20 QUESTIONS
FOR 20 YEARS

CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF DS4SI

SEP 27 - OCT 19

Celebrate With Us

“Dance Court 2022”, Mary Hannon Park. Photographed by Aram Boghosian”

Ribbon w/ ITC Avant Garde

The Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) partners with communities, artists, and social justice practitioners to imagine, demonstrate, and collectively rebuild places to be more just and vibrant.

We use questions to challenge our assumptions about everyday life and create portals as invitations into the imaginary.

Now, as we turn 20, we’re celebrating with 20 Questions, a space where artists, activists, academics, neighbors, youth, and the broader community explore provocative ideas together.

True to our history of blending art and activism, 20 Questions will invite fellow tricksters and troublemakers to experience the 20 questions, share insights, and engage in social interventions through rigorous play and conversation.

20 Questions will be a 4-week series of interventions, studies, and celebrations hosted by DS4SI as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial, September 27th-October 19th.

"Black Love”, Downtown Boston. Photograph by Stephanie Belnavis

Ribbon w/ ITC Avant Garde

THE HUB

The Hub is, in many ways, a pop-up version of DS4SI designed to welcome old and new friends of the Studio as we celebrate our 20th anniversary. It is a creative space where participants get a hands-on chance to learn about the Design Studio’s work from the past 20 years through the lens of 20 Questions we pose as a way to activate new ways of thinking together.

Participants get to:

Witness DS4SI’s work across the last couple decades
Explore the Timeline, the Archive, and other interactive installations
Learn about DS4SI’s methodology and tools for designing powerful social interventions
Experience curatorial talks, conversations, performances, and workshops
Study with us, and as we reflect back and move forward
Just like at our Design Gym, bring your own ideas to work out, stretch the muscles of our collective imagination,
Meet one another, the community of artists, activists, and academics, whether you’re an old head or part of the growing merry band of misfits

The Hub is an energetic and reflective space which will hold space for inquiry and witness alongside housing the curated programming led by our invited curators, our co-conspirators, and the four themes they will activate: Sense and Nonsense led by Anthony Romero, Affect and Aesthetics of Space and Place led by Tiago Gualberto, Intervening in the Moment led by Nato Thompson and Rehearsing and Performing the Everyday led by Grisha Coleman. DS4SI Thought Ecology Lead, Judith Leemann, is the Witness Curator who will tend to our shared thinking.

The Hub’s curation, design, and fabrication is led by the Hub Design Team, including Hub Curator Ayako Maruyama, DS4SI Prototype Lead Maria Gerdyman, and Hub Design Consultant Senjuti Sangia.

RSVP to Kickoff Party

HUB CURATORS

Judith Leemann
Witness Curator

More about Judith Leemann

Judith Leemann is an artist, educator, and writer. Through material, textual, and social inquiry, her practice tracks an urgent curiosity about how form does, how habit makes and breaks, and how we carve out conditions for sustained collective study. Judith was one of DS4SI’s early artists-in-residence back in 2007, and after almost twenty years of parallel play, she has taken on the role of Ecologies of Thought Lead. In this position, she continues to develop protocols for inquiry and reimagination: hack a diagram, question bending, close reading, and more.

Recent solo projects include a commissioned performance for the 2019 exhibition goat island archive—we have discovered the performance by making it at the Chicago Cultural Center, and a site-responsive work for the 2019 Even thread [has] a speech exhibition at the Kohler Art Center. Her writings have been included in the anthologies Beyond Critique (Bloomsbury, 2017), Collaboration Through Craft (Bloomsbury, 2013), as well as in several publications of the Warren Wilson MA in Critical Craft Studies program.

In 2017, she convened the retooling critique working group—a community of practice committed to studying studio critique’s relation to educational equity. She is in her final year as a student in the Boston Conservatory Alexander Technique Teacher Training and serves as a professor in the 3D Arts Department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ayako Maruyama
20Q Hub Curator

More about Ayako Maruyama

Ayako Maruyama is a Filipina-Japanese designer, teacher, and illustrator. She centers intentional collaboration, reflection, maintenance, and repair in her practice. Ayako is the 20Q Hub Curator, directing the design of the space that will house DS4SI’s 20th year celebrations and programming this fall.

