The Portal Between the Everyday and the Sacred is an online exhibition curated in August 2021 by students in the Urban Scholars program of UMASS Boston in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston.

What is the role of the artist in 2021?

The hope is that many of us have been fortunate to be able to use this forced isolation to shift how we think about art making. Through stress, fear, and uncertainty, we are all forced to reimage new modes of expression and realize that, simply, creativity is human. We are an incredibly resourceful bunch. Artists who worked for large companies in tall buildings are now working from home with more time for their own projects. Photographers who started as event or freelance photographers with studios and teams of assistants have shifted to getting more creative with the ways they work with clients and their own creative ideas.

We have explored different online archival exhibitions like Art In A Time Like This by Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen, QueerArchive by Paul Soulellis, Home Alone Survival Guide by Max Siedentopf, and The Free Black Woman’s Library founded by OlaRonke Akinmowo. Each archive takes the position of sanctifying the everyday, to highlight the present and past in tandem while remaining a free resource for anyone who stumbles across the URL. The purpose of this workshop is to be a means to follow in these footsteps of creativity, nuance, and inspiration and to create our own virtual showcase of multimedia works.

Please enter our artists’ spaces above where we have shared our thoughts and artworks produced in 2021. Each artist has selected a key word that links their work to experiences, feelings, and areas of reflection at this time. This collection represents a wide variety of media and art making practices. We all feel strongly that process is key – whether it is in the creation of art, or the building of this site - it is the thinking, the collaboration, the design, the dialog, and the systems of making that bring the most meaning.