Constructing the public realm.

Both meditative and provocative, To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom. presented a new experiential sculptural work created, for Boston, by Mexican artist Jose Dávila in response to our times and to a uniquely arboreal space in Downtown Boston. Composed of 21 custom-made concrete shapes that stood for variations of a standard cube, with river boulders balancing on top, To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom., created a dynamic field of vibrant red-colored geometric forms, with natural juxtapositions that punctuated and accentuated Central Wharf Park. The work, which intentionally invited the public to sit, rest, and play on and among the sculptural shapes, explored publicness in a time of social and physical distancing and encouraged passers-by and visitors to decide for themselves the function and purpose of the installation. By offering ideas on new modes of construction and innovative placemaking possibilities, this project aimed to demonstrate ways art can shift centers of creative power into the public realm.

Video by White Birch Media. All photos by Dominic Chavez.

VISIT

Between December 2020 and September 2022, To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom. faced the public at Central Wharf Park across from the New England Aquarium at 250 Atlantic Ave, Boston, MA.

The closest MBTA Stop is the Aquarium stop on the Blue Line.

Jose Dávila’s work originates from the symbolic languages that function within art history and Western visual culture. These pictorial, graphic and sculptural languages are reconfigured as contradictory and contrasting relations, taking the correspondence between form and content to its limit.

The artist represents these oppositions through different perspectives: the association between images and words; the structural disposition of materials which entails the possibility of a harmonious balance or disarray; the use of peripheral routes in order to define architectural space and the presence of objects. Dávila’s work is essentially a multidisciplinary endeavor that presents a series of material and visual aporias, these paradoxes permit the coexistence of frailty and resistance, rest and tension, geometric order and random chaos.

Engaging the public

To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom. is Now + There’s second collaboration with guest curator Pedro Alonzo who brought Oscar Tuazon’s Growth Rings to Central Wharf Park from 2019 to 2020.

Pedro Alonzo is a Boston-based independent curator. He is currently an Adjunct Curator at Dallas Contemporary. Since 2006 he has specialized in producing exhibitions that transcend the boundaries of museum walls and spill out into the urban landscape, addressing audiences beyond the traditional museum public. At the ICA Boston, he curated Shepard Fairey’s 20-year survey, Supply, and Demand. For the MCA San Diego, he organized the group exhibition Viva la Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape, which featured site-specific works inside the museum and throughout downtown San Diego. In 2015 Alonzo began to develop exhibitions designed to engage the public, starting with a citywide exhibition in Philadelphia, Open Source: Engaging Audiences in Public Space, followed by working with JR to place a gigantic image of a Mexican child named Kikito, overlooking the US/México border wall in Tecate. Since 2016 Alonzo has worked with The Trustees, Massachusetts’s largest conservation and preservation non-profit, to launch and curate the organization’s first Art and the Landscape initiative, resulting in site-specific commissions created by the artists: Sam Durant (2016), Jeppe Hein (2016), Alicja Kwade (2018), and Doug Aitken (2019). He is currently working on Amnesia Atómica, an ongoing project by Pedro Reyes, commissioned by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientist, centered to revive and reintroduce the issue of nuclear threat into the public narrative.

Building with friends

Special thanks to BRM Production Management for helping N+T, Dávila, and Alonzo bring this project to life!

Embracing the site

Designed by Reed Hilderbrand, a Cambridge-based landscape architecture practice, Central Wharf Park is an urban micro-forest composed of 24 mature oak trees and sits between the New England Aquarium and the Rose Kennedy Greenway at 250 Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Boston. The park has ramped entry points as well as step-up curb entries and is paved with cobblestones.

To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom. aimed to explore new dimensions of our shared public experience and public creative power in shaping the built environment. Along with the presentation of artworks, Now + There continues to lead and engage in public conversations, verbal and written, exploring the centuries-long history of the events, policies, and attitudes that have created the Boston we see today.

Boston Neighborhood Network News: Park Reframed by Public Art, November 20, 2020

“When young people gravitate to it, and understand it, and engage it — kids are very authentic. They only gravitate to things that they believe in. That they feel comfortable with, excited about. So this is a sign of success.”

GBH Arts This Week with Jared Bowen: A new public art installation by Jose Dávila, presented by Now + There at Central Wharf Park, November 19, 2020

“Visitors are encouraged to sit on and interact with the work (while still maintaining a safe, social distance), and Dávila sees the stones he employs throughout the installation as tied to our humanity, given civilizations’ reliance on them throughout the course of human history.”

Art Daily: Jose Dávila reimagines Central Wharf Park to bring community together in time of pandemic isolation, November 16, 2020

“The work, which intentionally invites the public to sit, rest, and play, on and among the sculptural shapes, explores publicness in a time of social and physical distancing and encourages passers-by and visitors to decide for themselves the function and purpose of the installation located at 250 Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Boston.”

WBZ Radio: New England Weekend, Sunday, November 15, 2020.

“It does call for us as a public to define the space.”

WBUR/The ARTery: 5 Things to Do This Weekend November 12, 2020

 “No need for purchasing a museum ticket or fighting off crowds. Just head to Central Wharf Park across from the New England Aquarium to see Boston’s newest eye candy.”