Fields Corner bench art will feature objects that remind residents of home

Krystle Brown

Krystle Brown recalls a childhood filled with housing instability. Before that, Brown’s mother, who grew up and lived in Fields Corner from the 1950s through the 1970s, struggled to get by. That sense of restlessness is what’s driving her daughter’s latest creation as a public artist.  

“I’m 34 and I still have anxiety about, like, I might lose my home,” said Brown in a recent interview. “I own a condo now, but I will always have that anxiety.”

Brown, who is an artist at Now + There, a public art curation program in partnership with the Boston Public Library, is working on a “memory-driven” bench, a piece of art in Dorchester that aims to convey issues of displacement in the Fields Corner community. It’s also conjures memories of childhood for Brown.

The project, called “Slán Abhaile,” an Irish phrase meaning “Safe Home,” will be located at Doherty-Gibson Playground in Fields Corner. “The bench will be a repository where the neighborhood collective memory of home is stored through photography and oral storytelling,’’ library officials said. 

This month, Brown invited residents from Fields Corner and Dorchester at large to bring photographs of what they define as home – maybe, among other things, their favorite neighborhood spot, their house, or family/friends who make them feel at home. They can also bring small objects that represent home and that they would like to have photographed for the project.

“Slán Abhaile is a beautiful homage to [Brown’s] mother’s roots, while exploring the ways we forge community amid the precarity of housing in a gentrifying city,” said Dory Klein, the community history and digitization specialist at the Boston Public Library, in an email. 

Along with economic disparity, the inequality of space can be felt in the community in various ways and Brown aims to combat this by making the bench accessible to anyone for any reason.

Leah Triplett Harrington, a participant in the Now + There program, said Brown is an “extremely empathetic artist who makes community central to each one of their projects.” 

Accessibility to public spaces is also important to Brown, who suffers from an autoimmune disease, which Brown described as being “like an arthritis that affects my spine.” She wants the bench to help people with similar conditions by providing a place to rest in public.

“I want kids and teenagers to also feel like this project is for them, too,” she said, “because my mom experienced all these issues as a child and I did, too, growing up.”

Library officials said Brown’s work aims to heal generational and social divides, starting in the neighborhood her mother and grandparents called home.

This story was published as part of a collaboration with Boston University’s School of Journalism in the College of Communication. The student journalist is a member of a Reporting in Depth class taught by former Boston Globe reporter Meghan Irons.


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