Roxbury Sunflower Project End-of-Season Garden Party
Friday, October 25, 2024 – 4:00 – 7:00 pm
Freedom House, 5 Crawford Street, Roxbury, MA 02119

The Roxbury Sunflower Project, along with partners Rose Kennedy
Greenway Conservancy, Madison Park Development Corporation, United Neighbors of Lower Roxbury,
Friends of Martin’s Park, and Speak for the Trees, will host the 2024 Roxbury Sunflower Project Garden
Party on Friday, October 25, 2024 – 4:00 – 7:00 pm at the Freedom House, 5 Crawford Street, Roxbury,
MA 02119. This free event is open to the public. It will celebrate the ongoing transformation of an open
community lot in Grove Hall into a family-friendly space filled with large-scale sunflower plantings and
accompanied by sister plantings throughout Boston.

Now in its seventh year, artist Ekua Holmes’ Roxbury Sunflower Project is a multi-site public artwork
consisting of three large-scale sunflower installations growing throughout the City of Boston from June to
September 2024. This project is an expansion of Holmes’ Roxbury Sunflower Project, which began as a
vision to use sunflowers to spread beauty and hope throughout the historically Black Boston neighborhood
where the artist has lived since childhood.

For Holmes, sunflowers represent resilience, inner beauty, self-determination, and the ability for a
community to evolve and emerge while staying deeply grounded in its history and traditions. “Sunflowers
have a radiance that sustains us by inviting us to turn toward the light in all things,” she shares. Sunflowers
are heliotropic plants, which means they shift and turn to follow the movement and light of the sun
throughout the sky each day. Other project themes are planting seeds, deep roots, resilience, radiance,
beauty, and transformation.

Holmes drew on these values to imagine the potential beauty in a large, empty lot in Grove Hall on the
corner of Warren Street and Crawford Street. In June 2023, Madison Park Development Corporation
acquired the lot and is thrilled to support the ongoing use of the lot for the Roxbury Sunflower Project as
they explore options for further development of the site for the creation of affordable housing and retail
opportunities.

Highly visible and along many commuting routes, Holmes understood that the space had the possibility to
become a central neighborhood gathering space full of joy and reflection for residents and passersby alike.
This year’s celebration will feature, in part, Old School Hip Hop and R&B music with DJ Kitzner and
ArtMaking with MassArt’s sparc! The ArtMobile, community resource tables, locally sourced snacks and
refreshments, Children’s book and Teddy Bear giveaway, a historical presentation by London Parker
McWhorter of UNLR, and an update of plans for the site from Madison Park Development Corporation.

Roxbury Sunflower Project: End of Season Garden Party is collaboratively organized, planned, and planted
by an interdisciplinary team of Roxbury Sunflower Project, United Neighbors of Lower Roxbury
Community Garden, Friends of Martin’s Park, Speak for the Trees, Madison Park Development
Corporation and the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Check out 639warren.org for more information about
MPDC’s project. Please save the date.