FROM THE MODERATOR
The arts are too often treated as peripheral to the serious work of policy — something decorative, something that happens after the real decisions are made. This panel was convened to challenge that assumption directly. In each of the five presentations that followed, the arts showed up not as ornament but as instrument: a way of making difficult history speakable, of building community ownership over contested spaces, of testing ideas before they harden into policy, and of helping people find their footing in a public life that increasingly leaves them feeling unseen.
Kitty Dukakis herself understood this. She was a modern dancer before she was a public figure, and she never lost sight of what that meant — the capacity to enter a transformative space, to communicate something essential about the human condition, and to insist that every person deserves access to that experience. Her advocacy for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, her rescue of Jacob’s Pillow, her work on the Esplanade, and her championing of arts organizations across the Commonwealth were not sideline activities. They were of a piece with everything else she did. The arts, for Kitty, were a form of civic seriousness.
This final panel brought that conviction into the present — and into the streets.
Ted Landsmark
Moderator · Distinguished Professor of Public Policy & Urban Affairs, Northeastern University
Anne Hawley opened with a personal portrait of Kitty Dukakis as arts champion — one drawn from decades of close collaboration that began when Hawley was 29 years old, trying to launch a nonprofit connecting arts organizations in Boston, and Kitty joined the board of advisors. What Hawley received was not just institutional support but a masterclass in how to get things done: how to communicate a vision to a broader public, how to navigate Boston’s dense networks of civic relationships, how to turn impatience into momentum without burning the room down.
Kitty was, Hawley reminded the audience, an artist herself. A modern dancer, the daughter of a violinist and conductor, she understood from the inside what it meant to make art — to enter that transformative space where you forget yourself and become connected to something beyond you. And because she understood that magic, she was fiercely committed to ensuring that it was not the exclusive property of the privileged. The arts, in her view, belonged to everyone, and she spent decades making policy to reflect that.
Hawley described the Berkshires exit project with particular affection — a design initiative that the head of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority initially refused to hear, relented to only after a meeting with Kitty herself, and then expressed his displeasure by physically detaining Hawley as she tried to leave his office to deliver a parting warning. “I never want to see you again.” That, Hawley said, was her first project with Kitty Dukakis.
The thread connecting all of these efforts — the policy battles, the institution rescues, the landscape improvements — was Kitty’s conviction that the arts are not a luxury but a civic necessity. And her willingness to put her own political capital on the line for that conviction, repeatedly, is a legacy that Massachusetts continues to draw on today.
Jody Kipnis described herself, without apology, as a former Holocaust avoider — someone who, as a child, had been so frightened by black-and-white liberation footage shown in school that she spent decades steering around the subject entirely. That changed in 2018 when she traveled with a Holocaust survivor to Auschwitz and stood on the grounds of what had once been the largest site of mass murder in human history. She came home not with a plan to build a museum, but with a clarified sense of what Holocaust education was actually for — and what it had been missing.
The Holocaust Legacy Foundation is now building New England’s only Holocaust museum, located on Boston’s Freedom Trail at the corner of Tremont and Hamilton Streets, with a direct sightline to the State House. The building will be wrapped in white glass tile, and suspended over the entrance — visible from Tremont Street all the way to City Hall — will be an original Nazi-era rail car, enclosed in glass. At night, it will be lit. Passersby will be able to watch visitors walk onto the rail car through the glass facade. The architecture is itself an argument: that this history should not be hidden, softened, or made comfortable.
“Holocaust education isn’t just about the past. We have to think about today — about how quickly societies can change, how fragile democracy can be, and how fast misinformation spreads.”
— Jody Kipnis, Holocaust Legacy Foundation
But the museum’s ambition goes beyond spectacle. Its core design principle is to resist the passive, linear visitor experience that most history museums offer. Instead, the Foundation wants visitors to arrive as one person and leave as another — not because they have been told what to think, but because they have been placed inside genuinely difficult questions. The museum’s thematic core is human dignity, belonging, civic responsibility, and moral courage. It asks: what are our responsibilities to each other? What allowed ordinary neighbors to become complicit? What does it take to act differently?
When Kipnis mentions democracy as a central theme, she is regularly asked whether the museum is taking a political stance. Her answer is no — it is taking a human one. The museum is not about any particular party or generation. It is about what people are capable of doing to each other, and what it takes to choose otherwise. The conversations it is designed to prompt — about identity, prejudice, and civic life — are ones the Foundation believes every community in Boston needs to be having. The Freedom Trail’s tour guides are already being prepared to incorporate it into their routes. Paul Revere, waiting at the crosswalk, will have questions to ask.
