Boston in Art

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Kind of a weird take here. It includes a very old, failed North Station proposal (3rd tallest building), as well as an "Arabian" version of the Zakim. Clearly Boston, just not our Boston.

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I should like that geometric style since I love 90's clip art, but stuff like this just grates on me, it looks like a bad Family Guy background.

You get some interesting results if you Google Image search "Boston city clipart" (city to filter out all the blasted dogs), a bunch of variations on the above mediocre line art, but some cool stuff too: https://www.google.com/search?q=bos...fXgB9rZytMPhPmMkAU&bih=1297&biw=2543&hl=en-US
 
I should like that geometric style since I love 90's clip art, but stuff like this just grates on me, it looks like a bad Family Guy background.

You get some interesting results if you Google Image search "Boston city clipart" (city to filter out all the blasted dogs), a bunch of variations on the above mediocre line art, but some cool stuff too: https://www.google.com/search?q=bos...fXgB9rZytMPhPmMkAU&bih=1297&biw=2543&hl=en-US

This one near the top of the search is really funny. It's 100% lower Manhattan, but then it says "Boston." One of the laziest things I have ever seen.

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I initially read this as Garbage Painting by Deb Putnam and thought jeez, you must not like your mom very much.

I've been putting off getting an eye exam and new lens prescription for over a year now because of the COVID thing. It took a bit of staring before I even realized it's a painting of the Motor Mart Garage.
 
New one from my mom -

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Nice work. Your mom's artwork reminds me of Edward Hopper, one of my favorite artists. I almost went to MassArt after high school but ended up not going that route. I should try to get back into it now that I'm semi-retired but am just so busy doing a lot of things.. Maybe a bit more down the road I'll get into it.
 
About a year ago (I could be completely off, the past 2 years have been a time warp), that sign's lights for G & A were out, and it just said 'RAGE' at night, amusing for a parking garage. They eventually turned off all the lights and then fixed them a short while after, but it was amusing while it was broken.
 
"A thread for paintings/drawings/sculptures/other media...". So here's an "other media" piece I wrote a couple of years ago, a poem. It's a bit surreal but that's the type of poem I like to write.

Walk Through the City in Dreams

Torn pieces of recognition
blow around on the ground
like lost memories in my sight;
Neon lit factories spin and whir
in lines and curves;
the laughter, broken in the night.

I walk along through an alley,
then a street in muted noise alone;
down concrete paths
trod by thousands of feet,
shadows of faces worn.

The atomic factories now
stand mute in the night;
the byways of the dawn
are beyond the reach
of empty darkened streets.

Asleep and in dreams
I wander other lands above,
glowing with light,
not of sun but of love.

City streets below
stand desolate and vapid,
infused with vacant wonder;
there I go amidst city walls.

The muffled voices
like distant thunder;
the muted roar of
machinery below and beyond,
racing like the wind.
 
Slightly different than the theme of the thread but not sure where else to put it:
The possibility of the commons An art installation on Boston Common features 200 rotating blue boxes posing deceptively simple questions about our shared resources: Who owns the air? Who owns time? Your data?
On view near the Parkman Bandstand through Sunday, the installation features, among other interactive elements, 200 rotating blue boxes, lit from within and in several languages, posing deceptively simple questions about our shared resources: Who owns the air? Who owns time? Your data? These pigeons? This park?
Janet Zweig, the acclaimed public artist who created the installation, wanted to explore the layered meanings of the word “common” (or “commons”). Does it refer to this specific Boston park, to the elusive ideal of unity in these fractured times, or to our responsibilities to one another and the resources we share? “People will enter this piece in different ways,” she said in an interview. “Asking public art to solve social problems is a lot, but it can ask questions; it can make people think.” Boston is fortunate that Now + There, the edgy local arts organization that curated the exhibit, so willingly challenges the city’s reputation for stodgy public art.

There’s an unavoidable irony to the installation’s lofty message of public ownership, since the Friends of the Public Garden is precisely the sort of private group that has become necessary because society has steadily disinvested in the public realm. America’s first city park — incorporated in 1634 — is today supported by a crazy quilt of city government funds, private philanthropy, and negotiated side deals, like the $28 million the city extracted from developers in nearby Winthrop Square. The Friends raise funds for lighting and benches, restoring the park’s sculptures, operating the fountains, and programming — tasks that once were the purview of the public sector.
In 1968, an ecologist named Garrett Hardin wrote an influential essay titled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Drawing from a 19th-century pamphlet that used as an example a common grazing pasture of just the sort the Boston Common once was, Hardin proposed that public resources held in common will inevitably be used up through self-interested profiteering and come to ruin. Such a cramped view of our collective stewardship! Happily, the economist Elinor Ostrom successfully challenged Hardin’s theory, receiving the Nobel Economics Prize in 2009 by showing that common resources can be equitably managed by self-regulated communities that collectively benefit from them.

This is the question underlying all the others in the Common exhibition: Can we prove Hardin wrong, reverse the exploitation that is exhausting our planet, and find a way to value and protect the resources we hold in common?
 

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