RAWk Star

Imagine staring at a rock - a dull, gray, lump that's rough to the touch. It doesn't have much importance, doesn't really stand out, nor does it capture your interest. What if I told you that you're missing something?

A geode waits to be discovered and seen for what it is. This visual poem uses scenic imagery to explore inner beauty, introversion, social interaction, and self-acceptance. Filmmaker: Rachel Newman. Kiely Quinn. Group: POV Check out Raw Art Works, home of the Real to Reel Filmschool, where we believe that all kids should be seen and heard. http://www.rawartworks.org/ Want to see more films like this? Consider a donation to Raw Art Works. A $20 gift allows our youth to become inspired by film and more prepared for their future. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/rawartworks Help us ignite the desire to create and the confidence to succeed in underserved youth!

So begins the college application essay written by Rachel, my mentee at RAW Art Works in Lynn, MA. Well, RAW uses the word "mentee," but I often found that she was the one mentoring me! Take her college essay, for example. After introducing the reader to a plain rock, she proceeds to show that appearances can be deceiving. If you make the effort to crack the stone's obdurate surface, it reveals a sparkling crystal geode interior - a metaphor for her own introverted yet brilliant persona. In her film that inspired the essay (posted above and worth a watch) she eschews the prevailing view that introversion is something that needs to be overcome. I wish I were that comfortable in my own skin when I was 17 - heck, I still haven't learned this lesson at age 31!

Rachel and her hand-painted RAW graduation robes. How clever is that brush tassel?!

Over the course of the year, we worked together on her college applications. Her unending optimism and work ethic during this process was a constant source of inspiration for my own parallel job search. This fall, Rachel is UMass Amherst-bound with a slew of scholarships! In the long run, she has an innovative and  selfless vision to combine elements of psychology, landscape architecture, natural resources, and film production to create spaces that protect the environment and improve the population's well-being.

You can support RAW Art Works and their rewarding mentoring program by hitting up Flatbread pizza in Somerville TOMORROW, Tuesday July 11. Or better yet, become a mentor yourself!

RAWk on,

Sarah

Puzzling Street Art

Earlier this summer I posted about a pack of graffiti ghosts that were haunting the greater Kenmore area. Regrettably, no more ever appeared, and all but the purple tag along Storrow Drive have been removed. Lately, however, a new batch of street art has captured my attention: a trio of tiny relief sculptures resembling puzzle pieces.

My favorite piece is also the one closest to my apartment. You can find this turquoise relief at the corner of Mountfort and Saint Mary's streets, overlooking the Mass Pike.

Much like the subtle interventions of another Boston-area street artist Nate Swain, these anonymous, jewel-like miniatures only reveal themselves to those who are sensitive to their surroundings, or introverts who keep their eyes low to the ground. They do not announce themselves, but instead function as cryptic punctuation marks framing normally overlooked architectures. As such, they intervene in our experience of the cityscape, prompting us to move through the streets in new ways. 

Not only is this the biggest and brightest of the reliefs I've found, it's also placed higher from the ground (at waist level). It's located at the intersection of Carlton Street and Comm Ave. 

In comparison to the more common street medium of spray paint, three-dimensional reliefs are rare but not unprecedented: check out Luna Park's photo essay on Hyperallergic rounding up the best of New York's street sculpture from a few years ago. Their three-dimensionality allows these works to establish a close formal dialogue with their surroundings that would be unachievable in paint alone. For example, I love how the blockiness of the turquoise relief chimes with the raised bolts alongside it. The red cutout also creates a mirror image of the discolored concrete to its right. The forms themselves are quite unique; their closest art historical relatives may be the cartoonish contours of graffiti artist Keith Haring's personnages and the abstract, linear matrices they inhabit. Last but not least, the visible, goopy adhesive keeps these gemlike objects from appearing too precious. 

This coral cutout reminds me of a dinosaur. It's outside Boston University's 808 Gallery on Comm Ave., so despite my affection for this body of work, I obviously can't endorse the artist's illegal defacement of school property (or, for that matter, private and public property in general). Art belongs INSIDE the gallery, people!

My search for these street sculptures coincides with the recent craze for Pokémon Go - maybe you've heard of it?! This app fascinates me for the way that fantastical creatures populate familiar landscapes to render them foreign, leading players on unanticipated paths that run tangentially to their everyday routes and routines. Whereas Pokémon Go accomplishes this goal through a novel fusion of the real and virtual, the BU street sculptures reassert the physical, embodied space that they share with their architectural substrates as well as their viewers. I "gotta catch 'em all!" Will you help me? As many of us return to campus this fall, I hope you'll keep your eyes peeled so we can solve this puzzle together. 

Happy Hunting!
Sarah

Ghosted

"There's something strange in [my] neighborhood..." A few weeks ago I was mailing a package at the Kenmore Square Post Office and spotted this wide-eyed graffiti ghost. Now, I'm not advocating for the illegal defacement of private or public property, but I must admit that this painted paranormal encounter was the highlight of my workday!

This ghost along Storrow Drive is purple. I wonder what other colors are out there?

Fast-forward to Memorial Day weekend, when I saw two more little ghouls in the greater Kenmore area during my drive out of the city. I began to wonder, how many more versions I would find if I left the library more? Since I'm up against a dissertation deadline, I turned to Google instead, but surprisingly, my search came up dry. Am I the only person playing this real-life game of Pac-Man on the streets of Boston?

Space Invader's Pac-Man mosaics BBO 24–27 (from left) in Bilbao near the Guggenheim Museum.

Space Invader is another, more high-profile street artist who has similarly appropriated Pac-Man's video-game-villians. He was featured in Banksy's "documentary" Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010). You can learn more about his art on his official website, which explains how he has inspired a global corps of artists to "invade" different cities using his signature style. However, it would not appear that our artist is seeking membership to this posse, as the invaders are known for their use of tile mosaic to approximate the pixelated graphics of video games from the 1970s and 1980s. Still, our local artist also creates a subtly pixelated effect by using Boston's famous brownstone as a ground. The bricks generate a gridded texture and lend the images a kind of site-specificity. The Boston ghosts also have a revamped silhouette with clean, quirky clean curves; I love the economy of using a single serpentine black line to delineate both eyes at once. It's probably an added bonus that this trick must speed up the painting process, enabling the artist to better evade authorities.

Another tangerine tag haunts the center of the Memorial Drive rotary by the Boston University bridge.

So, "Who ya gonna call?" Because the Ghostbusters have already packed up and left town (they were filming the all-female reboot here last fall) I'm asking you: If you see something, say something! Add a comment (or better yet, a photo) if you spot another example from this street artist's oeuvre.

Happy Hunting!

Sarah