To celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum will open its doors on Monday, Jan. 16 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. for a free day of community-building activities, art-making projects, and performances around social justice and healing.
Throughout the day, the Museum will come alive with movement and performances. Leslie Salmon Jones and Jeff Jones of Afro Flow Yoga will lead programs around music, movement, and reflection, inspired by Dr. King. Marsha Parrilla, of Danza Organica, will present Running in Stillness, a dance theater suite based on the impact of mass incarceration on women and their families. Local artist and community activist Ifé Franklin will offer art-making activities in the Museum’s Bertucci Education Studio.
Parrilla is one of several local artistic influencers who are taking part in a new Museum initiative called the Neighborhood Salon, a quarterly gathering of Boston’s select cultural leaders, music and arts leaders and tastemakers whose work and/or agency impacts and inspires the creative, educational, social and political landscape of Roxbury, Mission Hill, Fenway and Greater Boston.
Modeled after Isabella Stewart Gardner’s legacy as a curator and hostess of artist salons around the turn of the century, the primary goal of the Neighborhood Salon is to exchange creative ideas and dialogue with Boston’s most innovative and thoughtful luminaries as a means of informing Community Engagement programming at the Gardner.
Free admission will be available at the Museum entrance on Monday, January 18 starting at 11 a.m., on a first-come, first-served basis. To ensure everyone’s experience at the Museum is pleasant, entry is timed every 30 minutes beginning at 11 a.m., with the last entry at 4 p.m. Admission includes access to the entire Museum, including special exhibitions.