Public Art

Poe statue about to be unveiled:

Statue of Edgar Allan Poe to be unveiled in Boston

The 18-year-old author of “Tamerlane and Other Poems,” published in 1827, was such an unknown that he didn’t bother to affix his own name to the collection. Instead, he credited it simply to “a Bostonian.”

That the writer, Edgar Allan Poe, later came to have some famously sour words for the city of his birth does not diminish the fact that his short, troubled life was inextricably linked to the so-called Athens of America. This weekend Boston will honor one of its most reluctant native sons with a series of events leading up to the dedication of a dynamic new statue, to be unveiled on Edgar Allan Poe Square across from Boston Common on Sunday afternoon at 2.

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A brass version of this clay model will be unveiled Sunday in honor of the revered author and reluctant Boston native son.

More than two centuries after his birth, the author of “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and other Romantic classics very much retains his relevance, says Paul Lewis, chairman and founder of the Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston. The group, which is overseeing the celebration (www.bostonpoe.org/events), spearheaded the push for the project, meeting a fund-raising goal of $225,000 for the creation, installation, and maintenance of the statue in a process begun in 2009, around the bicentennial of Poe’s birth.

“We live in apocalyptic, Gothic times,” says Lewis, an English professor at Boston College. “Poe and other Gothic writers anticipated that.” In itself, that’s nothing to celebrate, he notes: “One would like it if the 19th-century utopianists were making a stronger showing now.”

But Boston’s various influences on Poe are undoubtedly worthy of celebration, Lewis says. On Saturday, he will lead a walking tour of Poe’s Boston, pointing out the writer’s likely birthplace, the theater district that employed Poe’s actor parents, and Frog Pond on the Boston Common, which inspired Poe’s withering nickname for the city’s insular literary community: “Frogpondium.”

Given Poe’s attitude toward the city, the celebration may seem odd. Lewis’s decision to pursue it likewise qualifies as somewhat quixotic.

The year before Poe’s bicentennial, Lewis was struck by a comment made by one of his doctoral students: Why wasn’t Boston planning anything to mark the milestone?

The answer was that the city claimed little connection to the writer, save for a modest plaque on the fringe of the Theater District marking the spot where Poe’s probable birthplace once stood.

This stood in stark contrast to Baltimore, where Poe is buried, and New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond, which host museums in the itinerant writer's former homes.

The city’s apparent lack of interest in Poe struck Lewis and a dedicated group of supporters at Boston College as wrongheaded. For the bicentennial year, the group persuaded the city to rename the corner of Boylston and Charles streets for Poe as a first step. Lewis also curated “The Raven in the Frog Pond,” a well-received Boston Public Library exhibit that cast new light on the writer’s prickly relationship with the city.

Abandoned as an infant by his father and orphaned when his mother died a year later, Poe associated Boston with bad memories. A few years before his mysterious death at 40, his ongoing feud with members of Boston’s literary establishment came to a head at an infamous appearance on behalf of the Boston Lyceum. Invited to speak, Poe promised a new poem but instead delivered one from his youth, inviting confusion and some hostility. He later claimed it was a hoax intended to expose the ignorance of the Boston audience.

“The deeper I got into it,” Lewis says, “the more I realized that although he probably didn’t live here more than a year, much of that as a baby, still his relationship to the Boston literary world was crucial to his own development as a critic and a creative writer.”

“There’s a tendency for American poets in my generation and younger to think of Poe as a fiction writer first,” Pinsky says. “His best-known poems like ‘The Raven’ don’t have much to do with the Modernist poets who were such a big influence on my generation.”

With that mindset, Pinsky once made a mildly disparaging remark about Poe’s poetry, and was quickly set straight.

“[Poet laureate and short story writer] Elizabeth Bishop said, ‘You better read ‘Fairy-Land,’ ” he recalls, “and she was quite right.” Despite his momentary blind spot, he says, “I’ve over the years learned.”

Sculptor Stefanie Rocknak, a Maine native who holds a doctorate in philosophy from Boston University, says she wanted people to feel a real connection with Poe when they stand in the presence of her statue. Unlike so many fusty historical monuments, her statue appears alive, with the writer’s cloak blowing in the wind, a huge raven flying in his path and a trail of pages (and a telltale heart) spilling from his briefcase.

“They gave me certain parameters,” she explains from her studio in upstate New York. “The Poe Foundation really wanted the sculpture to be specific to Boston, not one that could be picked up and placed anywhere.”

