“The Street is Memory”: Resisting Boston’s Urban Removal

Arielle Gray (she/her) is a Black queer writer and artist currently based in Boston. She is a reporter and arts engagement producer at WBUR, Boston's NPR station, where she also reports on Black and Brown communities through the lens of art and culture. Recently, her writing has appeared in NPR, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Boston Art Review and ZORA Magazine and her artwork has been featured in the Boston Globe and Boston Art Review. In 2022, she conceived and executed the Future Archive Project at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a community audio and photography exhibition highlighting Black LGBTQIA+ individuals in the Boston area. In 2021, she co-curated Combahee's Radical Call, a multi-modal exhibit exploring Black feminism in Boston at the Boston Center for the Arts. She is a 2020 Create Well Fund awardee and a 2021 A4A artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts.

Arielle Gray Instagram: @bonitafrobum
 

Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, PhD, is chief executive officer of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), a community development corporation dedicated to empowering and engaging individuals and families to improve their lives through high-quality affordable housing, education, and arts programs. Under Calderón-Rosado’s leadership since 2003, IBA has become the largest Latino-led nonprofit organization in Greater Boston. It controls a portfolio of 667 affordable housing units in its South End Villa Victoria development and in Roxbury and Mattapan.

Sheila A. Dillon is the Chief of Housing for the City of Boston and the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing (MOH). As the Chief of Housing, she is a member of Mayor Michelle Wu’s Cabinet, and a key advisor to the Mayor on housing issues in Boston. In her role at MOH, she oversees several divisions which include: the Boston Home Center, which helps Bostonians create and sustain generational wealth by becoming homeowners or repairing the home they already own; the Office of Housing Stability, which assists Boston’s renters with housing assistance, including rental relief and eviction prevention services; Neighborhood Housing and Development, which focuses on the creation and preservation of income-restricted housing in Boston; Supportive Housing, which provides funding for housing and supportive services for Boston’s unhoused residents, those at risk of homelessness, and housing for people with HIV/AIDS; Real Estate Management and Sales, which is responsible for the City’s tax foreclosed and surplus property; and the newly created Office of Urban Agriculture, GrowBoston, which seeks to increase local food production and support Boston’s food producers.

Sheila Dillon Instagram: @sheila.a.dillon
 

Professor Jovonna Jones teaches 20th and 21st century African American cultural production. She specializes in visual studies and photography, space and place, and Black feminist criticism. Her writing on Black visual culture has been published in Aperture, Souls, Callaloo, Southern Cultures, and MCA Chicago. Her current project, The Last Thanksgiving at West Rutland Square, blends family history, spatial study, and visual archives to resurface Black life in Boston’s South End in the wake of displacement. She is also at work on a visual and architectural study of Black women’s rooming houses, exploring how these sites—and their contemporary traces—materialize and memorialize Black feminist world-building in the early 20th century. Professor Jones is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Provost's Fellows Program at Dartmouth College. She holds her PhD and MA from Harvard University and BA from Emory University.