Kate Gilbert founded Now + There eleven years ago out of impatience — a frustration that Boston, one of the wealthiest and most internationally connected cities in the country, did not look like it. Her work with the Rose Kennedy Greenway, where she was among the first seven women helping to program the newly uncovered public space, gave her the networks and relationships she needed. What she needed next was a vehicle for experimentation. Now + There became that vehicle: a platform for commissioning temporary, site-specific public art that uses the city itself as canvas.
The work has ranged from 13-foot inflatable clouds to a city-wide joy parade with artist Nick Cave stretching two and a half miles through Boston’s streets; from sculptures hung off buildings to, most recently, the Boston Public Art Triennial — a six-month, 20-project city-wide expression of public art that closed in October. The Triennial addressed indigeneity, climate, joy, and history. Its most discussed moment: a replica colonial ship detonated on City Hall Plaza with fireworks and a ring of fire — a carefully staged act of decolonization and celebration that generated more conversation about Boston’s relationship to its own history than years of institutional programming had managed.
“Make it temporary. It’s a great way to build policy — after something’s already been tested, you know what you’re committing to.”
— Kate Gilbert, Now + There
Gilbert’s philosophy is grounded in a belief that temporariness is a feature, not a limitation. When a piece of public art is framed as an experiment — here for a season, gone when it’s done — it lowers the threshold for risk, invites broader participation, and creates space for honest feedback. It also models something that city policy rarely does: the willingness to try something, learn from it, and decide whether to make it permanent. Some of the most transformative policy changes, she argued, begin as temporary interventions that reveal what was previously unimaginable.
The Triennial also surfaced a conviction Gilbert holds about the supposed gap between Boston’s established arts institutions and its communities: the gap is less a gap than an invisibility problem. The space between the great institutions and the neighborhoods is not empty — it is full of work, full of artists, full of activity. What it lacks is visibility, funding, and the willingness of the large institutions to look outside their own walls.
Killian Mukwete presented a model of community-engaged practice that he has been refining since 2015 — one that takes seriously the gap between institutional expertise and neighborhood need, and tries to bridge it without erasing the community’s own agency in the process. The anchor project he described was an installation in Roxbury commemorating the legacy of the Boston chapter of the Black Panther Party, developed in collaboration with the Path Forward Neighborhood Association, students from MassArt and Northeastern, and ultimately the City of Boston.
The neighborhood association had been working for years to prevent a historically significant plot — the site where the Black Panthers once provided social services to the community — from being handed over to developers. They had the advocacy and the relationships. What they lacked was the documentation and design capacity needed to access funding. Mukwete and his students provided that capacity, but the collaboration was structured so that the community remained at the center: the design direction came from neighborhood members, the imagery was selected by community vote, and the fabrication and installation were done in partnership rather than on their behalf.
“Our role was not to come in and say, this is what you have to do. It was to partner with a group that was already doing the work and help them get what they needed to keep doing it.”
— Killian Mukwete, Northeastern University
The result was a gateway installation and community garden — a mural-adorned metal archway displaying the Black Panther’s Ten-Point Program, surrounded by a garden that addresses food security in a neighborhood with limited access to fresh produce. The Red Sox volunteered during the garden installation day. Students mounted a community exhibition showcasing the historical archive they had assembled — and during that event, community members brought photographs and memorabilia they had held for decades, contributing to an archive that had never before existed in one place.
The deeper lesson Mukwete drew was structural: community organizations doing daily advocacy work in underinvested neighborhoods are constantly blocked by a specific gap. They need feasibility studies to access funding. They need documentation and design work to make a case. But they do not have the resources to commission that work. Educational institutions — with students, expertise, and time — can fill that gap, provided they are willing to position themselves as facilitators rather than authors. Mukwete has since applied this model in the North End, in Haiti, and currently in Benin, where he is working on built heritage preservation using the same framework: identify who in the community is already doing the work, then ask how institutional partnership can support rather than supplant them.
Heather Kaplow, invited to participate in the Boston Public Art Triennial by Kate Gilbert, offered the panel’s most intimate perspective: that of an artist born and raised in Boston who grew up watching Kitty Dukakis as a public figure and was struck, in a way that stayed with her, by the visibility of Kitty’s humanness. Not just her leadership — leadership was visible in many places — but the foregrounding of her humanity within it. That, Kaplow suggested, was the rarer thing.
