Abigail Satinsky is the Program Officer for Wagner Foundation’s Art & Culture grantmaking portfolio.
In addition to managing the foundation’s ongoing art and culture partnerships and initiatives, she curates programming and exhibitions for the Wagner Gallery, which is located within the foundation’s Cambridge, Massachusetts office. Through her work at Wagner, Abigail supports artists, arts organizations, and museums as they bring their visions to life.
Abigail is inspired by artists who use their work to imagine and enact social change. Early in her career, she was part of several small arts organizations, artist-run spaces, and collective projects in Chicago — including InCUBATE, Threewalls, and ACRE residency — and co-founded the international micro-granting network Sunday Soup, which had over sixty chapters operating internationally. As part of a multigenerational community of artists and activists, Abigail learned how to organize and support artists at all levels. She co-founded Hand in Glove, a national conference on artist-run culture and cultural organizing, which evolved into Common Field, an advocacy network that connected and supported independent arts organizations, nationwide.
During her time as curator and head of public engagement at Tufts University Art Galleries, Abigail organized solo and group exhibitions and public art presentations with Sofía Córdova, Museum of Capitalism, Faheem Majeed, Josh MacPhee, Kimi Hanauer, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Erin Genia, and Elizabeth James-Perry, amongst others, and served as the founding program director for Collective Futures Fund, which supports artist-run projects in Greater Boston. Her curatorial work and writing focus on artist-run culture and socially engaged art. She has edited a number of publications on the subject, including Support Networks on Chicago’s socially engaged art history, PHONEBOOK a national guide of artist-run spaces and projects, and most recently Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities (co-edited with Erina Duganne, Inventory Press), which coincided with their curated nationally traveling exhibition.
Growing up in Boston as a young artist, Abigail knows firsthand the challenges associated with finding opportunities to stay and build a career in the city. She appreciates Wagner’s dedication to the national landscape of evolving arts organizations, and the foundation’s strong emphasis on sustaining the artist community in Greater Boston. She is proud to support the artists and arts organizations that make this city home.
