On September 14, 2024, Boston Public Art Triennial will hold a conversation about untold stories, historical trauma, and how we can work to remember difficult histories by acknowledging their realities while transforming them with love, empathy, and imagination. Join us at 2:00 PM at the Charlestown Branch of the Boston Public Library to listen and learn about public memory and healing from the featured panelists and moderator.
This program is being presented as part of the City of Boston’s “Un-monument | Re-monument | De-monument: Transforming Boston” program, an initiative to transform the nation’s commemorative landscape by ensuring that collective histories are more completely and accurately represented. Un-Monument provides funding to expand the public's role in shaping Boston’s future monuments, sustaining a cultural ecosystem for years to come.
Featured speakers
Artists Dell Marie Hamilton and Angela Counts will be in conversation with Africana Studies professor Nicole Aljoe, PhD., moderated by Stephen Hamilton, arts educator and Triennial 2025 artist.
About Lot Lab
Located in the Charlestown Navy Yard, Lot Lab is an outdoor, 24/7 space for site-specific contemporary art. Co-created with the Boston community, Lot Lab provides local and visiting artists with the opportunity to present multimedia artworks in a space dedicated to community connection.
Featured Lot Lab Artist Ifé Franklin’s sculptural work The Resurrection of Mark, Phillis, and Phebe serves as a monument to the titular people and other enslaved Black ancestors, bringing their stories to the forefront of public life. Franklin’s sculpture also creates conversational space to imagine how we might acknowledge uncomfortable histories while also infusing them with notes on healing, respect, resilience, and remembrance. The Resurrection of Mark, Phillis, and Phebe can be found at Lot Lab and is on display through October 31, 2024.
Dell Marie Hamilton is an artist, writer, and independent curator whose performances have been presented to audiences in New York at Five Myles Gallery and Panoply Performance Lab. She has extensively presented her work in the New England area including at the Museum of Fine Arts-Boston, Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, as well as at the Clark Art Institute, where she became the first visual artist – in the Clark’s 64 year history – to present a performance artwork in their galleries.
Working across a variety of mediums including performance, video, painting, and photography, she uses the body to investigate the social and geopolitical constructions of personal memory, gender, history, and citizenship. With roots in Belize, Honduras, and the Caribbean, she frequently draws upon the colonial and folkloric traditions of the region.
Dell is a recipient of the ICA Boston’s 2021 Foster PRize and her work will be discussed in a forthcoming article by scholas Iyko Day, in the anthology AntiBlackness (eds. Moon-Kie Jung and Joao H. Costa-Vargas, Duke University Press). Her most recent curatorial project, “Nine Monument for Now,” was presented at Harvard’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, and was ranked by Hyperallergic.com as one of 2018’s top 20 exhibitions in the U.S.
She was also named a grantee of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum’s 2021 inaugural cohort of the Charla Fund, a Ford Foundation-sponsored initiative that provides grants to Latinx artists. A frequent performer in the work of Afro-Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Dell appears in her collaborative video “When We Gather” which includes choreography and poetry by Okwui Okpokwasili and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. She also works at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research where she has held a variety of roles organizing exhibitions, events, and conferences. To explore Dell’s work, follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @dellmhamilton. (March 2021)
Angela M. Counts is a Lorraine Hansberry award-winning playwright and filmmaker that traveled to the Middle East on a personal quest to understand the forces that led to a decades-long estrangement with her Muslim, American-born father. She is also an accomplished career professional in admissions, diversity/equity/inclusion, and student leadership development, having worked at universities across the country, including Cornell, Harvard, NYU, Suffolk, and USC.
Before joining Emerson College in spring 2020 as a Screenwriting professor, she held the position of Director of Admissions at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) from 2015-2020. At HDS, Angela convened the graduate admissions committee and served on the merit-scholarship selection committee, hosted school-wide events, recruited in key territories across the U.S. and was responsible for creating the Diversity and Explorations Program, a first of its kind, diversity pipeline program for undergraduates exploring opportunities in graduate theological education. Over its 13-year history, it successfully enrolled students that, for many, were the first in their families to go to graduate school or enroll in an Ivy League school. Notably, many have successfully pursued careers in and outside of ministry, as well as, graduate studies in law, medicine, film production and doctoral degrees in religion and other fields.
