(in)Visibility: Belonging in the Margins

Inaugurated in Summer 2021, the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) Studio Residency program supports more than 50 artists yearly working in diverse mediums. The residency provides selected artists with affordable studio space in the South End, along with professional development opportunities. Presented here are the works of sixteen current and former BCA Studio Residents that Mariana Rey, the Galleries and Exhibitions Manager, met as she served as BCA’s Spring Visiting Curator in 2025. Connecting with the artists through studio visits, allowed her to develop relationships with them by providing feedback and curatorial guidance to support their artistic development. In doing so, she identified common themes that the artists were exploring. 

(in)Visibility: Belonging in the Margins presents artworks that navigate identity, community, and representation from marginal spaces. The artists in this exhibition work from positions often rendered invisible by dominant narratives — whether as immigrants, members of diasporic communities, or individuals whose identities resist easy categorization. Their practices ask: what does belonging mean when the structures that define it were not built equitably? How do we create space for ourselves when we've been pushed to the edges?

Across the exhibition, artists reclaim narratives that have been flattened, erased, or distorted. Some confront the colonial gaze directly, remaking historical images to center their own perspectives and agency. Others trace lineages of care and survival, using materials that carry memory — salt, hair, servilletas — to ground abstract histories in the body. These works resist the idea that marginality means absence. Instead, they insist on presence, on the right to take up space, to be seen on one's own terms, and to reshape the conditions of visibility itself, understanding belonging not as assimilation, but as the ongoing work of making home in a world that was not designed for everyone's flourishing.