Also atypical is the statue’s size: Rocknak’s likeness of Poe stands 5 feet 8 inches, not 7 or 8 feet tall, as historical figures are often depicted.

“This isn’t heroic size,” says the sculptor, who beat out more than 260 proposals for the commission. “I wanted people to relate to him as a human being. However, his reputation has certainly gotten bigger than most of us enjoy. That’s why the raven is oversize.”

The tableau on Edgar Allan Poe Square should be an important feature of Boston’s proposed Literary Cultural District, said to be the first of its kind in the nation, which was unanimously approved by the Massachusetts Cultural Council in August.

Poe had one of the most iconic faces in US cultural history, says Lewis, comparable to Washington’s and Lincoln’s. Rocknak’s statue “does something to make that whole map stand up and shine in a way that it should,” he says.

The Poe dedication and the Literary Cultural District are long-overdue appreciations of the city’s worldwide renown in the world of letters, he says: “For goodness’ sake, the Old Corner Bookstore is now a fast-food place.”

Like generations of children, Lewis was first enchanted by Poe when he read “The Tell-Tale Heart” in middle school.

“It feels transgressive, in that this is a mind you probably shouldn’t be going into,” he says. “That’s thrilling to middle school students.”

It is also “a perfect story for teaching about narrative point-of-view. It’s so clear that you can’t rely on what the narrator tells us.”

In much the same way, the time seems right to reconsider Poe’s recriminations about Boston.
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Has the Globe fired its editors? Statues are bronze, not brass. (There are small indoor statues made of brass, but I never heard of an outdoor one.)
 
I seriously want to change my user name to Frogpondian.
 
Not sure where else to drop this...

Someone put this up:
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Similar to my proposal from earlier this year:
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One note to pass along, if anyone (*cough*) knows who is behind this: the tiny planters on cinder blocks keep falling off from the wind. They need to be anchored to the cinder block.
 
I'm not familiar with this. Is this a protest of some sort or are these planters delineating future infrastructure changes?
 
It's just empty space that's been unused since the trolley tracks were pulled up. A few people have floated around the idea of decorating it, looks like someone finally got around to it.
 
It has something to do with the BAC. That's all I'll say.

Look out for a "suggestion box" in one of the greenway parks, gorilla parking stall striping around Allston, and some pop up seating on the eastie library lawn. There may or may not have been benches made from old pallets popping up around Cambridge too...

I'll shoot out an email Matt. I guess the idea for putting a grill out there fell through...
 
davem said:
It has something to do with the BAC. That's all I'll say.

Look out for a "suggestion box" in one of the greenway parks, gorilla parking stall striping around Allston, and some pop up seating on the eastie library lawn. There may or may not have been benches made from old pallets popping up around Cambridge too...

I'll shoot out an email Matt. I guess the idea for putting a grill out there fell through...
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All the planters are gone now.
 
Boston launches cultural planning process

By Joel Brown | Globe Correspondent October 11, 2014

Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s administration is preparing the canvas for an 18-month citywide “cultural planning process” to put the arts at the heart of the city’s future for at least the next decade, for artists, residents, and visitors alike.

Under incoming Boston chief of arts and culture Julie Burros, the process can consider anything from festivals to public art, and from easier permitting for neighborhood arts events to affordable housing for artists who might otherwise move somewhere else to work. Everything is on the table.

“Some people won’t quite understand at first, but as they start to see public art show up on the street, as they see movement in different avenues, they’ll be, ‘Wow, this is incredible,’” said Walsh, who made the arts a centerpiece of his campaign. “They might not realize it at first, but we’ll tie it all in as time goes on.”

The Barr Foundation and the Klarman Family Foundation, both Boston-based and already teaming up on arts funding, will fund the process, estimated to cost somewhere between $250,000-$600,000.

“I think this process is going to be really fundamental to the way Boston looks and feels for the next 10 years,” says steering committee member Eve Ewing, a writer and poet from Roxbury.

Organizers expect to reach out widely to artists, arts leaders, patrons, audiences, and the public at large.

“What do we want the city to look like on the cultural level? How do we make this city stand out with major cities in the rest of the world in terms of raising the level of our cultural life?” said steering committee member Miguel Rodriguez, executive director of Boston Baroque. “It’s going really in-depth and looking at what the communities and the neighborhoods are going to need, and how we all in the cultural sector can help to advance our artists and our organizations and our communities.”

