Art Around the Hub - art museums in Boston, Massachusetts

Art in America, June, 1999 by Martha Buskirk

History of a different sort has inspired the Reclamation Artists, a loosely organized group of artists, architects, landscape architects and others interested in land-use issues. For nearly a decade they have been creating temporary installations in overlooked or decaying sites around Boston. At the group's 1990 Site #1 project beside the Charles River, layers of lost urban history surfaced when Sheila Kennedy, Frano Violich and Linda Pollak excavated portions of old railway tracks and then used chalk lines to describe a network of submerged transportation paths.

The Reclamation Artists continue to find no shortage of neglected or forgotten sites for their projects. Highway construction in the North Point area of Cambridge inspired founding member Joan Brigham's 1994 Excavation, or the Law of Diminishing Returns at the group's Site #6. Designed to suggest an archeological dig, the work presented a strange asphalt roadway embedded with Duchamp-inspired readymades. Subsequent projects by Reclamation Artists have focused attention on the Muddy River, a now-stagnant and polluted waterway central to Frederic Law Olmsted's "Emerald Necklace" of city parks, whose flow was broken by road and parking-lot construction. For her No Wading (1997) at Site #9, not far from the MFA, Leslie Wilcox used the uprights from a defunct footbridge to support wire-mesh figures that hovered over water that is, she says, "so bad you don't even want to get near it."

Such temporary installations allow the artists to explore issues and techniques that inform their more permanent works. Mags Harries and Lajos Heder's planned Acoustic Weir, for the Fresh Pond Reservoir in Cambridge, will dramatize the 18 million gallons of water piped into the reservoir each day to supply the city of Cambridge. By cutting the supply pipe just before the reservoir, they will turn the previously invisible flow into a waterfall that will reverberate in the circular gate through which the water passes. Set in a park designed by Olmsted's office, the project refers back to a 19th-century landscaping vocabulary that included exposed water sources. Less apparently, it highlights a crucial difference between the neighboring cities of Cambridge, where the project was commissioned under a percent-for-art program, and Boston, which lacks such support for public art.

In the Galleries

Most of the commercial galleries on Newbury Street, for decades the established downtown art strip, try to find a balance between bringing outside work to Boston and exhibiting local artists. Barbara Krakow Gallery has long been a place to see works by LeWitt, Serra or Elizabeth Murray, not to mention recent solo shows by Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and von Rydingsvard. But Krakow also has a long-standing commitment to a number of area artists, including Mazur, Scott Hadfield, Maggi Brown and Cameron Shaw. For Hadfield, who employs a combination of chance and design to make paintings on plywood that he cuts apart and later reassembles, it was his inclusion in the ICA's first "Boston Now" exhibition in 1981 that brought his work to the attention of the gallery, where he has exhibited ever since. Krakow points to the number of nonprofit Boston venues that exhibit contemporary art as both a vital aspect of the local art world and one of the resources she continues to use to keep abreast of newer work from the area.