The email was unexpected, said Alison Croney Moses, an invitation to a Zoom chat with Trustees of Reservations’ art curators Sarah Montross and Tess Lukey. Moses, a Boston-based artist, was happy enough to hear from them, but didn’t know why.
“You don’t say no when a curator wants to talk to you,” she laughed. They exchanged small talk for a while, and then they got down to business. “At about the seven-minute mark, they said, ‘So, you’re getting the Rappaport Prize, and it comes with $50,000.’ I didn’t submit anything. I didn’t apply. And I just started crying.”
Croney Moses, 42, was officially named the 26th recipient of the prize Tuesday, given annually by the de Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum, a Trustees property, to an artist with strong New England ties (last year, the Maine-based artist Jeremy Frey was the winner; in 2023, it was Cambridge’s Tomashi Jackson).
Alison Croney Moses, who works mostly in wood, carefully manipulates a scale model of her Triennial project earlier this year. Lane Turner/Globe Staff
Moses was already having a banner year. Her piece called “This Moment for Joy,” an angular splay of undulating planks of red oak commissioned by the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, is perched prominently on an expanse of lawn at the Charlestown Navy Yard right now, in eyeshot of the USS Constitution Museum. In August, she’ll be one of the artists featured in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston’s Foster Prize exhibition, a biennial affair that celebrates artists from the city .
Outward appearances of success, though, can be misleading. Moses, who balances her art career with the active lives of her two young children, has struggled to find space and time to pursue her work. The prize, she said, is like a pressure valve being released. “Honestly, I really was in tears,” she said. “It’s hard to tell from the outside, because I know it looks like I’m doing very well, but financially, being an artist in Boston is difficult. It’s really, really difficult. This gives me space to breathe.”
The prize could hardly have come at a better time. Moses, whose work is largely sculpture, and mostly in wood, has only been able to devote herself full time to making art in the last two years; before that, she had a 10-year career working in nonproifts, leaving art to brief slivers of time in the evening and on weekends, when work and parenting weren’t in the way.
The prize places no restrictions on how the money can be used, and does not require artists to produce a piece or body of work. On a follow-up call with the Rappaport family, the local philanthropists who fund the prize, Moses made clear both her gratitude and how important a no-strings-attached gift can be for any artist.
“Any time I’ve had access to unrestricted funding, it’s given me the opportunity to get deeper into my practice, “she said. ”Literally, right before that Zoom call, I was looking at job postings, really thinking: Do I need a full-time job again? Something like this tells me: You are an artist. You should be doing this. And that’s huge.”
One thing the prize can’t currently provide, however, is an opportunity for the winner to showcase their work at the de Cordova, as it has in past. The museum has been closed since 2023 for an overhaul of its HVAC system (the last was 2020 winner Sonya Clark, who had a solo exhibition there in 2021). But Moses is already thinking about how her newfound freedom might transform her practice.
An exhibition of some of Alison Croney Moses's work at the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston. Mel Taing
Thematically, she’s devoted: “This Moment for Joy,” a minimalist cocoon that ripples and curls into a protective embrace, is a monument to the warmth of the Black women in her life who inspire and support her; using elegant wood forms, Moses means to honor Black motherhood and interrogate a society that has made it perilous and undervalued for generations.
The prize, she said, is opening her mind to expansive treatments on the theme. A project she’s been mulling involving sound and video — both firsts for her, and a real risk to attempt with bills to pay — now seems possible. “Right now, I work deadline to deadline,” she said. “I don’t ever feel like I’m really able to dream and experiment. Now, I can.”
Alison Croney Moses’s “This Moment for Joy,” a project of the Boston Public Art Triennial, remains at the Charlestown Navy Yard, 1 - 5th St., through Oct. 31.
The Foster Prize exhibition opens Aug. 28 at the Institute for Contemporary Art Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive.
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
