The visual artist

"The first time I called myself an artist? When I was about eight," says Roland Smart, plunking down a package of press materials about himself and his work. And today, the 27-year-old graduate of Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts — sporting a leather motorcycle jacket, black sweater, rectangular tortoise-shell glasses, curly red mop top, and clean-cut goatee — at least looks the part of a working bohemian artist.

That is, until he starts talking finances. "Right now, I’m collecting unemployment," he volunteers between sips of Jameson’s at the Squealing Pig, a pub around the corner from his new apartment in Mission Hill. "That’s kind of an artist’s grant," he laughs, but he’s only half joking. He’s currently concentrating on paying the bills and can devote only off hours to his pet projects.

Smart is former co-director of the now-defunct Gallery Bershad, in Davis Square, where he curated exhibits from early this year through the gallery’s closing this summer. Before that, he curated at the Starr Gallery in Newton. And somewhere in there, he put together a multimedia installation project called "Room," which was four years in the making. For it, Smart filled his former 3500-square-foot apartment in Roxbury with video art, kinetic sculptures, sounds, smells, and illuminations. Now, the exhibit, which he recently put into storage, has spawned a photography project that he’s assembling for a new show. Smart’s also working on an architectural job redesigning a lawyer’s office; he’s helping out with graphic design on some CD jackets; and he recently finished showing an exhibit, "Frame as Fetish," at the Copley Society. "My work is always content-heavy, and then I choose a medium to flush that out," explains the self-proclaimed Renaissance man.

To make a living, Smart divides his time between money projects (freelance graphic design, curating work) and art projects (installation, photography). All together, it’s a dizzying catch-all mŽlange that dances between genres and ultimately crystallizes at one bottom line: anything to get his name out.

Being in Boston, Smart says, has been a boon to his career. "I’m a big fish in a little pool," he explains. "In New York, every niche is filled. Living in Boston, we really are a breeding ground. It seems like I can’t leave Boston; there’s always a new project I’m interested in."

Right now, without much cash, Smart isn’t doing a whole lot on the art-project side. But that’s a telling part of the whole process of making it. "The only thing that’s stopping me now is money," he says. "I would like to get my installation shown in an alternative gallery in New York. That will happen ... what you’ll see me doing is writing grants."

Though the arc of his career may rise from Boston, he hopes it will take him to New York. "The Dia Center," he says, his eyes rolling back in mock ecstasy. "That would be a wet dream come true."

For now, Smart’s curating a show at the Gallery @ Green Street, assembling drawings for his architectural project, and, most important, "finding a job before unemployment runs out."

The poet

Bouncing her six-month old son Phineas on her knee in her apartment in Arlington, Angela Shaw, 33, wonders how fellow poet mothers like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (also New Englanders) did it. "I have such a romantic sense of what it was for them," she says.

After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1990, where she took her first writing workshop, Shaw taught English in Taiwan before enrolling in an MFA program at Cornell University. "It was a chance to see if it was something I wanted to do," she recalls. And apparently, still at it 10 years later, it was.

Shaw has twice been included in the Best American Poetry anthology (1994 and 1996). She received a Pushcart Prize in 1999, and, most recently, she was included in The Beacon Best of 2001 collection. After finishing a two-year teaching stint at Cornell upon completion of her MFA, the young poet was awarded an eight-month working fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. "To get funded to [write] was such a wonderful gift. It surprises me when I think I have found ways to do it financially," she says, adding that these days, with her husband, a software engineer, supporting them, "it’s not a question." "I called it underwear money," she says of her first poetry paycheck. "They’d pay me enough to buy one of those three-packs."

Shaw found herself in Boston a few years ago, when she came to live with her now-husband. Asked when she first began introducing herself as a poet, she demurs: "I like to say, ‘I write poems.’ ‘Poems’ sounds so friendly. ‘Poet’ sounds pretentious." And therein lies Shaw’s skill: weeding through words. A poem, which can take between months and years to write, starts with a word, she explains, which can pop into her head at any time. Writing a poem "is a process of gathering up the words and figuring out which poem they fit into."

These days, when she’s not feeding Phineas, taking walks, or reading, she’s assembling a manuscript of her collected works and preparing to send it to publishers. How does one do that? "I don’t quite know," she laughs. "I thought it would be like making a mix tape; you know how fun that is? But it’s not that fun at all. I thought I had to say something in the way the poems were juxtaposed, but then I talked with a friend of mine and her technique was to put short poems next to short poems and long next to long." For a poet, a quiet work space is critical, and at her neat desk in the back of the apartment, overlooking a small lake, Shaw has just that.

Living in Boston could be beneficial for Shaw. She hopes to start teaching at one of the many universities in the area. But these days, her goals are more pragmatic and immediate: she’d like to get her manuscript in the mail — and get a good night’s sleep.

Nina Willdorf can be reached at nwilldorf[a]phx.com