Prior to serving as admissions director, Angela was a diversity fellow at Harvard, where she worked on a series of projects at Harvard Business School's Leadership Initiative. While there, she co-partnered with alumna Bennie Wiley on the planning and research for the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the African American Student Union at HBS. Before coming to Harvard in 2002, Angela oversaw diversity programming for Suffolk University’s Office for Student Activities, advising its program board and affinity clubs on issues of student leadership and fostering cross-cultural understanding and cooperation. She brought to that role, experiences serving as the assistant director of Minority Programs at Cornell University, as affiliated staff with the Committee on Special Educational Projects (COSEP), “a program established in 1964 to increase enrollment of African American students and offer support services to foster their success" (Cornell Magazine January/February 2015), and as the coordinator of the Black and Hispanic Scholars Program for NYU’s Office of Admissions.
Angela is a film and theater director, playwright and performance artist whose works have been presented in galleries, theaters, and other venues across the country, including New York Theatre Workshop, LaMama Experimental Theatre Company, New England Conservatory of Music, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA thesis exhibition, 2013). Recent group exhibitions include Nine Moments for Now at Harvard's Cooper Gallery and #SayHerName: Watch Us Werk at Lesley University’s VanDernoot Gallery, curated by Dell Hamilton (2018) and StandUp!: Women You Should Know, curated by Silvi Naci at Boston’s Kayafas Gallery (2017). Angela was a featured guest artist for Lee Mingwei's Living Room Project at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2017), where she engaged with visitors in a presentation of her art and influences, including her Lorraine Hansberry award-winning play, Hedy Understands Anxiety. Angela’s latest video works, “Breakfast with Abu” and “Hijab, Red Sea” explore the complex dynamic between the artist and her Muslim father, an American expat, living in Saudi Arabia. She is developing the project further into a series, entitled, “My Muslim Daughter”. She most recently presented a new performance work-in-progress for the virtual, Area Code Fair, curated by Gabriel Sosa.
Angela has guest lectured at universities across the country including USC and Northeastern. Currently, she teaches screenwriting at Emerson College. Angela enjoys bringing her years of administrative, artistic and diversity/equity/inclusion experiences into the classroom, as well as, taking her experiences from the classroom back into her own creative work. She also consults on art projects and for prospective students applying to graduate level programs, as well as undergraduate degree programs and has done so in the past for international students applying to U.S. schools.
Nicole Aljoe is a professor of English and Africana Studies and Graduate Program Director at Northeastern University; her research focuses on 18th and early 19th Century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literature with a specialization on the slave narrative and early novels. In addition to teaching in these areas, she has published articles on these topics in American Literary History, The Journal of Early American Literature, and African American Review. In her monograph Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1836 (Palgrave 2012) and in the co-edited collections Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVA Press, 11/2014) and, most recently, A Literary History of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream (Palgrave/Springer, April 2018), she explores the myriad ways in which subaltern voices appear in the archives. Currently, she is at work on two new projects that extend this research in productive ways: the first examines representations of Caribbean Women of Color produced in Europe and England between 1780 and 1840, and the second explores relationships between narratives of black lives and the rise of the novel in Europe and the Americas in the 18th century. She is also a member of the Mapping Black London Research Team and contributed to the development of the Unforgotten Lives exhibit, which explores the stories of African, Asian, Caribbean, and Indigenous Londoners who lived in the city between 1560 and 1860.
Stephen Hamilton is an artist and arts educator living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. Stephen’s work incorporates both Western and African techniques, blending figurative painting and drawing with resist dyeing, weaving, and woodcarving. Each image is a marriage between the aesthetic perspectives and artistry of both traditions. As a Black American trained in traditional west African artforms, he treats the acts of weaving, dyeing, and woodcarving as ritualized acts of reclamation. He uses traditional techniques and materials native to West Africa to reclaim ancestral knowledge dissociated from Africans in the Americas, during the transatlantic slave trade. The work explores and heavily references the Black body in pre-colonial African art history, creating visual connections between the past and the present. This forms a body of work, which serves as a conceptual and visual bridge between the ancient and modern worlds. Through this, he explores elements of black identity through time and space on its own terms.
Through visual comparison of shared philosophies and aesthetics amongst Black peoples, he seeks to describe a complex and varied Black aesthetic. These visual and philosophical connections and cultural analyses form his visual language. The pieces created depict African thought and culture as equal to, yet unique from, its western analog. This work stands in stark contrast to the pervasive negative associations, which have become synonymous with Black culture. His work, therefore, bridges dialogue between contemporary Black cultures and the ancient African world through an asset-based lens.
Image: © Annielly Camargo