THE TRIENNIAL 2025

Gabriel Sosa

Ñ Press, 2025

Risograph printer, paper, wheatpaste, silkscreens, and cotton T-shirts

Gabriel Sosa, a Cuban-American artist, linguist, educator, and curator, navigates the fluid boundaries of language, memory, and interpretation, drawing from legal proceedings, personal archives, and contemporary visual culture. His work lingers in the space between precision and distortion, where meaning shifts and narratives unravel. 

Ñ Press is a community print studio that transforms zines, posters, pamphlets, and artist books into vessels of connection, activism, and education. Embracing the ephemeral nature of print, Ñ Press dissolves the barriers of public art, decentralizing it and folding it into the fabric of everyday life. Here, print is not just a medium but a dynamic, ever-moving force. 

At the heart of the project is a collaboration with Maverick Landing Community Services—supporting families, community health, and youth leadership—where the press becomes both a gathering place and an engine for collective expression. Across the city, bold, text-driven works ripple outward—billboards, wheatpasted posters, and handouts carrying their messages into the streets. Sosa subverts the sleek aesthetics of commercial printing to be bright, solid, and deliberate, repurposing them as sites of inquiry and resistance. In his hands, the printed word is not static ink on paper but a call to engage, question, and act.

Maverick Landing Community Services
31 Liverpool St.
Boston, MA 02128

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Pick-up Box Locations
+ICA Watershed
+SMFA (coming this week)
+East Boston Public Library (coming soon)
+Cafe Iterum (coming soon)
+Maverick Landing Community Services (coming soon)

THE TRIENNIAL 2025

Gabriel Sosa

I want more celebrations, 2025

I want more celebrations was created with Maverick Landing youth in April 2025, focusing on needs and desires in their community. For this text, the group collectively read artist Zoe Leonard’s poem I want a president, 1992—enlarged and reprinted as the inaugural 230 Fenway Billboard project in 2018—in which a typed letter reads: “I want a dyke for president” and continues on to describe a political candidate who has suffered illness, poverty, and loss. Leonard famously concludes with “I want to know why this isn’t possible… that a president is… always a boss and a never a worker…..”

In the workshop, co-facilitated by Paola Ruiz (BA'25), participants created their own text, drafting lists and completing one another’s sentences to shift the focus away from a specific individual and into the impacts of government on the community. Local youth Farah Lachmi, Sumeya Mohamed, José Landaverde, Julián Artica, Ilaf Bachir, Muhamed Bachir, Rafi Bachir, Brian Sologaistoa, and Adam Gaid relay the need for joy, safety, affordable food, and friendship along with open blanks, inviting viewers to fill in your own collective hopes and desires.

SMFA at Tufts
230 The Fenway
Boston, MA 02115

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Gabriel Sosa

b. 1985, based in Boston

Gabriel Sosa, a Cuban-American artist based in Boston, is renowned for his innovative use of language. Through a multidisciplinary practice that includes public art, drawing, video, and social engagement, he explores how the use of language shapes and interrupts our understanding of the world around us. Working in both English and Spanish, Sosa at times draws upon his background as an interpreter in the court system to carefully integrate fragments from legal documents and courtroom testimonies to highlight issues of power, justice, and human rights. As an educator, Sosa ensures that his work consistently creates spaces for the public to engage, reflect, and learn from one another.

Gabriel is an alum of the Triennial 2020 Public Art Accelerator program.