About the Black Artists of Boston Project

The Black Artists of Boston Project began as a collaborative endeavor between a graduate class at Northeastern University, a local performance artist Dzidzor Azaglo, and a group of community elders, who as artists, have been working in and around Boston for over thirty years. Professors Lee and Nieves were tasked with creating a new oral history and ethnography course for graduate students in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH) that would develop their skills in the craft of ethnography while also training them to integrate community members and values into their work.

The Office of Community Engagement, with the help of Ms. Chelsea Lauder, identified a project partner, Ms. Dzidzor Azaglo as someone who could connect the class to a vibrant group of local artists and support a project that centered the contributions of these artists to the Boston arts scene, as well as nationally and internationally. The course became a platform for honoring the contributions of eight multi-talented local artists (De Ama Battle, Bruno Eddie, Ife Franklin, Napolean Jones Henderson, Jacqueline L. McRath, Dale Patterson, Susie Smith, & Valerie Stephens) in a pilot phase of the project that, if successful, will usher in a long term effort on the part of CSSH and the Public History Program at Northeastern to begin a series of projects on the contemporary Black arts movement and its legacies. The project is unique because it is in partnership with community members and works to co-create the series of interventions that help tell these stories. The website here acts as a portal or an introductory gateway to the artists and their work, but more importantly to the stories of their lives and contributions to Boston’s history. This is the beginning of a kind of digital directory or gazette of Black artists that will continue to grow as we build relationships, listen, and learn from our community partners and elders. We hope that this website becomes a resource for others to both access these artists and learn more about this vibrant, dynamic, and creative community.

The students in this course, which was the first time Lee and Nieves taught the course, reflected on their experience, "We’re taking this course on "Documenting Fieldwork Narratives" to think about how history, memory, and archiving are important tools to document community experiences. We are interested in how our methods of documentation have historically excluded marginalized groups and how to address that in our methods. One main goal is to showcase our immediate community neighbors and how their experience of making a creative life and cultural community can enrich our understanding of Boston. This is a collaborative project that is co-created with you as the driving force. We hope to provide a venue or vehicle for the stories that you feel are missing or are important for your community and your work as an artist."