Announcing Ujima's Center for Art, Invention & Uncommon Practice

Boston, MA — The Boston Ujima Project, Inc. is proud to announce the Center for Art, Invention & Uncommon Practice (CAIUP). 

The Center for Art, Invention & Uncommon Practice is a commercial gallery and cultural initiative dedicated to pushing the edges of support in close partnership with artists, thinkers, and practitioners whose work expands the possibilities for collective and liberatory lives.

Anchored by rotating exhibitions, the Center will also host talks, workshops, publications, research, and other public programs. In addition, Ujima’s flagship cultural programs including the Arts & Cultural Organizing Fellowship, Ujima Press, residencies, and grants will be housed within the Center. As Ujima’s dedicated exhibition space, CAIUP will feature emerging and established artists across disciplines, with a particular commitment to Black artists, working-class artists, and artists whose practices have historically been under-appreciated within traditional art markets and communities. 

Cierra Michele Peters, Ujima’s Director of Communications, Culture & Enfranchisement, and Kamaria Weemz will head the Center as Co-Directors of Cultural Programs and Galleries. As longtime cultural workers, Peters and Weemz bring together a shared commitment to artist support, experimental practice and community-led cultural work. Together, they will guide the Center’s strategic vision, oversee its exhibitions and public programs, and steward new cultural initiatives.

Nia K. Evans, Ujima’s Executive Director is excited about the prospect of the Center emerging as a strategic complement to the Ujima Fund. An institutional site through which new administrative models could be developed, tested, and refined, while also offering increased visibility and resources to artists whose work aligns with Ujima’s values. An answer to one question: “How might artists be supported with the same intentionality, infrastructural care, and community accountability that guide Ujima’s support of businesses within its ecosystem?”

The Center will extend and consolidate Ujima’s longstanding commitment to labor rights within the creative sector, as well as to art, artists, and cultural organizing. Since its founding in 2017, Ujima has invested in a comprehensive cultural infrastructure that positions creative practitioners as essential to community power and equitable development. This work has included sustained support for artists, cultural organizers, and cultural organizing through grants, residencies, fellowships, public projects, publications and long-term partnerships that nurture both individual practice and collective capacity. As articulated in Ujima’s founding documents, this work contributes to “creating the air we are walking in, positively impacting what is considered normal and possible. [A] cultural shift.” 

The Center for Art, Invention & Uncommon Practice builds upon and formalizes this foundation, providing a dedicated institutional platform through which Ujima can deepen its role in the art world of Boston and beyond. 

Throughout 2026, Ujima will be conducting a search for the Center’s permanent site.

About Ujima

The Boston Ujima Project is a Black-led democratic organization building cooperative economic infrastructure in Boston, with a mission to return wealth to working-class communities of color. Ujima is bringing together neighbors, workers, business owners, investors, grassroots organizers, and culture-makers, to create a community-controlled economy in our city.