Reading Between The Stones

⚒️ Panel Discussion: Reading Between the Stones

📅 Wednesday, June 3, 2026 | ⏰ 6:00 PM ET

📍 Museum of African American History – Boston Campus, The Meeting House

Join Queer History Boston and the Museum of African American History for an evening of community, history, and reclamation.

⚒️ About "Reading Between the Stones"

Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907) was a pioneering sculptor of Black and Ojibwe heritage whose neoclassical marble works broke barriers of race and gender in 19th-century art. She was also one of ours.

In queer and trans communities, Lewis has long been claimed as an ancestor — recognized in her chosen family of women who cross-dressed and had relationships with each other, her refusal of convention, and her life built entirely outside the boundaries others tried to impose on her. Mainstream institutions have been slower to catch up, treating her queer life as speculation, footnote, or simply beside the point.

Reading Between the Stones takes its name from the practice queer historians know well: learning to see what the archive doesn't say — to read between the lines; in Lewis's case, between the stones.

This panel asks not whether Lewis belongs to queer history — but what it means to claim her, how to honor the full complexity of her life, and what it looks like when curators, journalists, and artists bring that history home.

🎙️ About the Panel

This panel brings together curators, a journalist, and a theatre-maker whose work spans museums, media, performance, and community — each bringing a distinct lens to the life and legacy of Edmonia Lewis.

Angela T. Tate · Arielle Gray · Giselle Byrd · theo tyson

Angela T. Tate is Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the Museum of African American History, where she oversees curatorial vision, collections stewardship, and interpretive strategy across historic sites. A historian and curator, her work centers Black women’s archives, sound, and performance, with particular attention to how voice, listening, and media shape political consciousness. She is the lead curator of Black Voices of the Revolution, which opened in July 2025, an exhibition foregrounding Black sonic and political life in the age of revolution. Her practice bridges museums, scholarship, and public dialogue, making her work especially resonant in film-based conversations about history, memory, and representation.

Arielle Gray is a writer, artist and native Bostonian. She is a reporter at WBUR, Boston's NPR station, where she's covered Black and brown communities through the lens of history, art and culture for the past eight years.

In 2026, Arielle was the recipient of the inaugural Gwen Ifill Emerging Journalist Award from Simmons University. In 2025, her reporting was published in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s catalogue for their 2025 Allan Crite exhibition. In 2025, she received the Ralph Browne Award from the National Center of Afro American Artists for her community reporting. Her writing and work have appeared in NPR, BBC, the Boston Globe, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Boston Art Review and more.

From 2022 to 2024, Arielle was a Luminary artist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and in 2022, she conceived and executed the Future Archive Project, a community audio and photography exhibit highlighting Black LGBTQIA+ individuals in the Boston area. In 2021, she co-curated Combahee's Radical Call, a multi-modal exhibit exploring Black feminism in Boston at the Boston Center for the Arts. She is a 2020 Create Well Fund awardee and a 2021 A4A artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts.

Giselle Byrd is the Executive and Artistic Director of The Theater Offensive, a Boston-based organization presenting liberating art by, for, and about queer and trans people of color. A Tony Award-nominated leader and the first Black trans woman to lead a regional theatre company, she brings a bold vision rooted in the intersection of art and social justice, centering community, culture, and transformative storytelling in Boston and beyond.

theo tyson is an intuitive and inclusive curator who invites conversations about the sociocultural implications of race, class, gender, identity, and sexuality through a lens of fashion, art, and culture. Her practice focuses on creating sartorial spaces of reclamation and authority to share the powerful stories of non-white, Black women and those on the LGBTQI+ spectrum, investigating power dynamics that touch on constructs from colorism to misogyny; then taking it a step further to misogynoir. theo privileges noncanonical and communal ways of seeing, offering audiences poignant new perspectives from which to view the rich diversity of our humanity. Looking beyond systems of white heteronormative patriarchy and supremacy, tyson’s curatorial practice is centered on historiography that privileges and provides authority to the global majority – those previously labeled as underrepresented or marginalized. Using the ‘universal’ language and power of fashion, she unravels threads that put forward opportunities for deeper connections to the intent, import, and impact of clothing and dress as a means of empathy and empowerment.

Their previous posts include roles at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film, and the Boston Athenæum where they worked on historical and contemporary projects across genres including fashion, sculpture, and photography. She went on to co-curate an original exhibition Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and served as advising scholar for Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love at the Peabody Essex Museum before being appointed the Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 2021. In addition to various installations and interventions including celebrating the 50th anniversary of Versailles ‘73 and the Black experience of jazz, art, and modernity, she’s since curated two original exhibitions, Four Womxn: New Musings on Blackness and Something Old, Something New: Wedding Fashions and Traditions, co-curated collaborative and interdisciplinary presentations through Dress Up and Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea and directed an annual commission, The Banner Project: Troy Montes Michie.

Her practice also prioritizes community engagement through mentoring MFA Boston Teen and Pathways Interns and MassArt fashion design students; teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design and Harvard University; and engaging with Boston College, Lesley, Northeastern, Boston, and other universities through tours and lectures to ensure pipeline as a verb. She’s also an active advisory board member of The Equality Fund of The Boston Foundation and the Un-Monument project at the City of Boston Arts and Culture.

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