Standing on broad shoulders

Mentoring Murals and the artists selected to participate in it by GGHMS, N+T, and a committee of local Black artists all come from a long line of Black artists who have shaped the Boston art scene, in particular Roxbury and Dorchester, for over a century.

From the 1960s to today, local artists such as Dana Chandler, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Sharon Dunn, and others have registered the neighborhood’s significance as a center of Black culture. During the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s, the neighborhood’s walls became the fulcrum of powerful murals, starting a tradition that continues to this day. Notable examples include “Africa is the Beginning,” by Gary Rickson (1969), Dana Chandler’s “Knowledge is Power” (c. 1973), “Faces of Dudley” by Mike Womble (1995, reprised 2015), “Roxbury Love,” by Ricardo “Deme5” Gomez and Thomas “Kwest” Burns (2016-2020), and “Breathe Life 3” by Rob “Problak” Gibbs (2019) for Now + There. (The wall at 345 Blue Hill Ave is catty-corner from Gibbs’s first in the “Breathe Life” series.)

Murals, bringing diverse representations of Black life and culture, have popped up across Dorchester in recent years. These artworks emerge atop the foundation of African American scene painting from the 1930s and 40s. In particular, painter Allan Rohan Crite “biographer of urban African-American life in Boston,” nurtured a generation of Black artists, known as “The Boston Collective” to depict their daily lives, as well as Black narratives, as a way of claiming space and broadening cultural representation. Crite mentees include Mentoring Murals’ Goodnight (rotation one June-September 2021) and Johnetta Tinker (December 2021-March 2022).

Cover image: Gary Rickson, Africa is the Beginning, 1969.