Holding Space Together: Fellow LaRissa Rogers Opens New Installation in Boston

LaRissa Rogers, a 2023-2024 visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, has made a two-thirds-scale replica of Atkins’s house, installed on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston through the end of October.

Zipporah Potter Atkins was the first Black woman to own a home in Boston. She was born in 1645 to enslaved parents and purchased her house in 1670. Rogers’s work honors Atkins and her legacy while drawing attention to troubling aspects of African-American history, including the transatlantic slave trade and the more recent displacement of homeowners to build the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway.

Rogers speaks of “spaces of possibility” regarding Atkins’s house. That a 17th-century Black woman in America might own a home seems implausible. But at the time of Atkins’s birth, the law in the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared that children born to slaves were free.

The design, materials, and site of Rogers’s public sculpture, titled Going to Ground, echo with poetic and historical significance. The details of Atkins’s story are recorded in the sculpture’s foundation. Its dimensions, 25 by 29 feet, correspond to Atkins’s age when she purchased the house (25), and the number of years she owned it (29). Constructed of modular steel, the sculpture is an open structure in the shape of a modest two-story house. Based on renderings from historical records of Atkins’s home, it features rectangular four-pane windows, a solid door, and a chimney.

Rogers went to the ground herself to create the foundation of her sculpture. She used oyster shells collected during her time at the Fine Arts Work Center to create a limestone mixture called tabby, a precursor to concrete.

“I wanted to incorporate that because there’s such a tie to tabby in the enslaved communities, especially on the East Coast,” says Rogers. She was also thinking about a relationship to land not tied to the commodification of labor. “There’s a rich history of freedmen’s towns and Black beaches,” she says. “I wanted to bring in these places of play and joy.”

The foundation is also made of earthen blocks that include soil contributed by members of the Boston community. Rogers hosted an “open call for soil,” asking people to submit soil samples from personally meaningful places, “a communal gesture in open-hearted labor and Black placemaking.” She received more than 100 submissions.