On August 8, the Reckonings Project hosted the first Story Tent installation on behalf of Boston Jazz Square Activation at the Charles River Jazz Festival. Two conversations — the first between Karen Cowan and Ron Mahdi and the second between Bonnie Johnson and Zahili Zamora — probed the deep history of Boston’s jazz music scene, and the engaged audience took the opportunity to ask the speakers questions.

Marking the Boston Jazz Foundation’s 6th annual free festival, this year’s Charles River Jazz Festival was held at the Hatch Memorial Shell and featured a lineup chock-full of extraordinary musical acts, including (but not limited to) Seba Molnar, Tyreek McDole, and the headliner Ghost-Note. The conversations at the Story Tent took place as the music on the festival’s main stage died down for set-up between sets.

The Charles River Jazz Festival’s mainstage at the Hatch Shell.

The first Story Tent conversation revealed the speakers’ connections with legendary Boston pianist and band leader Sabby Lewis. Karen Cowan, who is one of Lewis’s daughters, worked as an administrator and builder of special programs at Boston Public School for 36 years. With her mother Anna Lewis, she built Sabby Lewis’s archive, which she donated (with support from the Reckonings Project) to Berklee Archives. This summer, the Sabby Lewis Papers have opened to the public. Cowan’s conversation partner, Ron Mahdi, is a Boston-based bassist, recording artist, clinician, and retired professor emeritus at Berklee College of Music. After playing with Lewis early in his career in the 1980s, he has performed with artists such as Chet Baker, Bill Pierce, Kevin Eubanks, Roy Hargrove, Art Farmer, and George Coleman.

Mahdi recalled meeting Lewis through musicians who had performed with Lewis in Boston since the swing era. Mahdi went on to play as one of Lewis’s bassists for over a decade. Under Lewis’s mentorship, Mahdi learned that making notes swing — and Lewis smile — were the litmus tests for a jazz musician. Lewis treated the band like a family, which Mahdi sees as a key to his success: “The family vibe was so special … What a way to make a young person feel welcome and a part of something bigger than they actually are … For anyone that came in the band, whether they realized it or not, there was mentoring because of how he played.” As an educator, Mahdi aims to impart such lessons onto his students.

After leading her band in a moving early afternoon set on the festival’s main stage, pianist, composer, bandleader, arranger, and educator Zahili Zamora sat down for a conversation with 90.5 WCIN Public Radio host Bonnie Johnson for the second Story Tent installation. The two reflected on the festival’s theme of “The Revolution Will be Improvised” and how it relates to Zamora’s Cuban origins. Zamora said, “There’s something about that musical freedom, without the awareness of what it really represented historically. That’s that first thing of digging in, checking your story, your history, and realizing why that groove just makes you cry, makes you move. It’s just one note sometimes, but it’s a note that has so much emotion to it. And that’s a revolution in itself.” Zamora added, “For me, as an artist, now the biggest revolution is to be able to not be afraid to express just the essence of who I am.”

You can watch the full recordings of Session One and Session Two.

From left to right: Dzidzor Azaglo, Zahili Zamora, Bonnie Johnson, and Uta Poiger.

Throughout the day, festival attendees visited the Jazz Square Activation poster exhibit at the Story Tent to learn more about the entangled histories of jazz and migration, segregation, gentrification, entrepreneurship, artistic innovation, and activism. The posters feature legendary Boston venues — such as Wally’s Cafe or the Hi-Hat Club — and musicians — including Mae Arnette and Mabel Robinson Simms. Attendees were also invited to pick up new zines about the jazz club LuLu White in the South End and Duke Ellington’s 1966 Sacred Concert at Union Church in Boston, which can be viewed and downloaded at this link.

Festival attendees stop by the Story Tent poster exhibition to learn more about the history of Boston’s jazz scene.

Boston Jazz Square Activation — a coalition between the Boston Jazz Foundation, the Reckonings Project, and the Claremont Neighborhood Association — celebrates the past, present, and future of jazz in Boston. One of Boston Jazz Square Activation’s goals is to capture and preserve the history of the Boston jazz scene’s historical nucleus: the area around Jazz Square at the intersection of Massachusetts and Columbus Avenue.

In October, Jazz Square Activation will honor the 2026 Boston Jazz Luminary at its fourth concert at Union Church. The Boston Jazz Luminary Award recognizes the honoree’s influential role and shining presence in the Boston jazz community. If you are someone, or know someone, who has made an indelible impact on the Boston jazz scene, please submit this form by September 14th. For information on the 2024 and 2025 Boston Jazz Luminaries, Elynor Walcott and Sonny Carrington, click here. For more information on the Jazz Square Activation concert in October, stay tuned.