A request has gone out for proposals from arts consulting firms nationwide, with an Oct. 27 deadline for bids. The consultants will help city officials collect and analyze data and present the results. The bids will include their suggested outline for how the process will be conducted.

The project’s 15-member steering committee — including representatives from the city, the foundations, and local arts groups — will recommend a consultant, with Walsh making the final choice. Work begins in earnest by the first of next year, with final recommendations complete by June 2016.

Burros knows what’s ahead when she starts work in December. She was chosen as the city’s first cabinet-level chief of arts and culture in years in part because she was a key mover behind Chicago’s cultural plan in 2012. Chicago, Burros said, provided $1 million to start enacting their plan’s recommendations.

“We did it at kind of a breakneck speed,” she said, with dozens of meetings large and small across Chicago in just a few months. “At the end of our public process I had pneumonia,” she added with a laugh, “so I want to take better care of myself in Boston.”

The process began in Boston even before the mayoral election, when Barr broached the idea to the Walsh campaign. Barr is paying for local consultant group Technical Development Corporation to study other cities’ cultural planning processes around the country. Barr has already funded a part-time employee at City Hall to manage early stages of the process.

“The comment will be made, ‘With all the urgent pressing issues facing society today, why is it you’re funding in the arts?’” said Barr president and trustee James E. Canales. “We need to shift the frame from the idea that the arts are a ‘nice to have’ to really looking at the arts as a must-have in the community.

“If you care about a community that is vibrant, that is seeking engagement from all of its citizens, that is looking for ways to spark and support creativity … arts and culture has to be at the center of your community,” Canales said.

Walsh vows a plan with short- and long-term goals and clear criteria for success, so residents will see results. Barr and Klarman also pledge to help make sure that the recommendations can be enacted and will consider funding projects where needed. “This is a foundation that cares deeply about the future of this region . . . and always wants to take the long-term view,” Canales said.

Everyone involved expects the study to have a wide-angle lens.

“You’re talking about the arts in terms of how the community supports artists and arts organizations but also, and just as importantly, what’s the role of the arts in education, what’s the role of the arts in housing, what’s the role of the arts in development?” said steering committee member Michael Maso, managing director of the Huntington Theatre Company.

Players from Walsh on down say it’s important that the plan involve all sectors of the city’s arts community, from the Huntington and the Museum of Fine Arts down to storefront galleries and fringe theater groups in neighborhoods far from the Avenue of the Arts.

“The image of Boston that exists both here in the city and also nationally and internationally does not accurately reflect a lot of the really vibrant cultural work and arts communities that are present in the city,” said Ewing, who serves as development manager for the youth art group Urbano Project in Jamaica Plain. “There are so many people here doing incredible work that does not get the recognition and material support that it needs to get to continue thriving.”

“Hopefully all of the people whose voices need to be heard will be heard, and then we’ll make sure there’s a wide array of [initiatives] in the plan,” said Joyce Linehan, Walsh’s policy chief, who has been handling many of what will be Burros’s duties.

In San Jose, Calif., one of the cities TDC studied, about 3,000 people participated directly in the process, said Kerry Adams Hapner, director of cultural affairs for the city, who oversaw the process there in 2009-2011. She calls the cultural plan “a mobilizing tool” for the city, arts groups, and funders, and notes that San Jose has raised about $2 million in new grants and sponsorships since the plan was put to work.

In Boston, many noted a renewed emphasis on understanding the arts’ contribution, citing two recent studies, the MFA’s CultureTrack study of Boston audiences and ArtsBoston’s The Arts Factor, on economic and other impacts.

The Walsh administration knows it has to produce results once the plan is done. “We all have hopes and dreams and wishes for things we want to see, but unless we have a path for getting there, it’s just an exercise,” said Linehan.
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Boston Globe
 
Three finalists show models of Fields Corner sculptures

A trio of artists— each hoping to win a competition for the chance to create a new sculpture inside Town Field in Fields Corner— displayed models of their proposed works at a community meeting on Monday evening at the Vietnamese-American Community Center on Charles Street. One of the three will be chosen to execute the project by a 10-person committee led by Viet-AID director Nam Pham with a decision expected by next month.
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http://www.dotnews.com/2014/three-finalists-show-models-fields-corner-sculptures
 
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