Black Family Displacement on the East Side Providence

The Music Mural, 2017

The Mt Hope Dialogues for Community Action along with the establishment of a Mt Hope Arts Collaborative began as a series of telling the stories of Mt Hope and the Eastside. We looked for ways to tell the stories of Mt Hope through various art media. Hannah Resseger, rap artist, aka B-Mor 7, expressed a dream to paint the history of Mt Hope on the wall of the Cypress Street underpass. In 2017, Arts Culture and Tourism gave us a grant to paint a mural. We went through a community participatory process with surveys and interviews to determine the theme of the mural. The history of the music bubbled up with stories of the Celebrity Club on Randall Street as well as those in the music business that came from the neighborhood such as Billy Osborne.

Its unveiling and intergenerational storytelling program was covered by Steve Ahlquist, in 2017. The Music Mural was revised in 2019 and was a revisioning of the original mural. Story of the revamped Music Mural within an article about Providence murals can be found in in July's edition of The Providence Monthly.

Speeches and performances at the dedication ceremony of the Mt. Hope Music mural on September 16, 2017.

The Land Acknowledgement Mural, 2019

The Land Acknowledgement mural on the Billy Taylor Park overpass was designed in response to 2017 communities desire to see the telling of Native American history. The muralist, Deborah Morehead-Spears, the muralist for the land acknowledgement mural was covered by WPRI during the making of the mural.