The Founders Project

Stephen Hamilton uses art to teach African history and empower youth

Celina Colby

Celina Colby is an arts and travel reporter with a fondness for Russian novels.... VIEW BIO

Artist Stephen Hamilton has partnered with the Now + There Public Art Accelerator program to create “The Founders Project,” a multimedia installation depicting Boston Public School students as the storied founders of West and West-Central African ethnic groups. The project comes with an accompanying curriculum showing teachers how to incorporate those African histories and narratives into their education plan.

“The Founders Project comes out of a desire to both address the persistent lack of Pre-Colonial African Narratives in mainstream educational discourse and to create empowering visual representations of Boston’s Black Youth,” says Hamilton.

Hamilton explains that in West and Central West African lore, the concept of the “founder” represents the physical embodiment of the people and their history. This provides a sharp contrast to the white, Eurocentric history taught in schools, in which the founder of a nation might be the man who stuck his flag on the land first.

Through his process, Hamilton allows BPS students to physically become those founders and therefore to live and breathe the African history they stand for, even if only for a short time. “The Black experience, as it’s often represented, has been defined by misery, oppression and subordination, leading many to believe that our lives are, have always been and will forever be an ongoing cycle of denigration and suffering,” says Hamilton. This project provides an opportunity to illustrate a positive history that’s often ignored.

With “The Founders Project,” Hamilton has created a fully illustrated companion syllabus interpreting represented iconography and drawing connections between African history and modern culture of the African diaspora.

His partner, Now + There, is a public art organization that facilitates the creation of impactful, accessible public art in the greater Boston area. The Accelerator program provides artists with curatorial, technical and financial support to create new, temporary artworks each year. The team is still searching for the right space to install the exhibit in, but Hamilton says it’s important to him that the space be accessible to the public. Updates can be found at @theartofstephenhamilton and #thefoundersproject  on Instagram.

Hamilton’s artwork almost always has an educational tie teaching both artistic practices and African history. This passion comes from his first-hand experience of the lack of African history taught in schools. He found his cultural inspiration not in textbooks, but in art.

“Growing up in Roxbury, I was surrounded by the murals and paintings of artists such as Dana Chandler, Sharon Dunn and John Biggers. These artists dedicated their lives to creating artwork that made young black people see the beauty of our culture and heritage,” he says. Now Hamilton carries on that legacy.