Making a Scene

In her apartment in Dorchester, Masako Kamiya keeps her brushes stored neatly in a jar, at the ready. She works in gouache, an opaque, water-based paint, forming abstract images from hundreds or thousands of pointillist dots that protrude from the work’s surface like Braille characters. Working in these dabs of color is a painstakingly slow process. It often takes Kamiya more than four months to complete one 18-inch by 20-inch work.

Critics and collectors have taken notice of her unique style and sensual, poetic paintings. Only a few years out of art school – she finished an MFA at Massachusetts College of Art in 1999 – Kamiya has already garnered positive reviews from some of the most prestigious publications in the country, including Art in America. Her works sell for $1,250 to $5,500 at Gallery NAGA, one of Boston’s top-tier dealers. Even with her success, Kamiya says she has no intention of leaving Boston and trying her luck on the big art stages of New York, London, or Berlin.

“It’s not necessary for me to move to New York to show in New York,” says Kamiya. “That will only take time and energy away from my work.”

So she stays, along with hundreds of other artists who graduate each year from Boston’s premier art schools – Massachusetts College of Art, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston University School for the Arts, and the Art Institute of Boston – who no longer feel the need to whisk their portfolios to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the day after graduation. Jim Smith, director for alumni relations at Massachusetts College of Art, says that 80 percent of each year’s 350 or so graduates stay in the state, most of them in the Boston area.

Local gallery owners are benefiting from the change. Nina Nielsen, owner of the Nielsen Gallery on Newbury Street, insists that she’s always sold the best art she could find, no matter where it was created. Yet each year, she says, the coterie of artists she represents includes more and younger locals like painter Tanya Steinberg, who graduated with an MFA from Boston University in 2003.

“Nowadays, with websites and people clicking in from all over the world to see the work,” Nielsen says, artists can live wherever they want to. They can show where they want to, too. “The more exposure the better,” she says, “but artists can always get a New York gallery without living in New York.”

Arthur Dion, owner of Gallery NAGA, also on Newbury Street, Boston’s traditional gallery hub, says that the national and international press is showing more interest in Boston artists. This has raised a corresponding level of interest among local collectors. “Our parents’ generation would never collect from an artist living in Boston,” says Dion, adding that another gallery owner told him it was economic suicide to sell local work when he opened his gallery in the early ’80s. “Thankfully, the opposite is true now. Boston collectors make most of their acquisitions through Boston artists.”

Museums, too, are championing area artists, and local curators are working to gain outside recognition for the work. Director of curatorial affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo and curator Nicholas Capasso of the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln organize a regionally prestigious show, the DeCordova Annual Exhibition, of the area’s best work. Katherine French, curator at the Danforth Museum in Framingham – that museum’s mission has a national scope – has put together a show of Kamiya’s work that will travel the country starting in 2007. (She discovered Kamiya’s paintings when the two were working at the Montserrat College of Art in Beverly.) “The sophistication of work in Boston is very high right now,” says French. “I could display just from people in the area and show the very best work that’s being shown in the country.” In another boon for Boston, the new Institute of Contemporary Art, set to open this year on the waterfront, will show nationally and internationally known artists.

One persistent problem faces local artists: finding decent, affordable places to live and do their work. Jason Schupbach is director of ArtistLink, a grant-funded organization that helps artists of all kinds find space to rehearse, create, and live affordably and that also works with municipalities that want to attract and keep arts communities. In the last couple of years, says the former city planner, developers and artists in Boston have built about 100 artist-only affordable condominiums, and hundreds of other types of artist-only live/work spaces, including the new Midway Studios in Fort Point and Artblock in the South End.

Some artists, like Kamiya, opt to head for more-affordable parts of the city. We all know what tends to happen next: Coffee shops, restaurants, and galleries soon follow, leading to gentrification that, ironically, prices out the artists who changed the area to begin with.

For now, Kamiya lives comfortably in a former barn. She has enough space and light to do her work, a job teaching drawing at Montserrat, and a following of gallery owners and curators clamoring for her paintings. All she needs now is time to create her artwork, dot by dot by dot.

Stephen Jermanok is a freelance writer based in Newton.