About & Credits

In Transit: Voices Vision is a series of community-designed prints on the theme of “Journey”  on exhibit inside MBTA Orange and Red Line trains  August, 2016.  Students from the Urban Scholars program at UMass Boston collaborated with artist educators Brad Bleidt, Lisa Link, and Suamy Ventura to create this project.

Thousands of teenagers ride the MBTA every day, and this art project gives them an opportunity to inject their own voice and vision into a public space normally dominated by commercial advertising.

The Urban Scholars students engaged in a multi-disciplinary process over a period of several months. They conducted  inter-generational interviews on the theme of  “journey” with adults from family, work, school as well as the Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning and pre-collegiate programs at UMass Boston. They reviewed the interviews, posted excerpts on their personal blogs, shared the results  with each other and chose their favorite quotes. The Urban Scholars students used the quotes as a starting point for their individual designs. They sketched out ideas with pencils and pastels. They embarked on painting and photography studio explorations and  finally combined the words and images together in the computer with Photoshop.

Please join us in celebrating their work with the hashtag #InTransitBoston when you see one of their artworks on the MBTA this summer.

Special thanks to:

  • Urban Scholars Staff & Tutors: Divya Sharma, Arusa Zama, Jacob Aguiar, Chandramouli Chandrasekar, Terri Morgan, Stephanie Hicks-Williams, Jeff Foulkes, Naomi Brown-Jones
  • UMass Boston Pre-Collegiate Program Staff Inteviewees
  • Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning (OLLI) at UMass Boston Interviewees
  • UMass Boston Creative Services Designers: Rose Coveney,  Chris Fotino, Suzanne Korschun, Wendy Lanchester, Chans  Phanthalangsy, Sarah Weatherbee
  • UMass Boston IT staff especially Jouliana Bosneva, Angela Carretta, and John Mazzarella
  • Colleen Locke, Digital Communications Editor
  • Kim Szeto and the staff at New England Foundation for the Arts.
  • A special  thank you to the MBTA for extending the viewing of In Transit: Voices & Vision through September.

In Transit was made possible with funding by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ Creative City Program, with funding from the Barr Foundation.

New England Foundation for the Arts