Join us at Boston Arts Academy on Thursday, March 26 at 5:30pm for an Artist Talk with Ja’Hari Ortega!
Ja’Hari Ortega is the artist of Big Hoops to Fill, an interactive public art piece currently on view at The Greenway. She is also a 2017 Boston Arts Academy alum!
For this talk, Ja’Hari will be joined by her former teacher at BAA, Destiny Palmer, a Boston-based artist and educator. They will be in conversation with Dr. Audrey N. Lopez, the Director & Curator of public art at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy.
Thursday, March 26
5:30-7:30PM 
Boston Arts Academy, Recital Hall, 5th floor (elevator accessible)
Free and open to the public.
RSVP through this Eventbrite link. Seats are limited and are offered on a first-come, first-served basis.
Ja’Hari Ortega is a multidisciplinary Boston-based artist, educator, and advocate. Drawn to metal sculpture, jewelry-making, and performance, she creates work that captures the pulse of her city. Ortega developed her practice through a hands-on art education at Boston Arts Academy, Boston’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts. She earned a BFA in Interrelated Media from MassArt in 2021 and a diploma in jewelry-making and repair from North Bennet Street School in 2024.
Destiny Palmer is a Boston-based artist, educator, and public muralist whose work is rooted in the belief that color holds memory. Her practice grew from watching the women in her family shape beauty and meaning through quilts, gardens, and everyday acts of making. As an educator, Palmer works with students towards an understanding of color not as decoration but as a language shaped by identity, geography, and heritage. This dual perspective—artist and teacher—allows her to create work that is visually rigorous, culturally grounded, and deeply relational.
Dr. Audrey N. Lopez is a curator, researcher, and writer working at the intersection of public art and civic engagement based in Providence, RI. Currently, she is Director & Curator of Public Art at The Greenway in Boston, MA. Her work has been featured in Artforum, ARTnews, ArchDaily, designboom, The Los Angeles Times, KCRW, The Boston Globe, WBUR, and Boston Art Review. Lopez earned her PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara (USCB) and has taught courses at both UCSB and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). A multiracial Filipina American woman raised in a rural area of Maryland, Lopez is most at home working at unexpected borderlands of all kinds.
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