A new interactive sculpture coming to The Rose Kennedy Greenway in August will echo the absence of Zipporah Potter Atkins’ late 17 th century home, the first to be owned by a Black woman in Boston.

Titled Going to Ground, the steel sculpture will resemble an artist’s interpretation of the Potter Atkins home based on years of local architectural research. It will be seated on earthen blocks comprised of soil donated from over 15 states and countries, on the same plot where Potter Atkins’ home once stood, on the Greenway at Cross and Hanover Streets in North End.

Visual artist LaRissa Rogers, a 2024 recipient of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Art and Style from Charlottesville, VA, was inspired by Potter Atkin’s story, the natural memory of soil and the resilience demonstrated by both.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about what [Potter Atkins’] community was like, in order for this woman to be able to never get her home taken away from her, or to maintain it through several marriages,” Rogers said in an interview. “She never added her partner’s name, which I thought was really radical and amazing and insisted upon her presence.”

Born in 1645 to enslaved parents, Potter Atkins was born during the 1641 to 1670 window when children born in Massachusetts to enslaved parents were legally free. She purchased the property in 1670 for 46 colonial pounds, equivalent to between $9,000 and $10,400 in 2010 when Professor Vivian R. Johnson published her findings on the property.

Rogers’ sculpture will stand at two-thirds the size of the original home. The roof awning will bear a unique “scarification” pattern that will function as a sundial but provide only partial protection from the elements.

“It’s a momentary reprieve from the environment, so I wanted it to have this sense of sanctuary but also proximity to the elements which you need shelter from,” Rogers said. “I wanted that to function as a metaphor for Black and Brown bodies and communities thinking about housing and precarity through the history of this site and Boston.”

In the late 1950’s, construction of freeways and urban renewal projects displaced over 20,000 Bostonians. Of the families displaced, 32% were Black, despite only making up 5% of the population, with the rest being recent Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants. Construction of the elevated highway system favored white, suburban commuters with easier access to downtown, while eminent domain uprooted and poorly compensated destroyed communities like the one where Potter Atkins’ home once stood.

“How do we think about liberation and freedom? I think theoretically, that is linked with mobility,” Rogers said. “But there’s actually something to be said about [immovability] as a way to think about grounded-ness.”

The title of the project, Going to Ground, is pulled from an essay by Vanessa Agard Jones, who spoke about the need for communities to find lasting reprieve in order to create internal support systems. As a piece of functional public art, this is the kind of space Rogers hopes to facilitate.

As part of the project, Rogers put out an open call for Bostonians to drop off or mail in soil, from places where they felt grounded, to be used in the foundation of the structure. She’ll be hosting community events on August 15 and 17 to turn the donated soil into bricks, and the finished sculpture will be inaugurated with a performance art event on August 22.

“I would like for people to just be able to experience the beauty of it, but also the precarity of it,” Rogers said. “What does it mean to own a home?”