The Boston Art Review named its first executive director in late March: longtime Cambridge resident Jameson Johnson, who founded the largely volunteer-run nonprofit publication in 2017.
Despite the magazine’s sleek, professional look, the Boston Art Review has been scrappy from the beginning. Johnson recalled several years ago – before the organization had a physical space – when people assumed it had fancy offices on Boylston Street.
Looks can be deceiving: Johnson started it as an undergraduate at Northeastern University, where she paid for printing on her own credit card with work study money.
After graduating in 2018, she moved to Cambridge in 2019 and started working at the MIT List Visual Art Center. Aside from a stint running the magazine full-time in early post-grad – Johnson babysat and did odd jobs to make it work – it’s been all side hustle. “It was totally unsustainable,” Johnson said. Like the rest of the volunteer staff, “I had my nine-to-five, and then I had my nine-to-midnight.”
The team packaged the magazines in her living room. Two BAR colleagues lived in Cambridge, so they’d rotate houses to get the work done, Johnson said.
“I would keep the magazine boxes under my bed,” Johnson said, “and [think to myself], ’Oh, my God! If my house burns down, I’m gonna lose the entire Boston Art Review inventory!’ It was just so entangled.”
There were two issues a year, weekly listings and big promotional parties. “Everything that a much larger organization and magazine would do, we were doing with a volunteer-supported team,” Johnson said. “We were pretty precarious.”
Wagner grant
The turning point came last fall, when Johnson left her job at MIT.
“It was really this kind of pedal-to-the-metal moment,” Johnson said, “like this is now or never.” The team went to the Wagner Foundation, which had selected them for the competitive VIA Art Fund/Wagner Foundation Incubator Grant in 2022 – one of just four organizations selected from more than 150 applicant organizations nationally, according to the foundation’s arts and culture program officer, Abigail Satinsky. It guaranteed arts nonprofits two years of general operating support at $20,000 per year.
The grant selected its final recipients in 2023. With this new funding, the review became “the only incubator grant that we have further invested in,” Satinsky said. It got $75,000 a year over three years, totaling $225,000 for general operating expenses.
Johnson lauds that: “It’s frustrating to work with super restrictive grants.”
“I’m really grateful for the Wagner Foundation. They are, I think, pioneering a fantastic model for grant makers in the city. And they’re investing in great projects in Cambridge and in the Greater Boston area, and doing it in a way that feels very equitable and also responsive to organizations’ needs. I think that they’re leading the way and setting a fabulous example for grant makers around the city.”
The first order of business upon getting the funding, Johnson said, “was trying to figure out how to get full-time staff, because this just wasn’t going to work with part-time and volunteer support anymore.”
There are eight other editors working on little to no stipends, of their choosing, in a “volunteer-run, community-supported ethos” that still drives the publication, she said.
Next steps
Despite the new executive director title, Johnson’s responsibilities are much the same. “After we put out the announcement, so many people were saying ‘Congrats on the new job, Jameson!’ And I’m like, well, it’s the same job, it’s just now I’m getting paid, which is great, and there’s kind of a path toward sustainability.”
The review has also worked with Wagner on those plans, including audience engagement and strategic partnerships.
“When major art events happen in the city, for example, like the Boston Public Art Triennial or the semi-quincentennial, what can Boston Art Review do to partner?” Johnson said. For the Triennial, the magazine is in talks to help create commissioned works aligned with the public art installations. “There’s a financial model there,” Johnson said, “and it’s kind of like Boston Art Review is consulting.”
Within the next two years, Johnson hopes to go through a certification that represents a commitment to paying fair wages; existing staff are already paid on those principles with tools from the nonprofit Working Artists and the Greater Economy. The review brought on its second full-time team member this year in Shira Laucharoen, an audience engagement editor and staff writer who will likely manage a series of longer-term projects. One could be a Boston-area art map, with the support of a funder. (Disclosure: Laucharoen wrote on a freelance basis for Cambridge Day.)
“We’ve put together a list of over 150 art spaces that could be on this map to show people what is happening in Boston,” Johnson said. “Greater Boston has a serious PR issue. So often, people immediately jump to this idea that there’s nothing happening here. And there is! You just don’t know where.”
Johnson also hopes to hire a full-time operations person to take over the financial and logistical work she does in addition to functioning as editor-in-chief. “I joke that my No. 1 job title is mailman. I think I’m at the Post Office on Mass Ave in Cambridge like every day,” she said. “I click send on every newsletter; I click post on every Instagram post.”
Regional, national and global path
Johnson hopes to also gain stature by covering art happenings internationally. She covered the Venice Biennale in April for The Boston Globe, like she did in 2022 for her own publication as “one of the ways that BAR has been able to show that it exists within a global dialogue, and not just a regional one,” Johnson said. “Where can we tap into the dialogue of the international artwork world so that we can be on par with those publications.”
“Regional print publications are disappearing every day – I can count the regional print publications on two hands – so I think there’s an opportunity for Boston Art Review to not just serve readers here, but to be something that a national audience looks to,” she said.
According to BAR’s strategic plan, written with Newton’s Oakley Collective after a small community listening process, most readers are in Boston, New York City, Cambridge, Somerville and Providence, Rhode Island (in that order). In the next few years, the hope is to expand audience to Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta, Detroit and more – cities that “aren’t necessarily tied to art markets” but are “vibrant hubs” nonetheless.
For now, everything with the magazine “has been a labor of love from someone,” including a new website designed by friends running a small Web development company. “I went to high school with them and then to college with them,” Johnson said. “They just did this major project for us, also with a lot of donated hours.”
“The story is that this scrappy mentality has been the undercurrent of our work, and that’s not changing anytime soon. While people think we might have a big fancy office on Boylston Street or a large endowment, I think the real secret is that there are a lot of really dedicated people that just want to make this work happen,” she said.
A stronger
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