Juneteenth 2026

The National Museum of African American History will honor Opal Lee, the “grandmother of Juneteenth” in this year’s events.

Events for Juneteenth in Boston will take place from June 18-20, 2026. The flag raising ceremony on June 18th will commemorate “June 19, 1865, the day when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were finally informed of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.” The city’s Juneteenth is a “celebration of freedom, remembrance, and the ongoing pursuit of equity and justice.” Other city events are described here.

Both locations of the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket, will mark the holiday with a summer season of freedom as described here.

The Museum of Fine Arts offers a substantial array of programs as does the Institute for Contemporary Art: We Create the World.

This column provided a reflection by Alden Fossett in 2024.  Alden will be ordained to the diaconate in our diocese this week.

As soon as we have information on DioMass’s commemoration, we will post it.

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin

Art is therapy.

Her Caregivers Group blessed Alex on her last day as art-therapy intern at Emmanuel.

I want to thank you all for tuning in each week and allowing me this space to expand upon my learning experiences this year. I have truly loved interning here at Emmanuel in the common art, Boston Warm and Art & Spirituality programs. From my first week, I immediately felt welcome and a part of this amazing community, for which I am deeply grateful. It has been a gift to have been able to enter into the reciprocal love, care, and generosity that takes place in these programs. Continue reading

Farewell Quilt

On Wednesday we had our last session of the Caretaker Art Group, which focused on wrapping up the group and reflecting on the learning we had done over the six weeks. We started the session reflecting on the past activities and themes we had explored. I taped up member artwork from the previous weeks on the walls of our meeting room and to serve as a “gallery” of the art created by the group. Seeing all the various art activities from the past 6 sessions displayed together this way,  members began to point out connections between art pieces. Continue reading

Caretaking

On Wednesday, we had our second-to-last session for the Caretakers’ Art Group. This session began the process of synthesizing the topics we have discussed in the previous sessions.  We began by thinking back on the art activities we had done and reflecting on the themes we had discussed: self- exploration with the symbolic self-portraits, self-care practices with our self-care zines, and boundaries with our boundary maps. Continue reading