Meet Michael A. Bryan II, the 2025 Phil Freelon Fellow

I studied international affairs as an undergrad at Georgia but, while I was on campus, also took classes on city planning and sustainable development. I spent a little bit of time working for Georgia Tech’s Office of Campus Sustainability and did an internship at the Atlanta Regional Commission.

After I graduated, I was kind of like, “what can I do with all this?” I took a full-time job with the Urban Land Institute for about a year and a half up here in Boston and ended up applying to the Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) program after one of my mentors told me a little bit more about the field.

I had never done design before, but it was a prospect that was interesting and exciting—to do work that would be built into the ground. For me, it feels more actualizing and impactful, especially when working with community organizations like I’ve been doing recently.

I’ve been learning a lot about what landscape architecture is and how, as a field, we can use it to support communities that have been historically disadvantaged by their built environments.

I’m very interested in the idea of cultural landscapes, memorial preservation, and speculative futures—how we can speculate for cultural communities that have not always had access to the resources, skills, and tools to design spaces for themselves.

I also like this idea of landscape architecture as a tool of spatial translation, which comes from Elizabeth Meyer. How do we turn people’s orations, stories, and collective memories into these expressions of spatial design that are reflective of those communities?

The idea was that, in the first stage, you have time to grieve. Second stage, you have your time to reflect. Then the third stage—very much based off of the New Orleans style—you celebrate, you have your food, and you cook out. So, the aim was a space that was hidden in Franklin Park but, if you knew how to read it, then you could follow the traces through that space. Even if you didn’t, you would recognize that those spaces held a lot of respect and were sacred.

I called the project “For the Homies,” because it reflected the idea that, when we celebrate our dead and the diaspora, people like to pour out libations for their homies. You have all these different emotions, but it doesn’t have to be a really sad thing. It’s a transformation.

I think it was the fact that he was always very present in the space of design and always advocating for the use of our design tools to help communities receive the advantages that historically have been seen in a lot of other places. Those are tools which, in my eyes, have been used strategically against communities of color to keep them in different spaces, keep them segregated, and keep them away from what seems like esoteric knowledge but that’s actually just human knowledge.

Architecture and landscape architecture may be formal titles now but, before these things became professional fields, we were all creating our spaces and inhabiting them. So I really enjoyed learning that Phil had a hand in everything, especially when it came to memorial. I was really enamored by how he helped build a lot of different museums of history for Black communities, because that’s where I’m at in my head. How do we start to engage these institutions of memory, institutions of history, and spaces that capture and hold our history?

That’s what we’re putting in the ground somewhere. It’s more than just, “oh, it’s a new park,” it becomes a space of stewardship and ownership, and the community feels that connection to the space. “We are going to get out here on Saturday and clean up not just because we need to but because this is our space, we cherish it, and we want it to become an everlasting place of our identity.”