Her current project, Better Angels — a site-specific public engagement work coming to multiple locations across Boston — takes its name from Lincoln’s first inaugural address and his failed attempt to hold a fracturing country together on the eve of the Civil War. It arrives at a moment when the country is approaching its 250th anniversary, and Kaplow is interested in marking that occasion not with celebration alone, but with honest reckoning: an acknowledgment of the embedded flaws and unresolved tensions present since the founding, alongside a genuine invitation to grace.
“Pretty much everyone gets in. And that’s done through witnessing another person in their self-exploration about their strengths, their weaknesses, their efforts to be their best self.”
— Heather Kaplow, on Better Angels
The mechanism is participatory: visitors gain entry to a kind of heaven by witnessing another person’s honest self-reflection on their own efforts and imperfections. It is a meditation on what it means to extend grace — to others and to the country itself — at a moment when that capacity feels scarce. Kaplow offered a live demonstration of the process at the end of the panel session.
In the panel discussion, Kaplow offered a sharp characterization of what she sees as art’s role in the current political moment: not just social lubricant, but a destabilizing force — in the best sense. Art, she argued, teaches people to think on their feet. When you encounter something that doesn’t quite sit right, something that breaks your routine way of seeing, you are forced to find your footing again. That cognitive flexibility — the ability to confront an assumption before it becomes a policy — is something artists can cultivate in audiences in ways that no briefing paper can.
What role should the arts play in addressing today’s key policy challenges? Anne Hawley argued that the most urgent intervention is in schools: children in elementary and secondary education deserve a far more meaningful engagement with art forms than current STEM-dominated curricula allow. The repeated marginalization of arts education, she argued, disenfranchises young people from capacities they have — the ability to think, dream, and express — that no amount of technical training replaces. Jody Kipnis connected this to the Holocaust Museum’s mission: bringing young people into difficult conversations about democracy, human dignity, and civic responsibility through immersive, interactive experience rather than passive transmission of history. Killian Mukwete emphasized the structural opportunity for educational institutions to act as capacity-builders for under-resourced neighborhood associations — translating institutional expertise into advocacy support for communities that are already doing the work. Kate Gilbert argued simply for following artists: they are already looking at every policy issue that matters, and putting real money and collaborative effort behind their visions is among the most efficient ways to surface what communities actually want to change.
Is there a U.S. city doing the arts-in-civic-life well that Boston could learn from? The panel resisted easy comparisons. Gilbert noted that Boston’s age and layered institutional history make it more comparable to Philadelphia than to newer cities, and suggested that Boston may ultimately be the model — pointing to the Big Dig and the harbor cleanup as examples of the city doing transformative things that others then emulated. Hawley observed that Boston’s arts ecology, when taken in full, is remarkably healthy: hundreds of performing groups, vibrant theater, and a feeder system of young startups and experimental organizations that continuously refresh the larger institutions. Landsmark added Richmond (for its community-centered mural project), Cincinnati (for university-community partnerships), and — with admiration for the integration of contemporary design and art into historic urban fabric — Paris and Venice. The common thread across all examples was not a single model but a willingness to treat art as inseparable from the life of a city, rather than as an amenity bolted on after everything else.
What is the future of AI in community-building through the arts? The panel approached this question with thoughtfulness rather than enthusiasm or alarm. Kaplow reflected on the question of soul — the quality that resonates in a work of art and that may not yet be computable — and suggested that what matters most right now is ensuring that humans with the full range of human experience are the ones shaping how AI is used, rather than ceding that territory. Mukwete offered the most concrete application: AI’s capacity to aggregate and organize dispersed archival materials — photographs, documents, oral histories scattered across universities and private collections — could be transformative for communities trying to build cultural archives of their own history. The tools exist; the question is whether they can be made accessible to community groups who could use them to build the kind of archives that, until now, have required institutional resources most neighborhoods do not have.
Acknowledgments
This panel closed the day’s programming in honor of Kitty Dukakis, whose connection to the arts — as dancer, as patron, as policy champion — was woven through her entire public life. It was a fitting conclusion: a conversation about what the arts make possible that Kitty herself might have moderated.
The panel also honored Ted Landsmark, whose contributions to the architecture, landscape, and civic culture of Boston — through the BPDA, the Boston Architectural College, the Boston Society of Architects, and the Emerald Necklace Conservancy — represent exactly the kind of sustained, place-grounded arts leadership the panel celebrated.
We are grateful to our panelists — Anne Hawley, Jody Kipnis, Kate Gilbert, Killian Mukwete, and Heather Kaplow — for the depth, candor, and creativity they brought to the conversation. Heather Kaplow provided a live demonstration of Better Angels at the conclusion of the session; the full project will appear at multiple sites across Boston. More information on featured projects: nowandthere.org · holocaustlegacyfoundation.org