FELLOW SPOTLIGHT: YOLANDA YANG

Audience: For Fellows
Written By Kelsey Rode

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The Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship is a stipended, year-long advocacy leadership development cohort for artivists, creative workers, and emerging cultural leaders to gain the advocacy capacity necessary to achieve an equitable, inclusive, and vibrant creative sector for all in Massachusetts.

Each fellow identifies a cultural policy or creative community issue that they are passionate about changing through grassroots organizing and political advocacy, and then spends their fellowship year working with MASSCreative staff and trainers to incubate strategies to shift these issues.

MASSCreative is proud to feature 2024-2025 Advocacy & Organizing Fellow, Yolanda Yang. Yolanda is using her fellowship experience to address the inequitable treatment of frontline staff in Massachusetts’ creative sector by providing an independent community art platform, public programming, collaborative zines, and peer-led workshops on labor equity and creative resilience.

The Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship is possible thanks to support from the Barr Foundation.

 

REFLECTION FROM YOLANDA:

 

Holding Space, Building Power: Behind VA Shadows and Collective Advocacy
By Yolanda Yang, 2024–2025 MASSCreative Advocacy & Organizing Fellow

Behind VA Shadows began in 2021 out of necessity—a personal act of survival, remembrance, and solidarity. As an immigrant-in-process working as a Visitor Assistant (VA) at the ICA/Boston during the pandemic, I found belonging and care not in the institution itself, but in the friendships and informal networks among fellow VAs. Many of us were artists, educators, immigrants, and people of color. We showed up, masked and standing for hours, offering labor, knowledge, and empathy to the public—while navigating racism, isolation, and institutional invisibility ourselves.

Since 2022, Behind VA Shadows has grown from that intimate foundation into a community-led art and advocacy platform. We’ve organized exhibitions, various programs in public spaces, and opened pop-up spaces across Greater Boston that highlight the unseen labor and creativity of museum front-of-house workers. None of this was commissioned. It was built, piece by piece, by volunteers with intersecting lived experiences—as immigrants, non-binary folks, women, and artists of color.

After joining the 2024–2025 MASSCreative Advocacy & Organizing Fellowship, we’ve expanded our approach to advocacy. By learning about policy, legislative processes, and community organizing frameworks, we’ve been able to think beyond exhibition-making—toward systems-level change. The fellowship gave us the structure and tools to articulate the ways our creative work is organizing work. It also connected us with others in Massachusetts working to reshape the cultural sector from the ground up.

Moving forward, we envision Behind VA Shadows as a sustainable model that uplifts care-based organizing within and beyond museum walls. This includes continued public programming, collaborative zines, and peer-led workshops on labor equity and creative resilience. We are currently run entirely by volunteers, and we are seeking future partners and funders who believe in this vision—not as charity, but as a necessary reimagining of how institutions function.

Written by Yolanda Yang Founder & Coordinator of Behind VA Shadows

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