have also vanished. Prior to this time, in the late 1990s, areas like Fort Point saw artists driven out of their spaces, replaced by offices and high-end residential projects. While the current moment has brought about challenges, artists have also made solid efforts to strengthen community amidst the difficulties. An integral part of their potential success is being seen.
“There’s an awareness that this is a group that can work together on shared interests and policy goals,” Elliott-Ortega said. Creating systems that allow artists to engage in conversation with each other and reach the public—through publications, advocacy campaigns, or podcasts—supports this organizing as well. “The more that there are platforms where individuals can plug in and see each other, the more that raises visibility, to show that it is a community, all together.”
Before recent displacement, artists swept into Boston neighborhoods in waves, concentrated in their own live and work communities, but it was by no means free of precarity. This culture stems from the 1970s, when creatives flocked to warehouses in areas like Fort Point, the South End, Chinatown, Downtown Boston, and Allston. Artists kept studios and often lived illegally in these spacious abandoned buildings. In a 2023 BAR article by Dr. Lynne Cooney, “Intimate and Familiar: Revisiting the Boston School,” life in Boston was “bracketed by drug use and addiction, sex, cheap rents, and transient underground scenes,” before communities were disrupted by gentrification and development in the decades since. While this moment was “gritty and chaotic,” according to Cooney, there was a sense of a social or interpersonal safety net. Sarah Hutt, a Boston-based arts consultant who has lived in the South End since 1979, recalls that artists could rely on each other for support, but they were also essential to supporting the vibrancy of a particular place. Artists could live and work in the same neighborhood, fostering a natural sense of interconnectedness that allowed for collaboration by proximity. A similar feeling of solidarity and resilience, coupled with an emerging spirit of innovation, might help artists as they unite and activate against pressures to be driven out of spaces.
The struggle to retain artists’ studios and living quarters saw a particularly controversial moment several years ago regarding an industrial building affiliated with Northeastern University. The Jamaica Plain space had been home to the school’s African American Master Artists-in-Residency Program (AAMARP), a collective that began in 1974 when Northeastern provided studio space to artist Dana Chandler. In 2020, artists discovered that the university had changed the locks to the building without informing them, for unclear reasons. Since this incident, AAMARP has been in ongoing negotiations with Northeastern to determine whether artists can remain in the space, which the university claims is unsafe, also for undisclosed reasons. Currently, artists occupy the Atherton Street building, but do not have key access; a security guard positioned outside lets them enter. AAMARP, which became a 501(c)(3) in recent years, remains a unique organization, according to member L’Merchie Frazier, because it houses the studios of some of Boston’s most renowned Black artists in the contemporary scene.
“As African-descended people, we have a mission to preserve and conserve our own aesthetic,” said Frazier. She added that the group must “be in the continuum of a mandated response to racism, to Jim Crow, to the impact of slavery, by [artists]…. Repair is necessary. It’s not just reparations today.”
When it comes to pioneering models for creatives attempting to prevent displacement, many point to Midway Artist Studios. In 2013, tenants of the Fort Point space received notice that the building would be sold; they made a plan to purchase it from Keen Development instead, closing on the space in 2014. Resident artists, who mobilized friends and neighbors to secure financial support, formed a nonprofit, Midway Artist Collective Inc., and partnered with a developer. More than one hundred individuals and organizations participated in the Midway Fund that helped make the $20 million purchase possible. In the end, what saved them, according to Raber Umphenour, cofounder of Midway Artist Collective Inc., was grassroots engagement—knocking on community members’ doors, creating a campaign that wrapped their entire elevator—and acting decisively and quickly.
Though Midway Artist Studios is not the first Fort Point building to be primarily owned by artists who also live there, it was unique at the time in that the studios remained rental units. In the formation of their model, the artists were guided by several core principles. “[These included] raising rent only to the extent necessary to support operating the building,” Umphenour said. “The concept of the building remaining a rental building, so that there was a very low barrier to entry for people moving in, was very important to us … Creating an equitable power and authority structure so that people who were artists choosing to invest did not have more authority than other residents in the building.”
While the Art Stays Here organizers looked to Midway as an example of artists assembling to gain control of a space or its usages, their purview is not just tied to one building—they’re trying to create a movement. In January 2024, the coalition launched the Don’t F With FAB! campaign. In 2019, the city of Somerville created a Fabrication District, protecting spaces primarily dedicated to the arts and creative enterprises; anyone who decided to use these properties for other purposes would require a zoning variance. Currently, nearly half of the property in the Fabrication District is owned by individuals or developers requesting zoning changes. Art Stays Here aims to protect those spaces through an advocacy campaign that has included a podcast, video and sign making, and mixers, through which the group educates the community about the creative space crisis. Bennitt from Art Stays Here said that Somerville may serve as an example for other cities to follow.
“We believe that the cultural identity of Somerville needs these arts buildings. I’ll take it a step further—Somerville is actually the only [municipality in Greater Boston] that has this Fabrication District and these Arts & Creative Enterprise (ACE) requirements,” Bennitt said. “Other cities are even looking toward Somerville to consider adopting these things.”
The region has witnessed other strides—like those from the nonprofit the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston, which supports artists in the battle to preserve spaces by addressing the crisis through an equity and systems change approach. One of its initiatives has been to create a cultural land trust called the Creative Campus. Recognizing the pressure that gentrification has placed on the creative sector and the systemic economic imbalances that impact it, the project has a goal of building a $20 million fund to enable the acquisition and preservation of properties in Massachusetts for artistic and cultural uses.
The Creative Campus initiative made headlines in April of 2022 with the purchase of the Western Avenue Studios + Lofts in Lowell. A 240,000-square-foot facility with 250 work-only studios and 50 live/work lofts, the building is one of the largest artistic community complexes in the country. The Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston also partnered with Creative Hub Worcester to redevelop a building in Worcester, a former Boys & Girls Club; it’s being reimagined as a new anchor education and arts institution. The space will include over thirty artist studios, classrooms, a shared makerspace, a gallery, and more. Jim Grace, executive director of the Arts & Business Council, said that the current model has a focus of preserving dynamic and already vibrant spaces and, as the fund grows, they will develop new spaces that were previously not fully utilized.
“Going forward, our mission is to preserve, for the next three or four projects, existing buildings,” Grace said. “Without access to this ready and affordable capital, we will need properties that have some momentum, that are full, that are activated.”
Greater Boston’s displacement effect has been exacerbated for artists in recent years, and yet some believe that artists have strategies they haven’t had before—that maybe the crisis presents a window of opportunity for them to find their strength in cohesion. Ethan Dussault, co-owner of New Alliance Audio at Milk Row Studios in Somerville and a member of Art Stays Here’s steering committee, has experienced displacement twice, but he remains hopeful. The formation of tenant associations, which allows individuals to speak with one unified voice, is one approach that artists can take. Building networks of concerned people, showing up at meetings, and breaking down silos that separate individuals by discipline and geography are others. While Dussault called the loss of workspaces—which often feel like extensions of home and centers of community—traumatic, he feels empowerment comes from people joining together to organize.
“I think the conversation has changed,” he said. “There’s a lot of levers that people can pull that they couldn’t pull before. It looks different in every city. My advice to folks in other cities is [to] find the levers. And if they don’t exist, try to create them.”
