creative direction
Organization
WS Development
Role
Creative Director, ArtLifting
team
2 commissioned artists · ops partner · fabricators
timeline
2022–2024
01
the space between
I came into the WS Development engagement early — before contracts were signed — because a partnership with a developer that size is worth getting right from the start, and getting one right is how you earn the next one. As Creative Director, my job was to help shape what original artwork could anchor the client's flagship in Boston's Seaport District: a 630,000 sq ft LEED-Platinum tower where the work would be as much a commercial read as a creative one.
Before any artist was chosen, the space set the terms. The main lobby runs two stories of gray concrete and birch monotone, with long sightlines that punish anything too fine or too precious. The work had to hold its own against that — scaled and dynamic enough to contend with a wall of gray concrete, not just large — and that narrowed the field before a single name came up. I worked that read with our head curator and operations partner, screening less for talent than for whose work could hold up to fabrication and scale and still be itself.
The building gave the program two moments to land. The concrete lobby entrance carries the monumental geometric wall; a staircase rises from it, and at the top, the straight-ahead entryway carries the watercolors — so a visitor meets one artist on the way in and the other as the space opens up. Two artists, two mediums, two thresholds that had to read as one gesture. The geometric anchor was the piece the whole engagement hinged on: if it couldn't be commissioned and translated to scale, nothing else resolved. So it led, and everything else was designed around it.
02
one vision, two translations
Rudolph Jean-Louis paints flat, hard-edged geometric abstraction — bold color-blocking, clean lines, little subtle transition, which is exactly what lets it scale: a design like that can be vectored and enlarged without losing itself, as long as the geometry stays true. What shaped the engagement was how he works. He makes his pieces by hand, on physical surfaces — and that physicality brings a focus and intention the work depends on, because bold geometric design leaves nowhere for a careless line to hide. So the mock-ups are physical objects too, not computer renders you can swap materials and iterations through freely. That makes iteration deliberate and one-directional: you preserve each mock-up intact in case the client wants to return to an earlier one, and the contract set the round at six. Jean-Louis opened with one, to get a first read, and came back symmetrical — the one thing the brief had explicitly ruled out. Three to four years of working relationship is what let me handle that in a sentence: I told him plainly the brief said not to go symmetrical, and he took it and moved, because directness was what he wanted and confidence was what made his work good. I had him move into new compositions but hold color for later — resolving shape and rhythm first, palette after — and I still showed the client that first attempt, because bringing them into the process, wrong turns included, is what turns their reaction into usable direction instead of a verdict at the end. We landed the composition by the second round and the color story by the third. The selected mock-up then went to our fabricator, who engineered it into a five-panel construction — one coherent artwork, built to ship and assemble on-site with the tactile color-blocking intact.
Christina Constantine was the inverse in every way. An accomplished artist with a decades-long career, she'd long since moved away from working large — and her watercolors carry their nuance in soft transitions, unpredictable pigment, and delicate layering, all calibrated to the scale she'd spent years working at. Watercolor can scale in the right hands; the question was whether her style and execution would keep the clarity of composition and impact they had at the size she'd long worked. And because that nuance only comes through when the work is made at full size, every attempt was a full piece — so every test was also a potential final. She was hesitant — unsure she could still control the medium that large, and weighing whether she wanted to take on work at a scale she hadn't attempted in years. Each of those worries was real, and each could be designed around. So we structured the risk out of it: ArtLifting covered every material she'd need — down to shipping her a full roll of watercolor paper to work from — and framed the first large piece as a no-commitment test: not only whether the qualities that made her small watercolors compelling survived the jump, but whether the result was something she was proud to have made. If it was, we'd proceed; if not, she'd owe nothing. It helped that Naseem Niaraki, WS's group creative director and a trained designer, wanted precisely that watercolor variability — the spontaneity set against Jean-Louis's hard geometry — which gave the work room to find itself through the process, without pressure from the client to resolve it early. The test held, and held well enough to become one of the placed works itself. It cleared the way for the pair at the entryway: made full-scale, developed as a set, and resolved into a warm-cool split — the shapes landed early, and the feedback that remained was all color — that let her work and Jean-Louis's speak across the space without matching.
The two commissions posed opposite problems, and keeping one coherent vision across both was the work.
03
resolved before it was built
Both commissions were fully settled — Jean-Louis's design selected, Constantine's approach proven — well before either was built. That mattered, because the building's own timeline kept moving: an H2 2023 opening slipped to Q2 2024, construction starting and stopping the whole way, and roughly a year passed between a design locking and the doors opening. The work was staged to wait it out. Jean-Louis's selected mock-up was scanned and went into storage, the production design was made ready, and we held — starting fabrication only about six to eight weeks out, once there was a firm opening date, rather than building a 20-foot piece and storing it for months. Because the creative decisions were resolved up front, none of them reopened when the delays came; a construction schedule no one on the art side controlled never touched the work.
Doctrine of Obscurity now anchors the lobby of 400 Summer Street and is the piece WS Development featured in its public impact report. $63,000 was earned by the two artists — on standard terms that leave the majority of the value with them — for work neither had made at this scale before. And the return ran past the commission itself: the single roll of paper Constantine tested on yielded more than a dozen new works, sellable well beyond the three that were placed. The partnership did what it was meant to on every side — the client got a landmark, the artists got career-first work and most of what it earned, and the building got art that belonged to the people who made it.
04
what i took from it
20'×20'
55%
Large-scale creative work succeeds when the process is designed as carefully as the product. Creative intent rarely needs defending late when it's structured early — in the brief, the contract, the expectation-setting, and the clarity that final creative authority sits with the artists and with us. Structured that way, the client never has to manage creative complexity and the artists never have to fight for room to work. And a partnership run so the value lands on every side is the kind that earns the next one — which, with a developer the size of WS, was always the larger point.
Skills used
Creative Direction
Commercial Translation
Stakeholder Partnership
Fabrication Strategy
Budget Ownership