The steel for this sculpture came from steel yards all over Boston. Finding the steel and meeting different people was an important part of the process. Relating to the environment and surroundings of the shipyard was crucial to this installation; thus material from the yard was included. The need to secure this work from the elements became part of the artistic design.

We look out over the water to half of the City of Boston. East Boston occupies the other half. The totality of the two is our community.

Myrna Balk has received grants and awards for her bamboo and steel sculpture, photography, and etchings both internationally and locally. In addition to showing art locally, she has exhibited in Cleveland, Glasgow, Beijing, Budapest, Nepal. and India

As a social worker and artist, she was invited in 2001 to document the lives of Dalit women in a remote section of Nepal with photographs and etchings. Other etchings, exploring international sex trafficking, were shown at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2000.

The Children’s Chairs Project is an installation of small multicolored handmade chairs. These chairs represent the important place children hold in the community.

The colors represent the diversity of their background – some, descendants of those who first lived on this land, others offspring of parents who came to America from around the world.

We adults occupy the role of guardians, like buoys that mark marine dangers. The children float on the waves of the future. Protect them as they move into uncharted waters – they face grave dangers

Gail Jerauld Bos - “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” (The Children’s Chairs Project)

Wood, wire, glue

Gail Jerauld Bos was born in 1938 and has worked in construction, education, art and international development in West Africa. Currently she does special programs, “Taking a Look at Art and at Science”, with young children in the Boston Public Schools. Her art, paintings and monoprints fill her studio on Green St. in Jamaica Plain and her installations can be found at a number of sites across the city. Supported by WDB.

It is said that the sea anemone is immortal, capable of rebuilding itself when harmed.

I see this to be true of Boston and its people. In spite of what happens, in spite of the harm, Boston rebuilds and goes strongly on.

Catherine Evans - Anemone/Boston

Gimp

Catherine Evans is an artist based at ArtSpace, Maynard, MA. She has exhibited work in galleries and shows throughout the US. Selected exhibitions: "Abstractions: New Modernism" (invitational), Anne Street Gallery, Newburg, NY (2013); "Copious", (solo invitational), NK Gallery, Boston, MA 2012;  "Art Everywhere Waiting", Regis College, Weston, MA (2011/2012).

She also creates fibrous public art installations. Selected installations: Contemporary Sculpture at Chesterwood, Stockbridge, MA (2013); Exposed 2013 Stow Vt. (2013); Moses Brown School in Providence, RI (2012/2013); Provincetown Green Festival, Provincetown, MA (2012); Art in the Park in Worcester, MA, (2011) On an Ancient Elm Planted By Thoreau, Concord, MA (2012/2013).

Rising tides, the colorful painted lines on the far dock, marks the new high tide lines as sea level rises foot by foot over the next century. The base line is white, and marks the current high tide line. Each subsequent line shows where one foot of sea rise puts the new high tide line. The predicted total rise over the next century at this site is 2’-6’. After two feet, the color changes from cooler colors to the warning yellow at 3’.  The final color, red, at the top of the iron cleats, marks five feet, as there is nothing on the dock 6’ above current high tide. These tide lines show normal high tides, not storm surges, which will be higher.

These lines help you imagine where the water will be in the future, and what else around the harbor will be awash. How will we all respond to this new base line? We want to hear your response. Along the marina are messages tucked into tiny bottles that correspond to each new high tide level. For each foot of rise, there is a positive and a negative prompt- for in every change there is positive and negative. Will Ignorance or Hope win out? Denial/Response? Fear/Action?  Disbelief/Commitment? Awash/Repair? Adrift/Renewal? Both, or neither? What do you think?

Your thoughts may be prompted by these messages as you walk along the main marina, you may have unrelated ideas. These bottles are tiny, and are found much like a message-in-a bottle is found in the vast sea, by happenstance, or perhaps as a treasure hunt. They beg your reply message, which we will toss into the vast sea of the internet.

Place your response to these tide lines and rising sea levels in the large collection bottle, and we will post them on the HarborArts web site.

Susan Israel, Rising Tides

Acrylic paint, glass bottles, plastic bottle, asphalt roofing paper, copper wire;  all 

reclaimed materials

Susan Israel is the Founder & Principal of the Energy Necklace Project, which uses art and workshops to teach sustainability, innovation and collaboration in businesses, communities and schools. The Energy Necklace Project connects diverse communities  in a dialogue about sustainability through the vehicle of public art and workshops. We teach the skills of collaboration, leadership and creative thinking which are needed to innovate solutions. 

Through the Energy Necklace Project people become empowered to find solutions to  overwhelming problems, and become connected to a larger community of solution seekers.  

See more at www.energynecklace.com.

