Word: ra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
According to a coterie of artists, Harvard Square desperately needs “reclaiming.” So the area between Holyoke Center’s facade and the awning of Au Bon Pain will soon be filled by an artistic installation created by the Reclamation Artists (RA), a Boston-based group of professional artists and architects. In collaboration with Harvard students, the group of artists will install NEST, a public sculpture, on one of the Square’s most prominent buildings, the Holyoke Center...
...mission of RA is reclaiming a site in order to tell its story is . Typically working on neglected or endangered land, RA installs public artwork that call attention to the urban landscape and how city-dwellers shape, inhabit, neglect or enhance it. The group formed in 1990 and has built 12 major projects in the area from the Muddy River, to Government Center Plaza to Somerville’s Mystic River shoreline. “It’s a playground for artists to make statements without worrying about selling pieces. It’s about ideas...
...RA was commissioned by the Office for the Arts (OFA) at Harvard and was invited as the Marshall S. Cogan Visiting Artists. “The OFA sponsors public art projects in order to engage students in exploring art making for a public site through dialogue and/or collaboration with the participating artists and to bring this work to the Harvard and Cambridge communities,” explains Teil Silverstein, manager of Public...
Harvard proposed a number of sites on which RA could build. “We chose the site itself from what they [Harvard] had to offer because it’s front and center,” says project co-ordinator, Terry Bastian. But perhaps it was selected to improve the aesthetics of the area. Matt Daniels ‘01, who attended many of the project meetings last year, circulated a Norman Mailer quote amongst the artists which says, “[The Holyoke Center] expresses a style in architecture known as brutalism, which is unfinished grey concrete. That...
Last spring, meetings began with artists and students to determine the course of the artwork. In earlier Harvard-sponsored public art projects, this discussion was amongst students and one artist, but RA brings a different approach. “A group like RA, who are very involved in the tug and pull of collaborative art-making, promised to be a very different and interesting process for students participating in this project,” comments Silverstein. In a May meeting, the concept started taking shape when questions such as “How do you create the idea...