LAWRENCE:
BIPOC & IMMIGRANT ART ROOTS GREW IN INDUSTRIAL SEDIMENT
By Sara Valentina Alvarez Echavarria • May 04, 2024
Lawrence, Massachusetts, a sanctuary and home to multigenerational immigrants and BIPOC neighborhoods, has centered public spaces and art as mediums to build communities and maintain a recollection of a collective identity throughout time. It is not uncommon for public art to be part of community identity; art also has a tight relationship to public memory—how communities remember themselves—in all its forms. In the United States, significant exponents of public art prove that history becomes public while shaping a new language to tell history.
The Statue of Liberty, globally recognized, The Embrace in the 1965 Freedom Plaza commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and even locally crafted pieces such as San Francisco’s Secret Mosaic Staircase, have taken distinction for the country’s essence. All are representative and contextual to the history of where they are located. However, these are not the sole forms of public art; community murals, sculptures, memorials, purposeful architectural designs, performances, and collaborative gathering spaces are also public art.
Lawrence, for instance, is a city that occupies the space between the walls of its industrial past and the canvases that occupy these same walls in the present. This city’s duality is driven by its people, who continue an innate legacy of constant creation, as the continuation of the resistance back in the 1912 Bread & Roses strike.
SEDIMENTS
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Lawrence was founded solely for textile production, but the early immigrant laborers built a culture of expression and community foundations that could connect their different backgrounds. The Immigrant City book states that in the early 1900s, Lawrence’s neighborhoods were alive with the languages and traditions of families from Ireland, Quebec, Syria, Italy, Portugal, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. They were spinners, weavers, loom-fixers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and grandparents.
According to Kathy Flynn, Lawrence History Center’s Head Researcher, the Irish population was a prime example of art and architectural expression. As Flynn retells their story, “Irish were not included as Lawrence evolved as a more sophisticated city, and they were often seen as uneducated, poor, and not fitting among the other immigrants.” The unwelcoming feeling was mostly derived from the Irish community’s lack of wish to Americanize. But their response was to build St. Mary of the Assumption Parish, a place to gather as a community and celebrate the traditions they brought to Lawrence.
For marginalized communities, the essentiality of art available to all often extends to the constant strive to beautify shared spaces and engage in collective growth and remembrance to define who they are and what they have lived. In Lawrence, art evolved into a language to redefine their always-changing social context. From massive migration waves, industrial labor rights, and population diversification, the city has ingrained its junctures publicly.
From the early 1950s through the late 1970s, Lawrence started to give form to its modern identity with its first Latin American immigrant wave after several decades of relatively slow immigration. After this wave, the population increased, and urban renewal and redevelopment took place, resulting in the demolition of whole neighborhoods and the departure of multigenerational families. Later, despite the negative concerns, in 1978, the Immigrant City Archives (currently known as the Lawrence History Center) was founded under the leadership of German immigrant Eartha Dengler.
RESISTANCE
Within less than a decade apart, in 1986, Lawrence Heritage State Park opened, and the Bread and Roses Heritage Labor Day Festival was established to honor the 1912 textile workers’ strike. The new definitions of public spaces quickly influenced the community. During the early 90s, the reorganization of Lawrence Neighborhoods Association increased and became more active, cleaning public areas, beautifying neighborhoods, and setting up neighborhood watches to combat crime. Consequently, there was an emerging space for community art.
In 1993, Helen Tory, Linda Maddox, and Leslie Costello founded the Essex Art Center. They first opened a non-profit art studio on Essex Street in downtown Lawrence that offered classes to the community. Still standing, it has inspired and sustained growth and learning for a diverse community of artists in Greater Lawrence, with classes, events, and exhibitions harnessing the power of art to transform “their communities and themselves.”
One of their most recent revitalization architectural expressions added to Lawrence was the Buckey Transportation Center transformation and beautification by Elevated Thought, the city’s most contemporary non-profit organization. The idea emanated in 2008 from a poem and a mural addressing social issues and demanding solutions, then officially founded in 2010. Elevated Thought believes that all young people should and could have access to wide-ranging, creative, and alternative learning opportunities. After their official foundation, they ran the first art and social justice-based workshop, their first official mural in 2011, and their first scholarship award in 2012. Since then, they have strengthened their mission: serving, inspiring, and building community through art.
Listen up.
Bread & Roses: Elevated Artists
This audio story is part of the multi-layer project LAWRENCE: BIPOC & immigrant art roots grew in industrial sediment, that seeks to register the connection between public art and public memory in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Celeste Cruz (@hechoporcela) is an Artist, curator, and archivist who works as part of a non-profit art organization (@2elevated_thought) in the city where she grew up and where she is breaking ground for her community artists.
After all, Immigrant City Archives, Bread and Roses, Heritage State Park, Essex Art Center, and Elevated Thought have contributed with equity, collective enrichment, open-mindedness, and willingness to uplift the city, their identity, and memory. Their work confirms the essentiality and impacts of public art and public spaces, especially in cities like Lawrence, Massachusetts, with a dense history and diverse essence. Which endlessly evolved and moved through the spheres of industrialization and became a dwelling for immigrants and BIPOC communities that flourished with art.
In the present, according to the United States Census Bureau (2021), 41.3% of the nearly 88,508 resident population is foreign-born, 82.3% identify as Hispanic or Latino (with the majority being of Dominican and Puerto Rican heritage), and nearly 79.9% speak a language other than English at home. Hence, after many shifting demographics, Lawrence remains a city of immigrants and art to hold their memory: a gateway community and home to a young, growing, striving immigrant population.
CANVAS
“LAWRENCE IS A MOTHER.”
— Celeste Cruz