The 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition features Marlon Forrester (b. 1976, Georgetown, Guyana), Eben Haines (b. 1990, Boston), and Dell Marie Hamilton (b. 1971, New York). This group of artists works in a diversity of media, including collage, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and installation, with unique artistic practices that share the impulse to create connections with other artists through their work. Developed against the backdrop of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the individual projects reflect each artist’s approach to community and exchange.  

First established in 1999, the James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the museum’s efforts to nurture and recognize artists working in and around Boston, showcase exceptional artwork, and support the city’s thriving arts scene.  

 An artist and educator born in Guyana, South America, and raised in Boston, Marlon Forrester (b. 1976, Georgetown, Guyana) makes artworks that take the representations and uses of the Black male body as a central concern. Forrester often employs themes and motifs drawn from basketball culture in paintings, drawings, collages, and multimedia works that explore ideas of transformation and ritual and questions around the mediation of the Black male figure in America. Following an influential return visit to Guyana, Forrester’s work increasingly examines the instability of identity and complex ideas of homeland for individuals of the Caribbean diaspora. Forrester holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and a MFA from Yale University. He is a resident artist at the African-American Master Artist Residence Program (AAMARP) at Northeastern University. His work has been exhibited at such venues as University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, Boston; the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Harvard University; 808 Gallery, Boston University; Ajira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; Montserrat College of Art Gallery, Beverly, MA; and the Museum of the National Center for Afro American Artists, Roxbury.