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Hidden Histories Walking Tour with Curator Shana Dumont Garr
October 29 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Join Hidden Histories Curator Shana Dumont Garr on a special walking tour to view Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Sue Murad, Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill’s new public art projects in and around the Boston Common and Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston, Ma. We’ll see archival materials and ideas gleaned from old books and maps made public in poetic and slyly rebellious ways.
For more about the Hidden Histories exhibition click here.
Location: Meet at the Media Art Gallery, Boston, MA.
Elisa Hamilton’s project Glimpses of Glapion will present a series of digital vignettes honoring the life and legacy of Louis Glapion. Glapion was a French, biracial hairdresser and barber who, together with his friend George Middleton, built and owned what is now considered the oldest extant house in Beacon Hill, located at 5 Pinckney Street. While more is known about Middleton, the artist’s research has uncovered glimpses of Glapion that speak to an interesting and noteworthy life based in Beacon Hill. Hamilton seeks to honor Glapion and enliven curiosity about his lived experiences in our city. The AR experience will be available on Hoverlay and accompanied by a research document designed for educational purposes.
Clareese Hill’s The Black Boston Dream Oracle is a speculative reimagining of The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book written by Chloe Russel, a 19th-century Black woman from Massachusetts. By blending historical wisdom with future-focused fabulations, the Black Boston Dream Oracle will provide a unique space for reflection, healing, and imagining new possibilities for liberation and collective well-being through early Black feminist thought. The Oracle will be presented as an Extended Reality (XR) experience available on the Hoverlay application, accompanied by a web-based research document designed for educational purposes.
Sue Murad’s ASSEMBLE: Performance Instructions For Public Arrangement is a participatory performance that reflects on the ways we gather in public space—particularly the historic Boston Common—through the objects we bring with us or discover there. It is a guided, interactive experience that unfolds across the landscape, inviting participants into temporary arrangements shaped by memory, proximity, and shared attention. The project bears witness to the many generations of people who have gathered together for rest and rallies, labor and loitering, play and protest.
Kameelah J. Rasheed’s public poetry project I have Asked Myself:“Can a Sentence be Haunted? And if so by what?” responds to Boston’s memorial landscape by exploring the layered histories of Boston as discovered in the archives of the Boston Athenaeum. Rasheed gathered marginalia and ornate typefaces from their collection of Boston’s oldest books. These fragments are interwoven or sampled into digital designs to form visual poems to be displayed on digital signage situated around the Boston Common.
Our artist centered public programming is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts. Hidden Histories is funded by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-monument initiative, supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation
