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May 16, 2023 (Salem) – On March 13, 2023 North Shore Community Development Coalition (North Shore CDC) welcomed Saniego Sanchez as its first Director of Punto Urban Art Museum (PUAM).
Saniego comes to North Shore CDC with an extensive background in the nonprofit art museum sector. Born in Albuquerque, NM, Saniego was raised in Denver, CO, where he served as the Director of the Dikeou Collection for over three years and as Operations Coordinator at the Museo de las Americas for two years. In addition to this, he held various community leadership roles, served on the La Alma-Lincoln Park neighborhood’s RNO board, as Treasurer for the High Plains Society of Applied Anthropology, and was recognized as an Emerging Leader of Color in the Arts by the Western States Arts Federation. During the summer of 2022, Saniego was selected to be an Arts and Cultural Strategy Summer Fellow at the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, where he contributed to research on the practices and strategies that cultural anchors utilize to engender belonging in their communities.
“We are thrilled to have Saniego join the North Shore CDC team as the new Director of Punto Urban Art Museum. He comes to us with experience from the community museum world coupled with a background in cultural anthropology and has a passion for serving the community. We are excited that he will be leading our Punto Urban Art Museum and will allow us to continue providing opportunities for residents and artists to create diverse and culturally relevant art for the community,” offered Felicia Pierce, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of North Shore CDC.
In this newly created role, Saniego will spearhead the current work and expansion of North Shore CDC’s Arts + Culture department and PUAM. This work includes designing a new docent tour program, which will aim to create jobs for Point residents and develop relationships with local K-12 schools and with college/university art programs, and co-directing the return of Fiesta en la Calle with Ashley Ganem, or the annual Block Party in the Point neighborhood which celebrates the rich, vibrant diversity of our community. In addition, Saniego will be working with the PUAM team to develop the curatorial, exhibition, and programmatic focus of our new gallery spaces including the Peabody Street Gallery in Lighthouse 34, that is currently under construction and expected to be completed this Summer, the design and use of our new PUAM HQ, coming in 2024, and the program/artist studio spaces in Hawthorne Lofts, an affordable housing development with a preference for artists in the former St. Mary’s School.
“Throughout my career, my aim has been to develop a holistic community-centered practice which integrates my experiences working in the arts sector with the technical skills gained in my academic studies,” offered Saniego. “Recently my research has focused on understanding the cultural and socio-economic role that artists, curators, and museum’s play in their communities. I’m super excited to integrate this knowledge into PUAM’s future work as we set out to inaugurate arts focused inclusive spaces in the Point neighborhood.”
Since 2016, Saniego has lived in Mexico City and Pátzcuaro, México, where his graduate program research in the arts and cultural sector served as the central approach to integrating himself into the broader community. He is currently completing his applied thesis project, “How do Community Museum’s Practice Sustainability?”, as part of the University of North Texas’ MA in Applied Anthropology program. He also has a Bachelor’s Degree in Cultural Anthropology with a Minor in Nonprofit Management from Metropolitan State University of Denver and an Associate’s Degree in Anthropology from the Community College of Denver.
For more information about North Shore CDC’s Punto Urban Art Museum, visit puntourbanartmuseum.org. Please follow us on instagram at @urban.art.musem. To connect with Saniego, contact him at ssanchez@northshorecdc.org.
RECENT MEDIA FEATURING SANIEGO SANCHEZ
Announcement of 2022 Summer Fellowships – Othering & Belonging Institute – University of California, Berkeley
The Case for Ethnography and Community-Led Approaches in Affordable Housing and Community Development. By Max Mattisson and Saniego Sanchez. – The Applied Anthropologist, Volume 40, Number 1, 2020
Presentation: Art Exhibitions and Programs as Vital Resources for Urban Applied Ethnographers – Panel and Podcast: Doing Applied Urban Ethnography in the Neoliberal Age – Society for Applied Anthropology, 2019 Annual Meeting, Portland, Oregon
You’ve driven past Denver’s Dikeou Pop-Up space, but never seen it. – Denver Post, January 14, 2016
96 Lafayette Street, 2nd Floor Salem MA 01970
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email Info@northshorecdc.org
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