Roxbury Murals: An Exploration of Racialized Landscapes by Graham Moitoso and Anja Clark

Walking Tour Introduction

Art is a reflection of history and culture. When seen in a museum, we can gain insight into certain selected and curated histories, but when the art is made for the community, by community members, other powerful nuances are added to the experiences of both viewing and making. Through the study of murals in Roxbury, we can learn about the tense histories of urban renewal, redlining, and other such racist policies that have formed the relationships between the historically Black neighborhood and the included Boston streets. The murals include recognizable Civil Rights anti-racists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, international icons like Nelson Mandela and Marcus Garvey, as well as local heroes including Melnea Cass and Mel King. By diving into research about these figures, and details in the art and murals themselves, we can discover a wealth of stories about the racialized landscape that is Boston’s Roxbury, as well as neighboring communities like Fenway, Dorchester, the South End, Jamaica Plain and Back Bay, and nationwide cities and struggles that influenced them all. 

Our tour begins at a site in historic Lower Roxbury, bordering on the South End and the campus of Northeastern University, a neighborhood and an institution that have both affected Roxbury for better and for worse. The tour then leads through the section of the neighborhood down Tremont Street, ending up at the Madison Park Vocational Technical High School, another institution that has remained resilient in the face of many neighborhood challenges, and a catalyst for all in the face of disinvestment, gentrification, and urban renewal for interstate highway systems. After Madison Park, we move towards Nubian Square (formerly known as Dudley Square) and down Warren Street through the heart of Roxbury, where we explore more community organizations and cultural hubs that have uplifted the neighborhood for years. We conclude our tour near Franklin Park by exploring the work of the neighborhood abutting Dorchester, as well as a unique mural near Egleston Square. Franklin Park is one of the final links of the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Emerald Necklace, the root of this investigatory project. We aim to explore collective organizing and the relationships, both positive and negative, throughout history between this backbone of the city and the nearby Roxbury neighborhood and, by doing so, hope to understand more deeply the policies and attitudes that have ultimately shaped our landscapes today.

Reflective Essay

If one thing is clear as we wrap up this course, it is that racism is present in all aspects of cities, and is particularly prevalent in Boston. When thinking about a topic for this Transect Project, we essentially asked ourselves which lens we wanted to view this condition through. We landed on public art, specifically murals, as they were parts of the urban landscape that both of us, Graham and Anja, had noticed while walking through the city. Immediately as we began our research before our field trip and site visit, we noticed that murals were concentrated in lower income areas like the South End, Chinatown, Nubian Square, and Dorchester. Thus, we wanted our tour to track the Southwest Corridor, a large and historic piece of infrastructure in Boston that spans many of these neighborhoods. Overwhelmed with options and so many interesting histories, we decided to concentrate on Roxbury so that our narrative was more cohesive. This area is particularly interesting to us as students at Northeastern, an institution that has severely encroached upon the historic neighborhood, and separates its northern edge from the green space of The Fens, and the upper side of the Emerald Necklace. 

Parkland is unfortunately a double-edged sword: access to open space is a key aspect of climate justice, which increases return on investment in new and existing property, but unfortunately this contributes to gentrification… The Emerald Necklace has provided parkland and increased property value for the communities that surround it. This has contributed to gentrification of areas like East Fenway (shown in the history of arson instigated by landlords to try to change the demographics of Symphony Road explained in A People’s Guide) because, as living conditions improve with access to parks, housing prices respond by being driven up. Roxbury, however, does not border the Emerald Necklace and thus lacks greenspace and all of the environmental benefits that come with it, but a problematic consequence of this is that it has also remained a quite segregated lower income community with low rates of home-ownership and little economic mobility. Though it is a victim of circumstance, it contains a wealth of cultural history, celebrated in murals, that is being threatened by Northeastern’s encroachment. This development is causing similar effects of displacement and gentrification as parks, but without the green benefits of a place like the Emerald Necklace. One must acknowledge that Roxbury’s history is of no fault to the people that currently reside there and have resided there for years. Direct policies of urban renewal, mortgage exclusion, redlining, over-policing, and institutional expansion have placed and kept people, many Black, in poverty for the past decades. 

At times when governments have tried to silence people, art has emerged as a fantastic way to tell unfiltered stories of the truths of people living in a community. When drawing links between Roxbury and the Emerald Necklace, we noticed that there are far fewer murals in the neighborhoods that immediately surround the parkway. It seems that there are links between murals as a way to establish community pride and beautification, and the marginalized communities that do not have the community services that parks provide. From the perspective of neighborhoods like the Back Bay, these areas have not had to endure the racist policies, namely redlining, that have caused other areas to start these kinds of community initiatives. Though they lack murals, these neighborhoods still do have public art, but in different forms. Here, art often takes the form of grand sculptures and monuments, or art by visiting artists, rather than community members. For example, to mark the Emerald Necklace’s centennial anniversary, the Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya has been employed to create “fog sculptures” that reference Olmsted’s vision of sculpting with water. Antonio Lopez de Garcia’s Day Night, AKA The Baby Heads, outside of the MFA, was made in Madrid. There is a whole string of sculptures down Commonwealth Avenue that venerate mostly white men. The first of these sculptures closest to the Emerald Necklace is of Lief Eriksson, the Norse explorer believed to have been the first European to set foot on the North American continent in around 1000AD, or Quest Eternal, a huge 27 foot tall Greco-Roman style bronze statue of a muscular white man pointing powerfully towards the sky. These pieces are costly commissions in a very recognisably European style and bear no representations of the diversity of the Boston population, partly because this diversity is so segregated. Property in these more affluent areas are also predominantly rented by wealthier, impermanent residents, whereas Roxbury is home to a more established diaspora. This further contributes to the creation of murals as a community strengthening initiative, instead of costly, sculptural, and less personal public art. 

Aided mainly by the Boston Globe archives, we explored ideas of internal community development, resistance to urban renewal, and other 1960s/70s movements of community engagement and resistance that are now reflected in art. Our tour begins in Lower Roxbury and snakes through Nubian Square, moves down Warren Street, explores the Blue Hill Avenue area and then terminates around Franklin Park in Egleston Square. We sought to explore a large breadth of the neighborhood through a specific exploration of community struggles and needs, as well as a larger connection to the aforementioned historical figures of the city and nation at large. The murals we chose focussed on people and community rather than just beautification. Though beautification projects show an important aspect of community care and pride, we think that murals with specific figures better served our purpose of historical exploration and relation to the Emerald Necklace. 

Public art has been a fantastic way to learn about the entangled and racialized histories in Boston, and learn more about the Civil Right history of America as a whole. Without research, the faces and the stories that are represented by them in the murals could go misunderstood or unappreciated, especially by those not from Roxbury. Therefore, it has been a really meaningful experience for us to uncover these stories that were invisible to us as white non-locals, and discover so much about the people who have made Boston, and the country. We feel that this project is a way of digitally preserving the fragile histories that are at risk of being destroyed by Boston’s evident precedent of racism, colonialism, capitalism, and discrimination. We seek to immortalize these places, especially those that have existed prior to MFA artist-in-residence intervention that glorify predominantly Black spaces, and hope that the evidence of two Bostons, one underserved and one privileged, is clear through this artistic exploration. We sincerely thank Nick Brown for his assistance in this project and his unwavering commitment to heightening Indigenous and minority voices even at the powerful institution that is Northeastern. We also thank the wonderful people of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain with whom we talked on our day of visiting each of these sites. Without you and your commitments to community, resilience, and prosperity, we would not have the evidence to tell these stories today.