VIDEO July 18, 2024. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Artist Roberto Mighty at the Press Conference for the City’s Office of Arts & Culture, held at the Massachusetts College of Art.
“We Were Here, Too” is a new media monument to colonial African Americans in Boston, by Roberto Mighty. Boston Public Art Commission
SYNOPSIS: Publicly announced at a citywide press conference on July 18, 2024, “We Were Here Too”, Roberto Mighty’s newest multimedia project, is a site-specific augmented reality experience in a colonial graveyard. “We Were Here Too” is a digital monument to a vanished Revolutionary War-era Black community. The North End’s Copp’s Hill Burying Ground - founded in 1659 and now visited by 4 million tourists a year as part of the famed Freedom Trail – contains over 1200 marked graves of European-descended residents…and below the surface, the unmarked remains of at least 1,000 African Americans. By 2022, just five stones of Black residents remained. This multimedia temporary monument project will be accessible at the cemetery site and worldwide to anyone with a web connection.
- The Boston Globe “Mayor Michelle Wu and the City’sOffice of Arts & Culture have announced the first recipients — there are more than 25 — of grants that will fund temporary works of art celebrating people and events from the past that have historically been ignored or overlooked.
The initiative, dubbed “Un-monument | Re-monument | De-Monument: Transforming Boston,” is supported by a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project, which aims to create public artworks across the country that “more completely and accurately represent the multiplicity and complexity of American stories.”
Roberto Mighty was honored to have been chosen to address today’s press conference, held at the Massachusetts College of Art.
Live Address to the Boston Art Commission July 18, 2024
Dear Mayor Wu, Leaders of the Boston Art Commission, Un-monument advisors, fellow artists, members of the press, and invited guests:
I am honored to be among the awardees of the City’s new initiative — Un-monument, Re-monument, De-Monument: Transforming Boston.
Boston is one of the most storied cities in America. Every schoolchild knows about “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”, “Old Ironsides” and the battle of Bunker Hill. Tourists come from all over the world to see the Paul Revere statue, The USS Constitution, and the Bunker Hill monument.
But there’s much more to the story — and the people of America. Thankfully, Boston now has monuments like “The Embrace”, about Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King; “Step On Board”, about Harriet Tubman, and coming soon, the “Chinatown Workers Statues”.
The Un-Monument effort signals the city's ongoing commitment to supporting artists who challenge our assumptions about the past. It aligns with the movement to uncover, memorialize, and honor all the people who helped shape America.
My project, “We Were Here, Too,” is a new media monument to colonial African Americans in Boston.
This augmented reality experience serves as a digital monument to the North End’s colonial neighborhood known as “New Guinea.” It was a bustling community of free and enslaved Black seafarers, stevedores, shopkeepers, tradespeople, day laborers, and street workers.
New Guinea is now almost completely forgotten. My project aims to resurrect their memory, focusing on Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, where an estimated 1,000 Black colonists lie in unmarked graves.
Among Copp’s Hill’s few remaining monuments to Boston African Americans is that of Prince Hall, a Revolutionary War veteran, prominent Black abolitionist, and founder of Prince Hall Masonry, the first Black lodge of Freemasonry in the world. Some historians believe that Phyllis Wheatley, the 18th-century African American poet, may also be interred at the cemetery in an unmarked grave, perhaps along with her husband.
In “We Were Here, Too,” visitors to Copp’s Hill Burying Ground will be able to experience free onsite augmented reality projections of my original video, audio, and fine art photography collages on their smartphones. The multimedia will be based on historic maps, archival images, colonial-era texts, court documents, headstone inscriptions, and publications by and about the former Black residents of the North End.
Focusing on people without monuments highlights the contrast between those who have been memorialized and lionized and those who have been minimized or erased. By locating their remains and saying their names out loud hundreds of years later, we pay our respects in ways they may never have experienced during their lives.
I hope that Bostonians and people from around the world will experience this new media monument and learn that African Americans — free and enslaved — lived and worked here at the same time as Paul Revere, John Adams, Abigail Adams, and John Hancock. We were here, too.
Thank you, Roberto
LINKS
Boston Public Art Commission
Boston Globe Article
National Park Service: Copp’s Hill Burying Ground
https://www.nps.gov/places/copp-s-hill-burying-ground.htm
Text of Roberto Mighty Speech at Citywide Press Conference