Celebrating Black History with Public Art on The Greenway

13, Feb, 2025

The City of Boston has a rich history and countless landmarks that tell important stories about our community’s past. Here at The Greenway we’re honored to be caretakers of a very important historical space: the land where the first-known Black woman to own a home in Boston lived.

Celebrating Black History Month on The Greenway

This Black History Month, we invite you to visit “Going to Ground” by artist LaRissa Rogers on The Greenway. This work celebrates Zipporah Potter Atkins, the first-known Black woman to own a home in Boston. Years ago, Potter Atkins’ house rested on land currently cared for by The Greenway at Cross and Hanover Streets in Boston’s North End. Dr. Vivian Johnson, Professor Emerita of Boston University, brought this history to light after 6 years of archival research.

As part of this project, Larissa Rogers hosted an “Open Call for Soil.” This invitation encouraged Boston’s communities to gather and contribute soil from spaces meaningful to them. Afterwards,  community members crafted earthen soil blocks with the collected soil and formed the sculpture’s foundation. This gesture represented collective support, communal residence, and a tangible affirmation of Zipporah Potter Atkins’ life and story in Boston’s public memory.

Rogers asks how this process might be one way of enacting scholar Vanessa Agard Jones’ call to collectively “go to ground.” “Going to ground,” as Agard Jones describes it, is a liberatory practice that creates new modes of relation with ground and groundedness that prioritize survivance, sovereignty, and freedom, especially with and for Black communities.

By offering a mode of participation based not on ownership of land, but rather meaningful relationality to site and soil as defined by participants themselves, the soil archive embraces the complex constellation of relationships to earth, land, shelter, and power held across our community of participants. Rogers and The Greenway curatorial team felt this was an important way of honoring the site’s history while also recognizing the real tenuousness and precarity that continue to shape contemporary relationships to land and homeownership for many Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities in Boston and across the US.

Other ways to explore LaRissa Rogers’ work in Boston

In addition to visiting the sculpture, you can also stop by Boston University’s Visual Arts Library this month. There you can see a mini-exhibition showcasing part of the project’s soil archive, titled “Ground Thoughts: Archiving Going to Ground.” The soil archive is also on view as part of BLANCHE, a rotating mini-installation platform curated by Nerissa Cooney.

For further reading, we invite you to explore the following resources:

Artwork featured in this image: Installation and performance images of “Going to Ground” by artist LaRissa Rogers, 2024.

Photo credits: Alex Joachim, Chris Rucinski; scans by Magdalena Poost.