about the project.

Trans Boxing is an ongoing co-authored art project in the form of a boxing club that centers the participation of trans and gender variant people. The project provides a platform for community-building, education, and mentorship amongst participants from a diversity of backgrounds through training, workshops, and conversation. Trans Boxing has held weekly classes in New York City, facilitated workshops in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Cincinnati, and New Orleans, and facilitated projects in partnership with various community organizations, gyms, arts institutions, and schools across the country. Trans Boxing is experimental, and the project shifts in response to context, continuously re-imagining possibilities for social engagement.

During the Engaging Artist residency program, Nolan Hanson and collaborator Hill Donnell partnered with the James Baldwin School– a DOE transfer high school on West 18th Street in Chelsea– to initiate a project in the form of a Physical Education class designed to teach youth participants the fundamental skills of boxing, while also exploring relevant theoretical, cultural, and artistic context. Over the course of the 2020-2021 school year the class facilitated boxing training alongside various participatory workshops by guest-instructors which included writing, filmmaking and editing, graphic design, visual media literacy, and boxing film analysis. The partnership between the James Baldwin School and Trans Boxing is ongoing. Visit transboxing.org for full details.

Trans Boxing is commissioned by More Art through the Engaging Artists Residency program. The nine-month Residency provides an opportunity for NYC-based early career and underrepresented artists to gain a deeper understanding of the history of the field of public art, and is focused on the incubation and commissioning of a public art project. The Residency carries a $8000 award to realize the project.

 

Trans Boxing, The Basics video, created with support from the Engaging Artists Residency.

about the artist.

Nolan Hanson is an artist based in New York City. Their practice includes independent work as well as collaborative socially engaged projects, and has been shown in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Portland. Nolan is the founder of Trans Boxing, an art project in the form of a boxing club that centers trans and gender variant people. They received their BFA in Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2014 and in 2021 they graduated from the Art and Social Practice MFA program at Portland State University.