Artist Voices: Reflections from Ruth Henry on the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute’s Peace Poles Project

In the Artist Voices series, NEFA connects with grantees to learn more about the impact of the grant on their work. The Louis D. Brown Peace Institute received a Public Art for Spatial Justice Grant in 2023 to support their Peace Poles project. In the following blog post, you’ll read reflections from Ruth Henry, the Teaching Artist in Residence at the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute who originally conceived of the project as a way to transform community response to violence by honoring those we have lost. 

Public Art for Spatial Justice aims to support public artmaking that helps us see, feel, experience and imagine spatial justice now, while we are still on this journey towards realizing more just futures for our public spaces and public culture.

The human heart is a powerful organ; it is amazing how much sadness and joy it can hold at once, how much pain and healing can coexist in any given moment. The dream seed that led to the creation of the Peace Trail began with shared grief. It began with the 2005 murder of Dion Emmanuel Taylor, a beautiful young artist who I worked with closely, and with many years of deep friendship and love I shared with his family ever since. It began with joint prayers for a Peace Trail offered by Dion’s older sister Stacy and I at his gravesite, at the street pole where he was murdered, and at my thesis exhibition at MassArt in 2019. Then Stacy died suddenly in 2022. Chaplain Clementina Chéry of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute brings this Peace Trail dream seed to life in honor of both Dion and Stacy’s memories.  Sooner than I could have imagined, NEFA said yes to watering the seed and granting us the funding, support and courage to grow this dream forward through the Public Art for Spatial Justice program (PASJ).

The Louis D. Brown Peace Institute (LDBPI) is a center of Healing, Teaching and Learning for families and communities impacted by murder, trauma, grief, and loss. This center, where I work as a Teaching Artist-in-Residence, works to transform society’s response to homicide so that all families are treated with dignity and compassion. Central to this work are our seven principles of peace:- Love, Unity, Faith, Hope, Courage, Justice and Forgiveness. The invitation to try on these principles offers us each a pathway to peace and healing.

Working with the Peace Institute, our PASJ cohort of muralists, educators, arts therapists, and survivors guided families of murdered loved ones and young people affected by community murders in the creation of seven inaugural peace poles — one for each of our seven principles of peace. Participants were invited to respond creatively to prompts about these principles on artistic elements that were then integrated into the collective poles. This first round of poles now lines our Mother’s Day Walk for Peace route in Dorchester, MA.

It has been an honor and a joy to witness the powerful moments of connection and healing that our community has shared throughout Peace Trail engagement workshops and pole installations. Participants offer beautiful reflections and testimonies about the importance of holding up our murdered loved ones’ memories in the public sphere while coming together to cultivate cycles of peace in their names. Tears flow — and so do smiles, music, and food.

One reason these activities have engaged our community so effectively is because visceral artmaking activities offer a space for people to move through pain and complexity together, allowing them to feel connected, valued, and part of something larger. The invitation for participants to creatively express and combine what is on their hearts offers us a collective way to honor our loved ones’ legacies while simultaneously building individual participants’ confidence in their own purpose, agency, and creativity.

So much of the beauty and power of art lies in its making through the communities we build, strengthen, and heal as we create. Still, too, there is the after: the visual reminder of time spent together as well as the sense of pride and belonging that comes each time participants see their final creation, bring families and friends, and share the parts they worked on. And the ripples: the people who pass by these creations, feel their day brightened by color, their purpose renewed by a word or phrase, their commitment to peace strengthened.

NEFA’s PASJ grant allowed a long-time dream seed to begin to grow to fruition, and as our grant draws to a close, I am happy to share that the Peace Trail’s growth will continue. Our inaugural trail has helped us to build new partnerships with the Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, Office of Youth Engagement & Advancement, and Public Health Commission, as well as with Boston Public Schools, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Embrace Boston and Mass Design, among others. These partners share our commitment to expanding the trail and have committed resources and collaborative visioning to ensure this expansion. Over the next two years we will be creating seven additional survivor-led poles across the city, two youth-led poles in front of schools, a virtual storymap of participants’ testimonies to be linked via QR coding to physical trail markers, and a nomination process for additional public artworks to be included in the trail.

I first envisioned this project to honor someone I myself had lost to gun violence but I soon realized that I had a lot to learn before being ready to take it on. Learning together in community about what would work and what wouldn’t, readied me to move the project from idea to reality. Especially when working with such sensitive stories, it is important not to rush into an individual vision head-on, but to allow time and space for it to become a collective vision. A favorite phrase echoes in the Peace Trail’s unfolding: “I will not rush my dreams, but neither will I ever stop working towards them.” 

This process has expanded my ability to hold space for others’ powerful visions and stories and to find new ways to weave them together. Logistically, it has also taught me a great deal about the permitting process in my city, one of the biggest hurdles at the onset. It has taught me not to give up, not to be afraid to ask for help, and just how grateful I am for my team, who always stood by me and helped me take a deep breath and try again whenever we hit an obstacle. I have also learned a lot about the weather resistance of different materials and how to mentor other artists through the design process to choose long-lasting materials and engaging prompts for community engagement.

Most importantly, perhaps, the Peace Trail has deepened my own commitment and thinking about spatial justice. As our local survivor community readies itself to take our advocacy to the national level to call for our shared right to heal, I am reminded how important it is to bring this right to heal to our public spaces, to our streets. The deep heart work of survivors is something our whole community can learn from, and I am grateful that this seed is now growing.

I invite you, too, to plant and nurture your own dream seeds through NEFA’s Public Art for Spatial Justice opportunities. Share your dream seeds with your community and envision how they might grow together. And perhaps, if you feel so called, invite in some of our peace principles to help you get there. For me, today, I offer you Courage, Love, and Faith. May your dream seeds grow strong.