By Sarah Attie.
The Boston LGBTQ+ Museum of Art, History & Culture had a big idea: bring the museum to the people.
Jean Dolin, a Haitian immigrant raised in Dorchester, got the idea for the museum in 2020 after years working in politics and journalism. The museum doesn’t have a physical space and instead brings exhibits to places around the city, from Boston Common to the Seaport District. But while it lacks a building, Dolin has grand plans for his museum: He wants to take exhibits all across Massachusetts and build a statewide presence within four years.
“I emerged out of COVID wanting to do the thing that moves me, the thing that I feel like would inspire, would inform, but would also empower,” Dolin said.
He began with a documentary on the LGBTQ+ community called “Rainbow Tales” but decided it wasn’t reaching enough people.
“And then something kind of sparked,” Dolin said.
Inspired by a photography exhibition he’d seen in the streets of Boston, he created “Portraits of Pride,” which is now in its fourth round. The exhibit features 10-foot-tall portrait banners of people who have stood out in their communities. Printed on durable fabric and suspended from custom-built frames, the portraits spotlight leaders and figures in the LGBTQ+ community.
Above, Susu Wong’s portrait on display at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park. Photo by Wen Qi
“So to me, this was a way of saying thank you to all of those who fought for those decades, because I’m a beneficiary of all their work,” Dolin said.
He held his first “Portraits of Pride” on Boston Common in 2022, and then started raising money so they could keep creating similar projects as part of a formal museum. And it was finally declared as an established institution in October 2023.
Since that initial exhibit, the museum has held three more: on City Hall Plaza in 2023, in Sea Green in the Seaport in 2024, and the current one in the Connector/Winthrop Center Park.
The new exhibit contains 20 portraits, photographed by John Huet, including Gretchen Van Ness, executive director of LGBTQ Senior Housing, Paul Glass and Charles Evans, founders of LGBTQ+ Elders of Color, and Jerome Smith, a Dorchester resident who is the senior manager of external affairs at Amazon and Boston’s former chief of civic engagement.
Arline Isaacson, the board chair of the museum, was featured in the first Pride Legacy Exhibition. “It’s an important recognition of the work that our community has done over the years and especially young folks in our community,” she said.
Their locations are crucial, Isaacson said. The museum chooses public spaces where all sorts of people walk by. The Winthrop Center faces the Connector building, which holds 4,000 people, including major employers like McKinsey & Co. and Deloitte.
“It’s a great way to honor people,” said Aadya Gadkari, a solutions engineering analyst at Deloitte.
On Wednesday the museum opened a new exhibit, a collaboration between the two artistically renowned cousins, Paul Firmin, a queer Haitian artist widely known as KINI, and Rejeila Firmin, the exhibition’s curator, as the artist in residence. The exhibition is at the Pryde Gallery, at 59 Harvard Ave. in Hyde Park. Inside the LGBTQ+ senior housing building, with which they have been partnering since last year.
“I think I’m also excited that this is a Haitian queer artist that is doing it,” Dolin said. “There is a very long history of homophobia in Haiti. So that’s easy for these two identities to be held in one body. ”
KINI is known for his lively, colorful paintings, but he decided to work in black and white for this exhibit to symbolize good and evil, and grays to represent the blurry lines in life. His goal was to blur the lines between the past, present and future.
“Create a place where a kind of everything can exist,” KINI said, “and there’s like no objectivity really, and it’s just, that’s why I call it the void, because I feel like anything can happen in a void.”
The exhibition will be up until mid-September, and then will be followed by another, Dolin said.
In addition to “Portraits of Pride,” the museum commemorated 20 years of marriage equality in May 2024 at the State House and partnered with LGBTQ+ Senior Housing to create the Pryde Gallery. It also hosted the weeklong Queer Arts Festival last October and organized a National Coming Out Day celebration.
The museum launched an artist-in-residence program with Rejeila Firmin and plans to introduce a fellowship next year. The first initiative, “Queer Youth Creative Writing & Poetry,” will recruit high school seniors and college freshmen in Greater Boston to develop their writing.
The museum’s 2026 project is still in the works, but it plans to have a commemoration of the United States’ 250th birthday in the spring, and then travel with it through the whole state in 2027 and 2028.
“So at that point, we’re going to be evolving the name of the institution from Boston LGBTQ to Massachusetts LGBTQ,” Dolin said, “because ultimately, we’re telling the history of the state, and we want to go and evolve into a statewide institution.”
This story is part of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
