Artist Statement

After the sudden loss of my parents in 2017, I wanted to learn more about my history and the environments that impacted our family. I found particular interest in delving into my mother’s history and her life growing up in Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roslindale, Massachusetts. Due to economic hardship, my mother and grandparents moved over a dozen times before she was 18, which caused instability and trauma that my mother passed down to her children. 

Combing through her ephemera left behind after her death, I began to piece together her life growing up in these outer neighborhoods in Boston. Family photographs, fragile envelopes from cousins in the Bronx, her highschool wallet, and old YellowPages phone books have become important family archival material to trace the homes she lived in throughout Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roslindale from the 1950s through 1960s. Some of the addresses I remembered from her stories growing up in these neighborhoods; she had a hard time remembering the streets and house numbers of all the places she lived. I am photographing what I can find of her old apartments. I often wonder how much has changed in the area around these houses– what history they have seen, the families they have held, and what the futures hold for them.

My mother and her family faced significant economic instability throughout their lives. Sadly, their experiences are not unique.  After over sixty years, America is still failing the working class. The housing crisis has hit Boston particularly hard due to the chronic underdevelopment of dense regional housing, a choked public transit system and equally overtaxed highway system, and policies that favor wealthy landowners over renters and those with limited economic leverage. Her life growing up in Boston was the basis for my residency project with the Urbano Project. I created my community art project, Calling Home, as a response to this crisis. This project includes a website, phonebook, and physical public art installation, resulting from a ten-week series of workshops with eight participants. Together we considered the roles of community, empathy, and reflection in addressing the crises of housing insecurity, gentrification, and displacement in Boston and sought collective healing and empowerment to voice the stories that live within us. On view in Calling Home: Family Archives is the website and phone book, which include the perspectives of the participants who have directly experienced housing insecurity or been close witnesses. 

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