Ocean tides are critical to the function of East Boston’s harbor. The activities of commercial and pleasure crafts, cargo boats, boat tours and sailing vessels, all take place on the tidal waters whose ebb and flow are ruled by the moon’s gravitational pulls. ‘Tide Tables’ documents numerically and color-codes the daily times of the high and low tides on each of the months/days of the duration of the exhibit.

The sculpture plays with numbers to draw attention to the interrelationship of the moon's gravitational pull, the water, and the hours and minutes of the day and night. It shows that our environment is part of the wider universe and that we are all governed by natural forces not under our control, which we must respect.  Schoolchildren learn that tables, like the multiplication tables, communicate numerical information. The sculpture ‘Tide Tables’ makes real tables the physical site for such information. As each high and low tide passes, we sense its ephemerality; the tide turns and its changes are marked four times each day.  The entire sculpture is a colorful meditation on the movement of water marked by time.  

The tables themselves, recycled and restored, will be donated following the exhibition to neighborhood individuals or organizations first-come-first serve as mementos of the exhibition.

Karen Klein - Tide Tables

Recycled wooden tables and marine chart table on site

Karen Klein is a dancer, visual artist, and poet. As a young woman, she studied dance with Martha Graham, Jose Limon, and Mary Anthony.  Retiring after thirty-seven years in the Brandeis English Department, she resumed dance studies and has performed with the Prometheus Dance Elders Ensemble, and in work by Peter DiMuro, Kelley Donovan, Daniel McCusker, Joan Green, Emily Beattie, and Kee Chin. Her sculptures and artist books have been widely shown in solo, two-person, and group exhibitions; her drawings have been published in books from Oxford, Beacon, SUNY, University of Oklahoma, Davis, and Holly House Presses and magazines in the US and Canada.

She is a member of Galatea Fine Art Gallery, New England Sculptors Association, and Studios Without Walls.  Her most recent publication of poetry was in The Drunken Boat (2012).

www.nesculptors.com, www.galateafineart.com

On three alternating rows of MRI film, the portholes are painted with smaller circular painted holes. These represent looking inside oneself.  From portholes to portals - looking from within, looking inside, looking out and looking at a reflection - by framing them on the barrier fence, we see the world around us in a new and different perspective.

Bette Ann Libby, “Portholes: Looking Out/Looking Within”

Bette Ann Libby has worked in clay since 1972 and has been inspired by her sojourns in Samoa, Asia, India and the Middle-east. A studio potter in Waitsfield, Vermont from 1975-86, she ran the Mad River Valley Craft Fair from 1985-1989.

In 1999, she founded the sculptor’s collective, “Studios Without Walls”, which has received 12 consecutive Massachusetts Cultural Council grants for environmental installations in Brookline. In 2009, Bette Ann began creating “lanterns” out of MRI film which were exhibited in “Nature and Artifice” along the Longwood Riverway path.

Over the past 12 years, she has organized numerous mosaic workshops and public installations involving from a dozen to more than one hundred participants.  Most of the installations are permanently located in hospitals, schools and libraries. She has worked with art consultant Betty Bothereau, L’Attitude Gallery, Boston.

In 2008, she  was awarded an MCC grant for the Brookline Town-wide Mosaic, which was permanently installed in the Coolidge Corner Library, Brookline, MA in December, 2011. In June, 2011, working with students at Yestermorrow Build/Design School, Libby  created a 32 x 8’ wall on the campus in Warren, VT. In October, 2012, working with the Boston/Haifa (Israel) Connection, she created “Peace/Shalom” Mosaic for Temple Beth Avodah, Newton, MA and also created a community mosaic “Tree of Knowledge” through a grant from the City-Wide Friends of the Boston Public Library. Her work will be included in the “Art of Mosaics: Piecing it Together” at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, July 7th- October 27th  2013.

www.betteannlibby.com

‘Hell and High Water' can be construed as a meditation on the problem of Earth's rising sea levels.  Because most of  the planet's material culture resides near waterfronts and shorelines where the largest populations live, monuments and museums that cannot float, also cannot scramble to high ground.  They will require uncommon flotation ability and weatherproofing.  Only a variation on Noah's ark can provide safety.

Hell and High Water

Peter Lipsitt,  and principal assistant,  H. Kimsey.

wood and roofing membrane

Peter Lipsitt has shown outdoor sculpture at Chesterwood in Stockbridge, MA, Lars Andersen Park, Brookline, Triangle Workshop, Pine Plains, NY, Lewis Wharf, Boston, Wheaton College, Norton, MA, Wheelock College, Sculpture Key West, FL, The Rose Museum, and Art Complex Museum. His work is in the collections of The Rose, Fogg Art  Musuem at Harvard University, DeCordova Museum, Hamilton College Museum, and Vassar College. This summer there are works, created with Susan Israel, at the New Bedford Art Museum and the New Bedford National Park Service.

