Roxbury is a neighborhood within the City of Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
The Museum of Fine Arts is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. With more than 1.2 million visitors a year, it is the 79th-most-visited art museum in the world as of 2022.
Melnea Agnes Cass was an American community and civil rights activist. She was deeply involved in many community projects and volunteer groups in the South End and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston and helped found the Boston local of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. She was active in the fight to desegregate Boston public schools, as a board member and as president of the Boston chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a young woman, Cass also assisted women with voter registration after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She was affectionately known as the "First Lady of Roxbury."
Roxbury Community College (RCC) is a public community college in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. RCC offers associate degrees in arts, and sciences, as well as certificates. RCC has transfer agreements with Curry College, Northeastern University, Emerson College, Lesley University, and other four-year schools. RCC credits transfer to all public colleges and universities in Massachusetts through the MassTransfer Program.
Edmund Barry Gaither is known for his education and museum-related activities.
Pheoris West was an African-American artist. He was an Associate Professor Emeritus Ohio State University College of the Arts, where he joined the faculty in 1976.
Elma Ina Lewis was an American arts educator and the founder of The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts and the National Center of Afro-American Artists. In 1981 she was one of the first recipients of the newly organized MacArthur Fellows Grant, in 1981, and in 1983 was awarded a Presidential Medal for the Arts by President Ronald Reagan. She is also an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Abbotsford, now the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, is a historic house at 300 Walnut Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The museum is dedicated to black visual arts heritage worldwide, and presents historical and contemporary exhibitions in many media, including painting, sculpture, graphics, photography and decorative arts. The museum is operated by the National Center of Afro-American Artists.
Freedom House is a nonprofit community-based organization in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Freedom House is located in an area sometimes referred to as Grove Hall that lies along Blue Hill Ave. at the border between the Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston. Although it was historically identified with Roxbury, Freedom House currently refers to itself as being located either in Dorchester or in Grove Hall.
Muriel Sutherland Snowden was the founder and co-director of Freedom House, a community improvement center in Roxbury, Massachusetts. She is, together with her husband Otto P. Snowden, a major figure in Boston history and activism.
Thomas Sills was a painter and collagist and a participant in the New York Abstract Expressionist movement. At the peak of his career in the 1960s and 1970s, his work was widely shown in museums. His work was regularly featured in art journals and is in museum collections.
Otto Phillip Snowden (1914–1995) was an influential 20th-century leader in Boston's African American community. Snowden and his wife, Muriel S. Snowden, were co-directors and founders of Freedom House in Roxbury from 1949 until their retirement in 1984.
Roxbury Memorial High School is a defunct four-year public high school serving students in ninth through twelfth grades. Originally founded as Roxbury High School, the school was situated at 205 Townsend Street, in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States from 1926 until its closure in 1960.
Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts (ELSFA) was founded in 1950 by Elma Lewis. The school, based in Roxbury, Boston, provided classes in a variety of artistic, social, and cultural topics, including art, dance, drama, music, and costuming. Lewis founded the school with the intention of promoting "programs of cultural enrichment for the benefit of deprived children" in Roxbury, Dorchester and throughout the Greater Boston area. The school closed at its Elm Hill Avenue location following an arson fire in 1985.
The Boston Women's Heritage Trail is a series of walking tours in Boston, Massachusetts, leading past sites important to Boston women's history. The tours wind through several neighborhoods, including the Back Bay and Beacon Hill, commemorating women such as Abigail Adams, Amelia Earhart, and Phillis Wheatley. The guidebook includes seven walks and introduces more than 200 Boston women.
John Wilson (1922–2015) was an American lithographer, sculptor, painter, muralist, and art teacher whose art was driven by the political climate of his time. Wilson was best known for his works portraying themes of social justice and equality.
Ekua Holmes is an American mixed-media artist, children's book illustrator, and arts organization professional. Holmes' primary method of art making is mixed media collage, by layering newspaper, photos, fabric, and other materials to create colorful compositions. Many of these works evoke her childhood in Roxbury's Washington Park neighborhood in Boston, MA.
Robert Freeman is an American painter and educator known for his large-scale, figurative oil paintings titled Black Tie, offering commentary on the personal conflict Freeman felt as African-Americans settled into middle-class life following the racial tensions of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1997, Freeman was awarded the Boston University Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Visual Arts and in 2020, Freeman was named the newest member of the Boston Arts Commission.
William "Bill" Lowell Howell was a graphic designer, painter, illustrator, set designer and photographer. He was an early member of the Weusi Artist Collective, a group of artists who helped birth the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. He was art director for The New Lafayette Theatre in New York and its Black Theater magazine. He co-founded the Pamoja Studio Gallery in New York in 1967.
John Andrew Ross was an African American jazz musician, composer, musical director, and choral conductor. Ross was born and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts and remained in the Boston, Massachusetts area for his whole life. While growing up in Roxbury, Ross's home was frequently visited by his father's college roommate, Langston Hughes. The relationship shared between Hughes and Ross would later manifest as Ross becoming the musical director of Langston Hughes's gospel play "Black Nativity". Acquaintances of Ross, recall him as a welcoming man with a glowing presence and a knack for fine foods.
