While life has returned to some degree of normal in the streets of Boston, all of our senses have become much more attuned to our public spaces. Who is around us — and are they an appropriate six feet away? What favorite stores or restaurants are dark? What is absent? And what do we want to see more of? This recent article by Murray Whyte of The Boston Globe encapsulates many of the questions we’re asking ourselves at Now + There and a conversation we’d like to continue with you. What is public art even for? Comment below or sound off on social media with #publicartcity.
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
‘What is public art even for?’ New works suggest a transformation on culture and shared space
By Murray Whyte Globe Staff, Updated September 3, 2020, 12:20 p.m.
It was a dark void for months, this city of ours. Streets empty, sidewalks clear, parks and playgrounds closed. If not for the scattered glow from the doorways of essential services — grocers and drugstores, sanity-saving takeout food — you’d have believed in mass extinction. And as the pandemic peaked, the desolation was punctured now and then by calamity, with the howl of sirens en route to hospitals.
Life, slowly, has returned with people on patios and in green spaces, masked and distant as they are. But there’s no question that the idea of cities — as places to mix and mingle, where a happily chaotic stew of humanity serves up possibility — has been changed. How we even navigate cities is up for grabs — if we linger, or what to even do there as offices sit vacant and apartment and condo dwellers remain stacked in their homes, hostage to the health threat. It’s a reckoning we’ve barely started to get our hands around.
Faced with massive change, is it nitpicky to talk about public art? It’s easy to see it as less than urgent, but wait. As Black Lives Matter protests seized the country this spring, it’s no coincidence that one of the obvious fixes became the monuments to an old order scattered generously in major urban centers. Confederate generals in Southern cities are one thing. Here in Boston, the decision to remove a statue of Lincoln (who appears to patronizingly bestow freedom upon a slave crouched at his feet) is quite another. It raises the question of how “public” public space has ever really been — a place for all, or some? And as thinking moves forward into an unsteady future, what needs to change?
Horizons for change are usually long, which leaves us wondering what to do in the urgent meantime. That’s what fell on the Boston nonprofit Now + There, which had just welcomed a new cohort to its Public Art Accelerator program when the pandemic hit. The six artists joined the program to work on scaling up their ambitions in what, at the time, was a robust and thriving urban landscape. The program would give them the experience and the means to take the next step. Then, everything collapsed….
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