Her practice has been shaped by her work with DS4SI where she joined Lori and Kenny in 2012. Her early work focused on designing and producing Action Lab, the first of many DS4SI Creative Labs. She led the design and production of the Go Boston 2030 Visioning Lab, an unprecedented public space for Boston residents to express their vision for the city’s 15-year transportation plan. She grew to be the Design Lead until 2019, and continues to work with the Studio. Ayako co-authored and co-illustrated Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice, which offers a framework for imagining new arrangements. Ayako’s work with DS4SI on Social Emergency Response Centers has been exhibited at Project Row Houses Round 48: Beyond Social Practice and the Designing Peace exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, which traveled to The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco.

Ayako currently teaches the Fanned Obsolescence Studio that ties into her research on repair culture in the Philippines, the future of coolin, and the geopolitics of our manufacturing legacy. She collaborates on a project with Markus Berger, called reharvest repair: a circular economy research project. She is a Board Member at the University of Orange in New Jersey, a free school of restoration urbanism founded in 2008 and building on a 64-year history of progressive organizing. Ayako has taught at Boston University’s City Planning and Urban Affairs graduate program and is currently a professor of Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Featured

Jan 1

Opening Weekend

9/27, 7p-12am:
20 Questions Opening Fundraising Party with DJ Real P,

9/28, 12pm-10pm:
DS4SI Hub Opening! Details coming soon

Jan 2

Sense & Nonsense

Oct 3-5

As a studio seeking to prototype and disseminate creative approaches to social change, we are often met with critiques around practicality. This is an epistemological and strategic conundrum. Anthony Romero will question the thought architectures alive within and across institutions that keep binary logics of poetic and practical, sense and nonsense intact.

Jan 3

Affect & Aesthetics of Space

Oct 10-12

In DS4SI’s Aesthetic Justice Manifesto, we declare that we all have the “right to be moved” through aesthetic experiences. Tiago Gualberto will bring his insights and shared questions about the enclosing of contemporary art to formal spaces and how the techniques of multiple approaches to aesthetics in and of place can be brought to bear in public.

Jan 4

Rehearsing & Performing the Everyday

Oct 17-19

Much of DS4SI’s work is about both understanding the everyday as a political project and finding collective agency to reimagine the everyday. Many of our social interventions invite participants into rehearsing and performing otherwise. Grisha Coleman will bring her own artistic and political vision to why a critique and reimagining of the everyday is needed.

Jan 5

Intervening in the Moment

Oct 17-19

Much of DS4SI’s work has been about trying to sharpen how social interventionists interested in arcing towards social change might better design their social interventions. With Nato Thompson, this theme will engage seasoned interventionists in asking the question “How might social practice continue to sharpen its practice towards social change?”

20Q Curators

Anthony Romero
Sense and Nonsense, Practical Poetics

October 3 - October 5, 2025

More about Anthony Romero

Anthony Romero is a Boston-based artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. He is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College and earned his M.F.A. in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He is a founding member of Sonic Insurgency Research Groupwith Josh Rios and Matt Joynt. SIRG was awarded a MAP Fund Grant in 2020. Multimedia works by SIRG have been exhibited in Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art at the Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles), the Counterpublic Triennial at Luminary Arts (St. Louis), Acoustic Resonance at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art (Portland), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), Work for the People (Or Forget about Fred Hampton) at Co-Prosperity (Chicago).

Romero co-edited the book Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic with Daniel Tucker and Dan S. Wang (Soberscove Press, 2022). His most recent essays include “La Vivienda es La Cura: Latinx Art, Politics, and Housing Justice in East Boston” in The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Mey-Yen Moriuchi and Lesley Shipley (2023), and the essay “Sonic Legal Spaces: An Essay of Overdubs,” co-authored with Rios and Joynt, for Columbia University’s Academic Commons (2023). His essay “Asking for Permission/Listening for Consent” (2023) was published in Forging, the digital journal of Forge Project.

