“ShowUp’s rich tapestry of creative expression engages the audience with art in a way that transcends traditional boundaries, inviting them to see the world through the eyes of others…”
— Colleen Hall, South End Resident and Author of Jamoji, Essays Of Life And Play In Jamaica
About ShowUp
ShowUp is a Boston-based contemporary art gallery and education space focused on featuring underrepresented visions and voices. Focused on sustainability practices, ethics, and the power of representation, ShowUp works to nurture the careers of high-potential, talented curators and artists through thoughtful support, an innovative environment, and unique opportunities.
Our Mission
Our mission is to
CONNECT artists with local and global communities
AMPLIFY underrepresented voices and visions
PROVIDE tools for self-sufficiency
EMPOWER creators to experiment and engage in meaningful exchanges
Our Vision
Our vision is to foster art leadership in Boston by becoming a reference point and resilient creative community through thoughtful creative placemaking and pivotal programming that supports and develops artists' careers.
Our Flagship Programs
Year-round Exhibition Programming
Studio Visit Sundays
ShowUp Sustainability Research
Who We Serve
ShowUp is a nonprofit devoted to serving artists, the art community, and as a connector between the location-based communities radiating out from the gallery’s space in Boston’s South End. We offer concentric rings of impact: we are dedicated to serving our local artist community in Boston and its environs, but imagine our reach to be as far as New England, the region, and wherever the internet may take our message.
We seek to exhibit artists whose work might not easily be found in commercial galleries. Such an omission may be for a variety of reasons: either because the work is not considered commercially viable (but we believe it has artistic merit and deserves to be seen), the artist might come from a traditionally underrepresented community, or the artist may have rarely or never exhibited before.
How We Work
Through our “Three Es”": Exhibitions, Education, and Engagement, we work to serve the amazingly talented artists around us. These three pillars are put into practice through our curated rotating Exhibitions, our regular Educational workshops such as the BrushUp series, and opportunities for Engagement: gatherings within the artist community and for a general audience. ShowUp seeks to be a place of community to gather, connect with other artists, art lovers and supporters, and meet new people. It should also be a venue to learn and grow, to present and exchange ideas, and to experiment artistically.
How Can I Get Involved
ShowUp welcomes everyone into its community. Here are some ways to get involved:
Offer to volunteer - Email us if you’re interested.)
Spread the word Tell people about us and all the cool things we do!
Make a connection for us. Know someone who might like what we do or the perfect grant? We’d love to hear from you.
Donate to our cause. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We pay our exhibiting artists and curators. If you believe in our cause, please consider a donation: services, in-kind donation, or financial - all gratefully. Give today.
Thank you. Reach out today to start a conversation
Our mission is to
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CONNECT
artists to local communities and beyond
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AMPLIFY
artists and their voices
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PROVIDE
artists tools for self-sufficiency
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EMPOWER
artists and curators to experiment, learn, and have meaningful exchanges
Meet our Board & Staff
Christine O’Donnell (she/her)
Founder, Board Chair & Executive Director | LinkedIn
Christine O’Donnell is the founder and Executive Director of ShowUp, a nonprofit contemporary art space in Boston, MA. She is also a curator, art writer, consultant and lifelong educator. To all she does, O’Donnell brings her knowledge of the commercial art world (having been the founder and director of Boston’s Beacon Gallery), as well as her decade spent as an educator, her time working in advertising/marketing, and her 12 years living in France, Hong Kong and Singapore.
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A graduate of College of the Holy Cross, with a B.A in French, O’Donnell speaks fluent French and conversational Spanish. Additionally, she holds an M.A. in Teaching from Tufts University, and an M.A. in Art History from the U.K.’s Open University. Her Master’s thesis focused on artists’ grassroots organizations and American museum critique in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She also studied at Harvard Business School in 2024-2025 as part of the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative’s 2024 Upswell Forum Cohort, a program which supports social impact leaders working in communities of color.
O’Donnell has juried exhibitions for Tufts University’s New Ventures Creative Arts Entrepreneurship prize, the New England Sculpture Association, The Attleboro Museum of Art, The Boston Society of Architects, Boston City Hall’s Boston City Employees National Arts Program, the Fay Chandler Emerging Artists Exhibition, the Hopkinton Center for the Arts, and Artscope Magazine’s Artist Feature.
O’Donnell has also been an invited speaker at the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA), the School of Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA), the Newton Art Association (NAA), the New Art Center and Harvard Education Portal & Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE).
O’Donnell’s skills as an art management consultant are sought out from as near as the New England Sculptors Association and Temple Gallery NYC, and as far away as ArtsActivism Papua New Guinea and galleries in Melbourne, Australia.
As part of O’Donnell’s international scope, she is a partner at Very Private Gallery in Madrid, Spain. O’Donnell is a member of multiple boards including Arlington International Film Festival Executive Committee and a board member of Boston Art Review magazine. She is also a member of the Advisory Council at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), a member of the Association of Women’s Art Dealers (AWAD), and a member of the Boston Art Dealers Association (BADA). Additionally, she trained as an appraiser with the International Society of Appraisers. She was also a member of the Newton Cultural Council from 2018-2020 where she was influential in refining and standardizing the granting process, as well as co-led the organization’s branding, website and social media launch.
O’Donnell balances her career with an active family life in the Boston area, with her husband and two school-aged children. You can learn more about O’Donnell and ShowUp on Instagram at @intlchristine and @showup.inc respectively.
