Virginia-based artist LaRissa Rogers wants your dirt — literally. Along with the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, she recently announced an Open Call for Soil, inviting anyone in Boston and beyond to contribute soil from spaces meaningful to them, for a sculpture planned for The Greenway’s North End parks. The sculpture will engage with the story of Zipporah Potter Atkins, who was the first known Black landowner in Boston in 1670 , at a time when most Africans were enslaved and women didn’t own property.
The piece will depict a house structure, and the soil will support its adobe-brick foundation. Director and Curator of Public Art at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy Audrey Lopez says she first approached Rogers in November 2021 at a BIPOC craft fair in Los Angeles. Rogers was selling photographic prints of a prior exhibition she’d done in Virginia featuring archival family photos and amaranth emerging from plinths of soil.
“I was really drawn to [her] approach to land, to soil,” Lopez said in a Zoom interview, “that it could be something that both held grief and harmful histories, but also something that held the capacity for life; to generate new visions of what our relationship, and specifically Black and brown communities’ relationship to land can be.” Three years later, their initial conversation is coming to fruition, not as a memorial, but as a catalyst for community building, as various non-linear histories connect with one another through soi.