Public Art – Creative Minds Out Loud

Episode 97: Public Art Accelerator

Kate Gilbert, Executive Director of Now + There, says the most successful public art is trying to disrupt how we walk through and see the world. She discusses how her organization supports temporary work in Boston as a strategy for changing how public art gets made and is appreciated.

Kate Gilbert. Photo by Bianca Mauro Kate Gilbert is on a mission to transform Boston into a public art city. As artist, curator, and cultural producer, Gilbert sees contemporary art as a catalyst for transformation. In 2015, she launched Now + There, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to delivering impactful, accessible, and temporary public artworks that challenge Boston’s cultural identity by taking artistic risks and consistently producing compelling projects that engage the public.

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Episode 93: Creating Public Space for Community Health

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Matthew Mazzotta is an artist and activist. His work utilizes – and fuels – community dialogue. Through the creation of public artwork and space, he aims to leave people with an experience that expands their view of where they live.

Matthew Mazzotta works at the intersection of art, activism, and urbanism, focusing on the power of the built environment to shape our relationships and experiences. He is as much as an inventor as he is an activist using artistic sensibilities to bring real world issues into the social discourse and lead collective public imagining. His community-specific public projects integrate new forms of civic participation and social engagement into the built environment and reveal how the spaces we travel through and spend our time living within have the potential to become distinct sites for intimate, radical, and meaningful exchanges.

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Episode 90: Technology as an Expressive Medium

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George Fifield, Director of Boston Cyberarts, says, “Anytime you have a technology which can create an expressive medium, artists are some of the first people there – after it’s invented – to really explore it, and to stretch it, and to see what it really can do.” He discusses the evolution of media arts and details some recent projects using augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

George Fifield is the founding director of Boston Cyberarts Inc., a nonprofit arts organization which programs numerous art and technology projects, including the Boston Cyberarts Gallery in Jamaica Plain and Art on the Marquee, on the 80 foot video marquee in front of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. In 2017, Boston Cyberarts curated The Augmented Landscape, large augmented reality sculptures at The Salem Maritime National Historic Site and other public artworks.

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Episode 66: Lynn, Lynn, City of Murals

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Al Wilson, Founder and Executive Director of Beyond Walls, discusses their work to create public art installations in Lynn, MA. He shares how perceptions were torn down as part of this process, bringing people into downtown and changing the image and ethos around this diverse and vibrant city.

Al Wilson is the Founder and Executive Director of Beyond Walls, a creative placemaking agency based in Lynn, Massachusetts whose mission is to activate public space to strengthen communities. In 2016, Al and a robust volunteer committee launched a grass-roots effort to implement four inaugural large scale public art installations in downtown Lynn, a post-industrial city located just 10 miles north of Boston. Inspired by projects in Brooklyn, New York; Philadelphia, PA; Kings Cross, London; and Wynwood, Miami, Al recognized Lynn’s rich history, distinctive architecture, and burgeoning arts and cultural district as the perfect landscape in which to test the creative economy.
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Episode 15: Playing the Long Game for Public Art

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Since 1978, a formal ordinance in the City of Cambridge has required by law that they include artists in the thinking and practice of designing and building the city. Jason Weeks, Executive Director of the Cambridge Arts Council, details how their public art program has grown to become a nationally-recognized model, and a steward for 285 unique art works, the largest collection of contemporary public art in New England.

Jason Weeks is the Executive Director of the Cambridge Arts Council, a city department and public non-profit agency in Cambridge, MA. Weeks works with an Advisory Board, Trustees of the non-profit corporation, the Cambridge Public Art Commission, elected officials, city administration and agency staff to oversee an award-winning Public Art/Percent-for-Art program, the Cambridge Arts Grant Program, Street Performer Program, annual events including Cambridge River Festival, Summer in the City, Cambridge Open Studios, and other community based initiatives.
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