On July 21, Hidden Histories Artist-in-Residence Lani Asunción hosted a Dragon Head Making Workshop at Northeastern Crossing. Asunción facilitated a workshop with the We Belong Youth Leadership group, which helped construct and add decorative scales to two dragon boat heads. The artworks, created out of abstract materials like empty spray cans and plastic vents, were then transported to the August 1 Fort Point Dragon Boat Festival. At the event, designed to preserve the longstanding tradition of dragon boat festivals, Asunción, alongside Hidden Histories Artist-in-Residence Joanna Tam, extended the opportunity to help further beautify the pieces to event attendees.

The Hidden Histories Artists Residency and workshops are a collaboration between the Reckonings Project, the Center for the Arts, and Gallery 360. The 2025/2026 Hidden Histories Artists-in-Residence, Lani Asunción and Joanna Tam, are two Boston-based interdisciplinary artists whose work engages deeply with social justice, public memory, and historically underrepresented narratives. At their workshops, the artists have invited community members to aid in the creation of new art works and learn about history, based on their research in documents on Asian American history in the Northeastern University Archives.

From August 26 to December 5, Gallery 360 is hosting their joint exhibit “Waves of Hidden Histories: 隱藏歷史的浪潮.” The exhibit, curated by Juliana Barton, features various artworks — including the dragon boat heads — that Asuncion and Tam created during their time in the residency program. The showcased work is a response to the continued erasure of collective memory and neighborhood resilience affecting the diverse Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) diaspora community in Boston. The narratives in the exhibition span from the history of Boston Dragon Boat Festivals since 1979 to movements in the 1980s and 90s through to recent community activism. Beginning September 9, the exhibit expands to include Northeastern Crossing. Please stop by Gallery 360 and Northeastern Crossing, and please join the open house at Gallery 360 on September 17 from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Please watch a video about the exhibition set-up. Please check the Center for the Arts website for upcoming workshops related to the exhibit.

As part of the Reckonings Community Network Series, the Reckonings Project has hosted two workshops this summer and published a toolkit on Curating Community Voices. The aim of these offerings is to help participants conceptualize new interview projects and to present effective approaches to rendering interviews in a digital format. The workshops emphasize the significance of oral histories and their capacity to preserve community voices and histories.

Participants looked at ways of presenting oral history features such as transcripts, audio and video files, time-coded indexes, and biographical information about interview participants. These features are designed to make the long-form content of oral history interviews more accessible and navigable to readers and researchers.

The toolkit, written by Assistant Director of Design & Program Manager, Greg Lord, also helps new and ongoing projects imagine how best to structure the data and content of their own collections for presentation on the web. Like all our work and toolkits, this one has grown from collaborations between community partners, students, staff, and faculty.

Take a look at the sandbox website and an example of an oral history from the West End Museum. Both use the Omeka S Resource Template that the toolkit describes.

In collaboration with Patrice Green from the Schlesinger Library, Dzidzor Azaglo and Uta Poiger will be hosting an Archives Fellowship Hour on November 9th from 6:00 to 8:00pm in the Bruce Bolling Building on how to record and preserve family and community stories and rituals.

You can register for this event at this link.

On May 28, Reckonings Project Community Liaison Dzidzor Azaglo hosted “Remember!: A Chant, Cultural Café” at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA) in conjunction with their “Say it Out Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now” exhibit. AAMARP, or the African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program, is a collection of artists relating to the African American diaspora. Members of the Reckonings team invited people walking through the exhibit to answer two prompts: “Listen closely to the art. What messages are you hearing loudly from the exhibit?” and (in reference to the quote “AAMARP is for everyone”) “Who is included in your ’everyone?’”. Dzidzor Azaglo, as well as AAMARP artist Marlon Forrester and featured artists Thamanai Jeremie on vocals, Toussaint on percussion, and Esuyah Xavier on saxophone, then took the answers to create a call and response chant: they led the audience in the studio for an interactive live session of words, music, and movement.

The event, a collaboration between Tony Van Der Meer, the ICA, and the Reckonings Project, honored the legacy of the Cultural Café program series. The series was started by AAMARP, the program founded in 1977 by Dana C. Chandler Jr. and supported by Northeastern University, which today hosts studio space for 13 artists. Since 2002, the Cultural Café has served as an alternative independent cultural forum for film, music, poetry, and cultural exchange that addresses social issues of people of African descent and their relationships with other cultures.

