Alondra will lead a poetry-writing workshop for teens, ages 13-19 years old.

Alondra will lead a poetry-writing workshop for teens, ages 13-19 years old.

Join us at the Speaker’s Corner on City Hall Plaza (near the flag poles, across from the Government Center T station) to hear readings from the poets whose work was selected for this year’s Mayor’s Poetry Program! Starting this month, their poems will be on display at Boston City Hall through April 2026.

Join us for a new play by the Dorchester Weather Theatre Collective!

Produced and devised in collaboration with a community of local neighborhood artists and activists, The Lot Next Door explores issues and dynamics at the intersection of community development, environmental justice, and social resilience through the retelling of a true story in which residents fight a proposed development lot on the corner of Woodrow Ave and Norfolk St in Dorchester.

Join us for Boston Chinatown: Stories on Our Streets produced by CHUANG Stage in partnership with Company One Theatre.

Based on the community engagement and oral history work done by C1’s artists, PlayLab alumni, and frequent collaborators of the 2021 Boston Chinatown Musical, this new musical uplifts Chinatown’s history, vibrancy, and perseverance in the face of gentrification and racial violence.

We Were Here Too by Roberto Mighty, in partnership with the Freedom Trail® Foundation and Old North Illuminated, revives the memory of Boston’s colonial African-Americans, many of whom lived and worked in what is today’s North End. The project can be experienced worldwide via an online multimedia website, and locally via augmented reality in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground

The project launches Wednesday May 21, 2025 at 1:00pm at Copps Hill Burying Ground with a dedication and a guided historical tour by the artist. An artist talk will be held on Wednesday May 28, 2025 at 5:30pm at the historic Old North Church, hosted by Old North Illuminated. Events are free, but accommodations are limited, so please sign up as soon as possible with the links above. Light refreshments will be provided. This project is funded by the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-Monument Initiative and The Mellon Foundation. 

This innovative project honors the lives of colonial-era African Americans in Boston’s North End—many of whom were interred, or are believed to have been buried, at Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, established in 1659 and recognized as Boston’s largest colonial cemetery.

This project honors historical figures, including Phillis Wheatley Peters, in 1773 the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry; Prince Hall, an abolitionist who fought in the Revolutionary War and founded Prince Hall Masonry; and Onesimus, an African who was instrumental in bringing knowledge of smallpox inoculation to America.

Blending history with technology, We Were Here Too invites the public to engage with a layered storytelling experience. The project features augmented reality, video interviews with historians and community voices, digital illustrations, archival images, voice performances, and historical content drawn from museum collections and archives around the world.

Roberto says, “I hope folks will experience this exhibit and learn that African Americans – free and enslaved – were living and working in Boston at the same time as Paul Revere, Abigail Adams and John Hancock. We were here, too.”

Funded by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture through a grant from the Mellon Foundation, “We Were Here Too” is presented in partnership with the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, The Historic Burying Grounds Initiative, the Freedom Trail® Foundation and Old North Illuminated.

Join artist Ying Ye in this final activation, a communal gathering where participants will collectively transform soybeans into tofu through their labor symbolizing, acts of cultural healing.

Sprouts of Resilience: A Journey from Seed to Tofu, brings Chinese traditional aesthetics of gardening, street food tricycles, and collective food-making gatherings to activate Chinatown’s public spaces and foster cultural resilience and belonging.

Programmed in conjunction with the exhibit Celebrations of Perseverance: Public Art in Chinatown, 2024-2025 on view March 20 - June 20, 2025.

To kick off Boston’s Patriots’ Day weekend celebrations in partnership with the City of Boston, Old North Illuminated will stage a free reading of the hit play Revolution’s Edge behind Old North Church on Paul Revere Mall. Mayor Michelle Wu and other local officials and guests will give remarks to commemorate this historic anniversary.

Written by Patrick Gabridge and produced by Plays in Place, Revolution’s Edge is a gripping 45-minute historical drama that ran at Old North Church in the summers of 2023 and 2024. Guests will be greeted with live music before brief speaking remarks welcome the crowd and introduce the 45-minute costumed read of the play. Old North’s lanterns will light up soon after the play’s conclusion, at the beginning of the reenactment of Revere’s row across the Charles River.

ASL interpretation offered.