Community Engagement – Creative Minds Out Loud

Episode 114: Reflecting the Community in Art Spaces

In late 2019, we spoke to Doneeca Thurston, the newly-named Director of Lynn Museum/Lynn Arts. The 29-year-old Lynn native said her new role felt like a homecoming. She shares her vision for how the museum can be a champion for its majority minority community and ensure that local artists feel respected and celebrated.

Doneeca Thurston (Image by Christopher Padgett / Citizen Salem) Doneeca Thurston is currently the Director of Lynn Museum/LynnArts, located in the heart of the Downtown Lynn Cultural District. A Lynn-native, a lot of her efforts are focused on community-centered initiatives, committed to making Lynn Museum/LynnArts’ spaces more inclusive, accessible, and visible to all.

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Episode 110: Prescribing Cultural Engagement as a Protective, Healthy Habit

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Dr. Deborah Buccino and Adrien Conklin, BSN RN of MACONY Pediatrics discuss the addition of social prescription – prescribing cultural engagement as a protective, healthy habit – to their collaborative care work in the Berkshires.

“We can give prescriptions for medicine. We can give prescriptions to see a neurologist. But we can also give a prescription for something fun to do with your family. And that’s just as important as some medicines or referrals,” Conklin said.

Dr. Buccino said their participation in CultureRx social prescription has also meant getting to know patients more as people, instead of just their physical bodies. “It does a lot to combat physician burnout.”

Dr. Deborah Buccino and Adrien Conklin Deborah Buccino, MD is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Medical School. Since completing a residency in pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital in 1996, she has practiced general pediatrics at MACONY Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Dr. Buccino is an Instructor of Pediatrics at Boston University Medical School. Dr. Buccino is a school physician at Berkshire School and previously at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

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Episode 101: An Emergence of the People, their Spirit, their Stories

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L’Merchie Frazier is an artist and Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket. Her work is centered on helping others to find their voice and discover their own innate creativity. She shares how her community projects aim to encourage people – individually and collectively – to participate in the arena of art-making.

L'Merchie Frazier L’Merchie Frazier, a public fiber artist, innovator, poet and holographer, is Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket, engaged in highlighting and curating the Museum’s collection/exhibits, providing place-based education and interdisciplinary history programs, projects and lectures, most recently promoting STEM / STEAM education pedagogy, and manages Faculty/ Teachers’ Institutes and its extension, The Cross Cultural Classroom, a benefit marketed to independent education entities, municipalities and corporations.

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Episode 96: When Well-Being Takes the Stage

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Mandy Precious, Engagement and Learning Director at Theatre Royal Plymouth, shares how social prescription – prescribing the arts or arts activities over medication – has impacted their organization and their community. Through their Our Space program, adults with addiction, homelessness, and/or mental health issues come to see productions and make their own work.

Mandy Precious is the Director of Engagement and Learning at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, UK. Previously she was the CEO and Artistic Director of the largest Youth Theatre in England. She was a freelance theatre maker, writer and project manager for 18 years working with communities from all backgrounds. Her work focuses on applied and community theatre, co-creating work with groups least likely to engage but often with the most interesting stories to tell.

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Episode 94: Look at Art. Get Paid.

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Through “Look at Art. Get Paid,” artists Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu pay people who have never been to an art museum to visit one as guest critics. Having both studied social science in addition to art, Chao and Devanbu crave a candid conversation about the structural inequalities of art, critique, and its institutions.

Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu Maia Chao is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores play and absurdity as subversive and emancipatory tools for collaboration and collective imagining. Chao holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from RISD. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant (2014), Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2017), and Van Lier Fellowship (2018), and is currently artist in residence at Pioneer Works (2019). She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

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