The Brookline Arts Center was founded in 1964 on the tenets of community, creativity, and charity. Now, 56 years later, community is still at the heart of the center’s work. Executive Director Lauren Riviello has spent the past six years instituting programs that make the center’s work accessible to all populations and continually elevate the quality of classes and gallery shows available.
“I’m particularly proud of our extensive reach out into the community now,” says Riviello. “We do a lot of programming that is specifically offered to provide opportunities to low-income families in our community. We’ve developed quite a few partnerships with Brookline organizations to develop those services.”
These programs include free classes at the Brookline Food Pantry, held every Thursday from 3–4:30 pm by a BAC teacher. A collaboration with Brookline’s ParentChild+ also provides free classes for low-income families with young children. The center additionally distributes over $14,000 in financial aid each year for community members to take classes. Riviello says that attendance at classes and programs across the board has grown since these initiatives were created. When it was founded, the center primarily focused on serving children; now, they’re able to bring art into the lives of Brookliners of all backgrounds and ages.
“I’m also particularly proud of our gallery program, which has really grown quite a bit over the last several years,” says Riviello. “We now have annual and semi-annual national exhibits with guest jurors, and we’ve refined the kind of programming that we’re offering here.” One such juried exhibition, “Activation,” opens on March 13. Works were submitted by artists from all over the country and selected by Arlette Kayafas of the Kayafas Gallery in Boston’s South End. Many of the artworks physically move or can be activated to perform for what will be a lively and engaging kinetic show. To have both high-level exhibitions like this and community workshops in one building is a rare and wonderful opportunity.
In 2018 BAC partnered with the Brookline Housing Authority and local artist Silvia Lopez Chavez to create the community mural “Together We Thrive” at Saint Paul and Drummer Streets on the exterior of the Egmont Public Housing Community Room. Riviello says the event was so successful that another public art project will debut this spring. The center is currently reviewing proposals for a piece that will live in the park adjacent to the BAC. As with “Together We Thrive,” there will be a community component to engage the neighborhood in the making of the artwork.
“We definitely pride ourselves on being a community center for people of all ages and backgrounds,” says Riviello. “We like to say that we start offering opportunities at age 18 months, and we have students participating here who are well into their 90s. We’re really passionate about what we do.”
