Editor’s note: This story is an excerpt from WBUR’s weekly arts and culture newsletter, The ARTery. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, sign up here.

At the beginning of each year, before the final winter frost, WBUR’s arts team starts thinking about The Makers, our annual project celebrating the local artists of color shaping Greater Boston’s culture. The reporters scour their notebooks for the artists that have intrigued them, and we ask past cohorts of Makers and other arts insiders about whose work is inspiring them right now.

What is clear — once again — with this yearly undertaking is that our region is rich with artistic talent. We’re excited to present the work of seven Makers whose work explores borders and transcends boundaries.

Borders are the place where one thing meets another. Where one culture gives way to the next, where traditions collide, and where something new is created. Artists live at that edge. And in our region, shaped by generations of people arriving, mixing and making lives together, the artists’ work we’re presenting feels enlivened by the boundaries they are traversing.

This year’s artists work across photography and visual art, performance, music and the written word. And each of them asks some version of the same questions. What does it mean to cross over? To belong to more than one place at once? And what can you build from the things you carry with you?

Meet the 2026 Makers:

• Austin Bryant: The photographer and writer pairs archival images with his own photographs of vast landscapes to recover forgotten histories, including a 1968 Franklin Park rally against discrimination that his father joined at age 14. His series “Where They Still Remain” honors the Black and Wampanoag communities of Martha’s Vineyard, including a Wampanoag woman who sheltered a man fleeing slavery in 1854.
• Christian Hernán De Restrepo: In his ongoing project “A Él Mismo,” the Colombian American designer builds an imagined world in which pre-Columbian cultures, especially the Muisca and Tairona, flourished without Spanish colonization. His garments and jewelry, often textured with rows of gleaming staples, double as an ode to his family, and his grandparents have modeled the pieces in striking portraits.
• Ifé Franklin: The Roxbury artist builds life-size ancestor cabins and leads ring shouts, a sacred ritual born among enslaved people in the South, to connect the living with those who came before. Her latest, “Cabin in the Sky,” turned the Overlook Shelter Ruins in Franklin Park into a procession through a realm of the ancestors, and an exhibition of her work opens at the Fuller Craft Museum next year.
• Maria Pinto: The naturalist and writer leads mushroom walks around Greater Boston, many of them for communities of color long kept out of outdoor spaces. She shows people that urban parks are abundant with foragable food. Her essay collection “Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless” explores what fungi can teach us about nourishment, ecology and hidden histories.
• Steph Davis: The Dorchester marimbist has added more than 40 works by Black composers to the instrument’s repertoire, from spirituals to a sonata by Florence Price. He also plays the gyil, a West African xylophone, and pairs it with the marimba in concert to highlight its African roots.
• Zahili Zamora: The pianist has carried her music from Havana to Bermuda, Italy, Canada and Southeast Asia before settling in Boston. She blends Afro-Cuban rhythm, jazz and her classical training into deeply personal compositions. A track on her new album “Overcoming” won Best of Latin America at this year’s Intercontinental Music Awards.
• Zainab Sumu: The Sierra Leone-born multimedia artist weaves reed, calabash, rope and yarn, along with objects gathered on her travels, into sculptures that give contemporary form to African and diasporic traditions. Her new series “Supernal Beauty” is inspired by the women-led Sande society of Sierra Leone and explores how women pass down knowledge.

See the artists in action tonight at WBUR’s CitySpace. Secure your free tickets here.