Tiago Gualberto
Affect and Aesthetics of Space and Place

October 10 - October 12, 2025

More about Tiago Gualberto

Tiago Gualberto (1983) is a PhD candidate at Campinas University, visual artist and a curator, who has stood out for a number of projects including those at São Paulo’s Afro-Brazil Museum and his partnership with the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) in Boston. He was part of the body of art critics at the São Paulo Cultural Center (CCSP) and an invited instructor at The Alternative Art School (TAAS). He has received the following prizes: artist in residence at the Tamarind Institute at New Mexico University for the program Afro: Black Identity in America and Brazil (2012); the same year, he was a finalist in the category of Visual Arts of the Programa Nascente, promoted by the Office of the Provost for Culture and Extension at the University of São Paulo. In 2015, he received the Funarte (National Foundation for the Arts) Scholarship for Black Artists and Producers from the Ministry of Culture for his Master’s project in the visual arts, LembranÃ§a de Nhô Tim (Souvenir from Massa Tim, 2016-18). In 2017, Gualberto was one of ten Brazilian leaders selected to participate in a roundtable with President Barack Obama in São Paulo due to his artistic work and social involvement such as in Project Row Houses -Round 48, in collaboration with DS4SI in Houston. Actually, Gualberto is a high school teacher at a public school on the outskirts of the city of São Paulo.

Grisha Coleman
Rehearsing & Performing the Everyday

October 17 - October 19, 2025

More about Grisha Coleman

Grisha Coleman is an artist working through choreography, performance, experiential technology and sound composition. Her research explores tensions across our physiological, technological, and ecological systems; human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. I engage this exploration in interdisciplinary ways, centering presence and experience to counter conventional dichotomies of quantitative/qualitative thought. Working with time-based performance and technology began at the California Institute for the Arts in Music Composition and Integrated Media. As a Fellow at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University, her work forged bridges among workers in the arts, human-centered computing, robotics and natural sciences. Ms. Coleman continued to build hybrid systems across applications of health, education, and the arts with teams of engineers and computer scientists as faculty in the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering and School of Dance at Arizona State University. Previous to this, she worked full time as an artist, notably founding and composing the music performance company HOTMOUTH, as well as a dancer with the acclaimed company the Urban Bush Women. She currently holds the position of Professor of Movement, Computation, and Digital Media in the in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University, and an affiliation with the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and the Center for Race and Democracy at Arizona State University.

Her work has been generously supported by The Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Technologies Lab, a Harvard-Radcliffe Fellowship, The National Endowment for the Arts in Media grants, the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Project [MAP] Fund, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, the Surdna Foundation Thriving Cultures Grant, the MacDowell Arts Colony, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Pioneer Works, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and Stanford University’s Mohr Visiting Artist Fellowship.

Ms. Coleman is a New York City native.

Nato Thompson
Intervening in the Moment

October 17 - October 19, 2025

More about Nato Thompson

Nato Thompson is a curator, writer, and cultural strategist working at the intersection of art, politics, and community engagement. He is the co-founder of The Alternative Art School (TAAS), a global, artist-led platform for experimental art education. Through his consulting practice Dreaming in Public, he supports artists, institutions, and organizations in developing visionary projects, expanding visibility, and building sustainable careers.

Thompson previously served as Artistic Director of Philadelphia Contemporary and Chief Curator at Creative Time, where he organized landmark projects with artists such as Paul Ramírez Jonas, Trevor Paglen, Tania Bruguera, and Pedro Reyes. He began his career as Curator at MASS MoCA, curating exhibitions that blurred the lines between contemporary art and lived experience.

A widely respected voice in the art world, Thompson is the author of Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life. His writing, curatorial projects, and lectures have helped shape a generation of socially engaged art.