The work of AAMARP is, in the words of L’Merchie Fraizer, to continue the “mission to preserve and conserve our own aesthetic.” AAMARP artists are fulfilling this mission with work across various mediums.

In Spring 2027, we will continue the conversation on the importance of preserving the work of artists. Stay tuned!

Date: Thu September 17, 2026
Time: 4:00 – 6:00pm
Location: Northeastern University’s Gallery 360, First floor of Curry Student Center

We invite you to attend the open house for the “Waves of Hidden Histories: 隱藏歷史的浪潮” exhibit, hosted by Gallery 360, on September 17. The exhibit, curated by Juliana Barton, features artwork that the 2025/2026 Hidden Histories Artists-in-Residence Lani Asunción and Joanna Tam have created during their time in the residency. The showcased work is a response to the continued erasure of collective memory and neighborhood resilience affecting the diverse Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) diaspora community in Boston.

The exhibit runs from August 26 to December 5, 2026.

Date: Wed September 23 – Thu September 24, 2026
Time: 10:00am – 5:00pm
Location: Shaw-Roxbury Branch of the Boston Public Library, 149 Dudley St

For two days, historians, researchers, community leaders, archivists, and descendants will come together to explore significant yet overlooked stories in American history. Through original research, oral histories, personal narratives, performances, and thought-provoking discussions, the conference examines how Roxbury, Tulsa, and Oak Bluffs became interconnected centers of Black excellence, entrepreneurship, culture, and economic power. The Reckonings Project will participate on Thursday 9/24 with an exhibit on Boston jazz history and a related presentation on Roxbury nightlife at 2:30 pm.

Come help preserve the stories that deserve to be told.

Date: Tue October 6, 2026
Time: 5:30 – 8:30pm
Location: Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building, 2300 Washington St

Join us for an evening of meaningful connection with culture workers contributing to and preserving Boston community histories. This networking event brings together community historians, artists, storytellers, and collectors from across generations. Together we envision how honoring Boston’s rich community histories contributes to a more equitable future.

Along with the members of the Reckonings Team, Becca Berkey and Jackson Jirard from Community Engaged Teaching and Research (CETR) at Northeastern University will facilitate conversations.

Featured panelists include Leland Clark, Jessica Estelle Huggins, and Jaronzie Harris.

Date: Fri October 16, 2026
Time: 9:30am – 4:00pm
Location: Cabral Center, Northeastern University Boston, 40 Leon St

The Sharing Community Histories Showcase fosters practice and knowledge exchanges about community-engaged projects out of the humanities and arts. Talks and posters will feature projects that Boston-area community partners, college teachers and students have co-created. We hope you leave this event both inspired and with a few more Boston-area contacts.

Date: Mon October 26, 2026
Time: 12:00 – 1:30pm
Location: TBA

An energizing session that brings faculty and community partners together to openly share their strengths, needs, and ideas. This collaborative space sparks meaningful dialogue and fresh connections, setting the stage for innovative partnerships and impactful projects in the upcoming program for service-learning for the spring semester — or future years.

This event is co-facilitated by the Community Engaged Teaching and Research (CETR) and the Reckonings Project.

Stay tuned for more details, including how to register.

Date: Exact date in October TBA
Time: TBA
Location: Union Church, 485 Columbus Ave

The Boston Jazz Foundation, the Reckonings Project, the Claremont Neighborhood Association, and Union Church are partnering again to throw a concert celebrating Jazz Square and the greater jazz community in late October at Union Church. Come enjoy the music and learn who the 2026 Boston Jazz Luminary is.

Stay tuned for more details.

Date: Mon November 9, 2026
Time: 6:00 – 8:00pm
Location: Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building, 2300 Washington St

Are you the family record keeper, the one that holds the memory of the family, the one who knows the family recipes, or carries forward a skill passed down through generations of your family or chosen family? And/or are you thinking about preserving memories together with members of older or younger generations? This workshop invites you to explore such roles.

Participants are encouraged to bring one small meaningful object: for example, a photograph, a document, or a recipe with meaning for their family/chosen family. Together we’ll use these objects as starting points for conversation and practice:

1. What does our family/community already have?
2. What rituals shape our family’s life?
3. How do we preserve family memory through objects and their stories?
4. How do we preserve memory through recorded conversation?Who decides what gets kept?

Oral histories are a fantastic and effective way to preserve community voices. This toolkit showcases various techniques to transform your oral history project into a concise, digestible, and accessible digital format.