Stewarded for the church by MASS Design Group and created by Los Angeles-based musician Harmonia Rosales, it is to be officially unveiled today.
“It’s an important gesture that they’re making,” said Jha D Amazi, who leads the Public Memory and Memorials Lab for MASS “As one of the oldest religious institutions in the country, right on the Freedom Trail, it’s been an opportunity for them to lead — to say to other institutions, ‘How are you grappling with your complicated histories, and how does radical truth-telling fold into that?’”
The figure in the piece holds a birdcage, door flung open; a handful of little bronze sparrows dot the immediate vicinity – on the pedestal at her feet, on a windowsill, on leading of the cage itself. The woman squats imposingly, but not wearily, inscrutable in her role as an avatar for past injustice.
“She’s stoic,” Rosales said. “I wanted her to embody the idea of a protector, but also someone who would be able to lead us forward, and to heal.”
As a small team from MASS Design hurried to photograph the just-installed piece during a brief reveal last week, crowds of pedestrians stopped to look, some craning their smartphones through the courtyard’s steel picket fence. In the bright light of the morning commute, the piece’s presence had already unmistakeably registered.
Presence is surely the point of “Unbound,” both for those it memorializes and as a permanent and public gesture towards redress. “It’s always been part of the church’s tradition to remember people in a physical way,” said Joy Fallon, King Chapel’s senior minister, noting the various stone tablets inside the church memorializing past congregants, some of them enslavers themselves. “How could we not also want to create a memorial to these people, who were so vital to our being, but never recognized?”
King’s Chapel, today home to active Unitarian congregation, is among the oldest churches in the country. Built in 1686 for wealthy Anglican British loyalists in the densely Puritan settlement that was the Bay Colony, it was first a wooden chapel, and then rebuilt on the same site in stone in the 1750s.
It was financed by wealthy merchant congregants, including Charles Apthorp and Peter Faneuil. Apthorp and Faneuil had more in common than their faith. Both had built their vast fortunes in part through the trade of enslaved Africans; they kept enslaved servants in their homes. Many of the congregants were also slave owners, and Sundays at the Chapel in their time was a strictly segregated experience; on the lower level, the Bay Colony elite would nestle into plush family pews, while their enslaved servants would fill the church’s balcony and look on from above. The enslaved’s actual faith was secondary, said Joy Fallon, and their presence likely required by their masters, Fallon said.
King’s Chapel has been telling this tale – to visitors, to Freedom Trail tourists, online on its website, and in the building itself on the array of historical placards that line the aisles when service is not in session – for almost a decade. The church hired its first full-time historian in 2015, Faye Charpentier, Fallon said, who unearthed that one of the church’s major financial supporters was a congregant named Isaac Royall Jr. Royall was likely the most prominent enslaver in the region in the 18th century, and one of the founding benefactors of Harvard Law School.
One thing led to another; it became clear that Royall’s community, many of the city’s wealthy elite, were also enslavers who would bring their servants to Sunday service.
But simply telling the story felt incomplete, to Fallon and congregants both. It needed an anchor, something permanent, affixed, to give it weight. In 2022, the congregation reached out to MASS Design Group to help craft a memorial to the 219 enslaved congregants that it knows – so far – frequented its services at the command of their masters (Fallon speculated that there were likely many more). MASS, based in Boston, has a record of both conceiving powerful public memorial projects in recent years, and expanding the idea of monumentalizing memory in novel and provocative ways.
Bostonians will be most familiar with the “The Embrace‚” Hank Willis Thomas’s memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King on Boston Common, which MASS shepherded to reality in 2023; a tangle of arms perched on a plaza of interlocking granite emblazoned with the names of 69 local civil rights leaders, it anchors the Kings’ broader legacy to the city where they met and fell love.
But the firm’s signature piece remains the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Made for the Equal Justice Iniative, it reset the notion of contemporary memorials: Created to mark the more than 4,400 lynchings of Black people in America between 1877 and 1950, it blends sombre figuration with the monumental gravitas of racial terror; within the memorial, more 800 steel monoliths hang suspended above the ground, one for each county in the U.S. where lynchings occurred. As a monument, it is dynamic: The EJI invites those counties to reclaim their monoliths to be installed in public as a restorative act. Each one is engraved with the names of known victims; the counties can give their wandering spirits a place to rest.
At King’s Chapel, a dynamic mindset is in development, too. Roeshana Moore-Evans, the former director of Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery initiative is leading the church’s “Living Memorial” project, just taking shape today. But what unites all of these is broader purpose. “Our church has a covenant,” Fallon said. “It begins with: ‘In the love of truth.’ That is our commitment, and that is how we proceed.”
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
About the Author
