20 QUESTIONS
FOR 20 YEARS
CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF DS4SI
SEP 27 - OCT 19
“Dance Court 2022”, Mary Hannon Park. Photographed by Aram Boghosian”
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
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.
HUB CURATORS
Judith Leemann
Thought Ecology Lead
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 DS4SI’s first artist-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.
20Q Curators
Anthony Romero
Sense and Nonsense, Practical Poetics
October 3 - October 5, 2025
More about Anthony Romero
Anthony Romero is an artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting artists and communities of color. His collaborative practice engages intercultural exchange and historical narratives in order to generate reparative counter-images and social transformation. Recent projects and performances have been featured at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), the Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston) and the Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Biennial (Calgary, Canada). Publications include The Social Practice That Is Race, co-authored with Dan S. Wang, and the exhibition catalogue Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements, of which he was the editor. He is a cofounder of the Latinx Artist Visibility Award, a national scholarship for Latinx artists produced in collaboration with artist J. Soto and OxBow School of Art. Romero is a Professor of the Practice at the School of The Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Anthony worked with the Mayor's Office for Immigrant Advancement, which seeks to strengthen the ability of immigrants and Boston’s diverse cultural and linguistic communities to fully participate in the economic, civic, social, and cultural life of our great City, and promote the recognition and public understanding of immigrant contributions to Boston.
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, Lembrança 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.
InPublic 2.0, Downtown Crossing (2021)
Photograph by George Comeau