Link to: Christine O’Donnell’s Resume
Christine has been honored to be featured on the following podcasts:
Catherine Orer's The Artist Entrepreneur, September 21, 2022, Building Strong Relationships with Galleries
Fine Art Insights with Michael Rose, Sept 29, 2021 A conversation with Beacon Gallery owner Christine O’Donnell (feature below)
Ibrahim Ali-Salaam
Clerk
LinkedIn
A Boston native and graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Ibrahim Ali-Salaam has been a professional artist for over 20 years. He works mainly in oil painting and charcoal; mediums that allow him to explore themes that range from studies of the human figure to the influences of hip-hop on American culture. Ali-Salaam’s work often seeks to portray a lived…
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reality in a culture that tirelessly seeks to classify and categorize identity.
Ibrahim Ali-Salaam’s oeuvre has been exhibited in galleries across the country and around the Boston area, where he continues to live and work today. In addition to being an artist, Ali-Salaam is the proud owner of an art handling company, Nova Art Handling. To keep up with Ali-Salaam’s work, you can find him at his artist website, his art handling website, or on Instagram.
Jameel Radcliffe
Treasurer
Website
Jameel Radcliffe is a Boston-based painter whose work intricately weaves together personal introspection and the vibrant energy of his community. A graduate of Montserrat College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing, Radcliffe has developed a distinctive voice in contemporary art, marked by a compelling interplay between figurative and…
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abstract forms. Radcliffe's artistic journey has been showcased in a diverse range of exhibitions. Notable recent solo shows include "Kids From the Stars" at ShowUp in Boston (2024) and "Obsessed With" at The Flowering Rock (2020). His group exhibitions include "Bird Stories" at Concord Art (2024), "Black Futures: How to See in Total Darkness" at Hallspace Gallery (2023), and "XTENSION" at Beacon St Gallery (2022). He has also exhibited in significant two-person shows, such as "Fragmented Experiences" at Laisun Keane (2022) and "Whistling in the Dark" at Kingston Gallery (2021).
Radcliffe's contributions to the art community have been recognized through various honors, including the George Gabin Prize and the Gilbert Award in 2017, the Excellence in Painting Award at Montserrat College of Art, the Saint Botolph Club Emerging Artist Award (2024) and he has been honored as one of the 2024 WBUR Makers. His work has been featured in prominent publications such as the Boston Globe and Art New England, and he has participated in the Boston Center for the Arts Residency Program from 2022 to 2024.
His art is represented in several esteemed permanent collections, including those of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Google LLC, and MIT. Radcliffe continues to explore the boundaries of artistic expression, drawing inspiration from his Boston roots and the dynamic interplay of identity and community.
Nayana LaFond
Board Member
Website
Nayana LaFond has been a curator and community arts organizer for over 20 years including 8 years as the founding Chief Curator for The Whitney Center for the Arts. She sits on several arts organization boards, including as executive board member of Artist Organized Art, The selection committee for The Local Art Gallery, Executive Board Member for Stavros and others.
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LaFond’s work can be found in private collections and institutions worldwide. Her work often deals with issues related to trauma and violence including her experiences as a domestic violence and leukemia survivor. She is most well known for her project “Portraits in RED: The Missing & Murdered Indigenous Peoples painting project” which gained national acclaim and toured the US from 2020-2026. In addition to being a painter Nayana is also a sculptor. Her sculpture Zoongide’e, a metal, plexiglass, and concrete structure was on display in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood as part of the Be The Change public art initiative for the summer and fall of 2022. Her work was on the cover of the January/February 2024 edition of Art New England Magazine and featured in Artscope Magazine and In These Times Magazine as well as many other publications. LaFond was the recipient of the 2023 Katherine F Erskine Award for her work in community building and healing through the arts. Her artwork has been included in feature films, used in papers about femicide written and presented to both the Canadian and Mexican governments, used as educational materials for CPS workers and is taught in the curriculum of several universities. In 2023 MassLive recognized LaFond as a leader in the Massachusetts Indigenous community.
Nayana holds an associates degree in Visual Arts from Greenfield Community College and is currently a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College majoring in Visual Arts, Minoring in Art History and pursuing a NEXUS is Museums, Archives and Public History.
Angela Tate
Board Member
Angela T. Tate is a curator and cultural strategist whose work shapes how Black diasporic histories are seen, felt, and experienced. Working across art, archives, and material culture, she brings a distinct eye to the relationships between aesthetics, memory, and power—moving fluidly between historical scholarship and contemporary cultural production.
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Her practice is grounded in public history, African diaspora studies, and women’s history, with an expanded interest in sound and performance as sites of presence and storytelling. She is known for creating work that is both intellectually rigorous and sensorially attuned, foregrounding the ways history lives in objects, spaces, and the body.
Based in Boston, she is Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the Museum of African American History. As a board member, she contributes a sharp curatorial perspective to artist-centered programming and the cultivation of bold, resonant contemporary art spaces.
Lu Valena (they/them)
Assistant Director
LinkedIn | Website
Lu Valena is a person of many interests exploring themes of expansion, the space in between, and what it means to put more power into the hands of creative people. A multi-disciplinary artist, writer and educator, Valena holds a BA in Studio Art from Hampshire College (2007) and a Masters in Gastronomy/Food Studies from Boston University (2016).
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Valena serves as executive director of the call-and-response art publication Bait/Switch, and is the former owner/operator of the coffeehouse and gallery Voltage Coffee & Art. Their artwork has been featured at several venues across the US, including the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Shelter In Place Gallery, Level99, Webster Arts, and Worcester State University. They research the intersection of food and art, with a recent focus in hyperrealistic cake decorating and sugar sculpture as cultural phenomena.
Interested in getting involved? Send us an email.
Our Sponsors
ShowUp is sponsored by Mass Cultural Council and the Teuber Family Foundation. Our audiovisual sponsor is Everla$t Entertainment. We are so grateful for everyone’s support.
Please reach out if you wish to donate and support our nonprofit programming. Read ShowUp’s Land, Neighborhood, and Art Community Acknowledgement.
Audiovisual Sponsor:
