Arts & Culture

Boston’s Society of Arts + Crafts (SA+C) has launched an online gallery and a dynamic series of free programming throughout the month of May. After closing its Seaport retail location in early 2020 and later cancelling the CraftBoston spring event due to COVID-19, the online exhibitions represent a rebirth of this beloved arts organization.

The Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and the Boston Cultural Council (BCC) has awarded 153 arts and culture organizations grants totaling $489,000. These grants will support the general operating expenses of the organizations and the goal of enhancing life in Boston through the arts.

Headlined by keynote speaker and 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown, the Roxbury Poetry Festival will feature writers, panelists and curators in conversation. Poets of all ages and styles will come together at the festival on June 5 to celebrate the powerful medium.

Jazz pianist Witness Matlou knows the power that music has to effect social change. It changed his life and has given him the opportunity to give back to his community while traveling the world performing and teaching.

A new mural has bloomed on the walls of 527 Albany Street, thanks to a collaboration between Artists for Humanity and Boston Community Pediatrics. The teen artists at AFH painted a series of bright, bold, masked portraits called “Facing the Future” to represent the pandemic experience and the importance of masking and social distancing to keep the community safe.

The New England Foundation for the Arts awarded artist and educator Ekua Holmes the Newell Flather Award for Leadership in Public Art.

“Witness: Spirituals and the Classical Music Tradition,” a collaboration between Castle of Our Skins and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, explores the beauty and power of African American spirituals through a classical lens.

The second annual National Antiracist Book Festival is a one-day event taking place this Saturday, April 24 through Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. Due to the pandemic, last year’s event was cancelled, and this year it will be virtual.

This summer, the ICA Boston will present its first exhibition devoted to work by artist and designer Virgil Abloh. “Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech,” will delve into the artist’s work in fashion, painting, music and design.

The Boston Comics in Color Festival (BCICF), running April 22-24, is New England’s first comic arts festival homing in on works created by and for people of color. The three-day hybrid event featuring virtual and in-person programs highlights artists from Boston and around the country working in the comics world.

Acclaimed composer Jonathan Woody firmly believes in the universality of music, and that it doesn’t belong to anyone person, race or culture.

The shameful history of President Thomas Jefferson and enslaved woman Sally Hemings gets reimagined and reinterpreted in James Ijames’s “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever,” streaming virtually via SpeakEasy Stage Company April 23–May 6.