Reckoning with History: Art, Landscape, and Memory

Margaret A. Burnham is University Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law. At Northeastern she is director of Reparations and Restorative Justice Initiatives, faculty co-director of the Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR), and Director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, (CRRJ). She has led investigations into racial violence in the Jim Crow era and other historical failures of the criminal justice system. Burnham serves as co-chairperson of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board, a federal board charged with reviewing, and rendering public, government records of racially motivated incidents that occurred between 1940 and 1979. In 2023, Burnham was honored with a Mass Humanities Governor’s Award for her “dedication to exploring history, illuminating truth and confronting injustice in order to protect civil and human rights locally, nationally and internationally. Burnham’s book By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners (Norton, 2022) won numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Hurston/Wright Book Award. A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow-era violence, the book reveals the legal apparatus that sustained Jim Crow and focuses on its enduring legacy.

Dr. Karilyn Crockett’s research focuses on large-scale land use changes in twentieth century American cities and examines the social and geographic implications of structural poverty and racial formations. Karilyn’s book People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making (UMASS Press 2018) investigates a 1960s era grassroots movement to halt urban extension of the U.S. interstate highway system and the geographic and political changes in Boston that resulted. In 2019 this book was named one of the “ten best books of the decade” by the Boston Public Library Association of Librarians. Karilyn holds a PhD from the American Studies program at Yale University, a Master of Science in Geography from the London School of Economics, and a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale Divinity School. She served for four years with the Mayor's Office of Economic Development as the Director of Economic Policy & Research and the Director of Small Business Development for the City of Boston and was later appointed the City of Boston's first Chief of Equity, a Cabinet-level position Mayor Walsh established to embed equity and racial justice into all City planning and operations. She is a professor of urban history, public policy and planning at MIT and currently leads the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in a partnership with the Boston Federal Reserve Bank to revisit the 2015 “Color of Wealth'' report on closing the racial wealth gap. 

Steve Locke (b.1963) was born in Cleveland, OH and lives and works in the Hudson Valley, NY. Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, Locke’s practice critically engages with the Western canon to interrogate the connections between desire, identity, and violence. Locke’s works are in the collections of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MA; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA, among others. He is the recipient of many grants and awards, including the Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2022); the Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2020); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2014); the LEF Contemporary Work Fund Grant (2009); and the Art Matters Foundation Award (2007).

Steve Locke, 2021: Photo: Ross Collab

Lee Pelton is the CEO & President of The Boston Foundation, one of the nation’s leading philanthropic organizations with $1.8 billion in assets. He joined the Foundation in June 2021, after a long career in academia, most recently serving as President of Emerson College (2011-2021) and Willamette University (1998-2011). Pelton began his academic career at Harvard University, where he earned a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Languages with an academic focus on 19th-century British prose and poetry. Under his leadership, Pelton has positioned the Boston Foundation, one of the nation's first and most influential community foundations, as an agent for social change, by centering equity in its programs, grantmaking and civic leadership. The Foundation’s defining ambition is to achieve equity, which involves acknowledging and then seeking to eliminate the structural and underlying causes of outcome disparities for historically marginalized communities. A signature Boston Foundation program is its Racial Wealth Partnership, established in late 2022, as part of the Boston Foundation’s commitment to close racial wealth gaps in Greater Boston and the region by expanding homeownership for people of color. Throughout his career, Pelton has combined authentic leadership, civic engagement, and a deep commitment to social justice with his skill and vision for growing institutional capacity and effectiveness. He has been awarded three honorary degrees and is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions for educational excellence and social justice, including, A Living Legend by the Boston Museum of African American History (2021), and the Governor’s Award from Mass Humanities (2020). In 2023, he ranked #3 on Boston Magazine’s annual list of the most influential people in Boston, following Maura Healey, the newly elected governor of the Commonwealth and Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

Sara Zewde is founding principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm in New York City practicing landscape, urbanism, and public art. Named to Architectural Digest's AD100 and an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York, the firm is celebrated for its design methods that sync culture, ecology, and craft. In parallel with practice, Sara serves as Assistant Professor of Practice at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is currently writing a book on her research retracing Frederick Law Olmsted's journeys through the Slave South. Sara holds a master’s of landscape architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a master’s of city planning from MIT, and a BA in sociology and statistics from Boston University.