Lipsitt, who grew up in a town on Buzzards Bay, is a graduate of Brandeis University (BA) and Yale University School of Art (BFA, MFA). He also attended the Skowhegan School program. In the 1960s he taught in the US Peace Corps in Ethiopia. He has also taught at Wheaton College, and other colleges and schools. As a founding member of Boston Sculptors Gallery he has presented many solo exhibitions. Fuller Art Museum, Wheaton College, Brown University, and Mather House, Harvard University have given him solo shows. Lipsitt has permanent public sculpture at Bajko Skating Rink in Hyde Park, MA, University Place, Cambridge, and work on extended loan at Boston City Hall.

He has received a generous grant from Artist Resource Trust (A.R.T.), a fund of Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, faculty grants from Wheaton College, and others from the Brookline Arts Council. His longtime studio is in the Piano Factory, South End, Boston, MA.

Astrobiologists are increasingly convinced that life on Earth itself might have started in the sulfurous cauldron around hydrothermal vents. Vent environments minimize oxygen and radiation, which can damage primitive molecules. Indeed, many of the primordial molecules needed to jump-start life could have formed in the subsurface from the interaction of rock and circulating hot water driven by hydrothermal systems. - NASA Science News

CDs are made from petroleum formed in the earth’s ancient past, made into plastic, and then pressed with information that is now obsolescent: computer programs which were once state-of-the-art, but now meaningless. Other CDs hold memories and images.

Most of this sculpture is made from petroleum products and commonplace objects. The assembled piece conjures up the image of the tubeworms that live near hydrothermal vents deep in the bottoms of our seas, reminding us that there is so much more to learn about the earth’s deep reaches. Do they hold the secret of the beginnings of life?

Lyn MacDonald –Organisms From The Depths of Time

Materials: Recycled CDs, copper scouring pads, zip lock ties, swimming noodles, drainage tubes, weed whacker filament and duct tape.

Lyn’s studio is in Arlington, MA. She has been a member of Studios Without Walls since 2010. More of her outdoor work can be seen on www.studioswithoutwalls.org.

(A BIG Thank you! to all of the helping hands that made this happen.)

Sounding is a site-specific work for Building #12. Built directly from elements of the site itself, this subtle piece activates intentional and unintentional marks, structures, and sounds, quietly luring you to focus primarily on an unused sliver of space. Abstractly reflecting current use, remnants of pasts and imagined futures, this work occupies the present of this truly non-space—a crevice between an historic brick building and a newer metal clad construction in the shipyard.

Liz Nofziger - "Sounding"

Audio, gold foil

Liz Nofziger is a site-specific installation artist whose work examines relationships to space within the physical, architectural, political, and pop-cultural landscape. Employing a broad range of media including sculptural elements, video, light, audio, and text, viewer investigation completes her work. She lives and works in East Boston. Her installations have been shown at the Currier Museum (Manchester, NH), the 2010 DeCordova Biennial (Lincoln, MA), Galéria Ateneo (Medellin, Colombia), the Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College Chicago (Chicago, IL), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Kult 41 (Bonn, Germany), the Contemporary Artists Center (North Adams, MA), and Montserrat College of Art (Beverly, MA), among others.

 www.nofzilla.com

I work with light. 

It’s a natural thing in this environment to see how old art fades out into the background and how new art takes its place. I started with a wish to capture and reflect those sparkly moments of sunlight scintillating on the waves.  The piece needed to be an integrated object.  I had no idea just what I would be integrating into – the sky, the sea or just the side of a brick building. 

My first attempt was disastrous.  A hundred feet of aluminized Mylar shredded in the first stiff breeze. I changed my materials to stiffer plastics, accepting that they must overlay a previous work---not fighting with it but respecting it. I sought to shape and manipulate everyday perception of the visual field, defined as the place the brick ended and the plywood began. 

Cutting Plexiglas strips and Lexan discs, I stenciled geometric shapes with spray lacquer, then reversed the surfaces.  The silver, blue and red reflect colors I saw in the water and patterns and shadows evoking the surroundings in the shipyard. Each piece moves slightly on a single pivot-point, complementing the forms below and highlighting the passage of time.

John Powell - 'Collected Reflection'

Plexiglas, Lexan, lacquer-based paint.

John Powell was born in Los Angeles.  He studied metal-smithing, foundry and printmaking early on.  He received his M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art in 1985 and his M.S. in Architecture (Visual Studies) from MIT in 1989.  He was a participant and organizer of Reclamation Artists installations from 1987 to 1991, and his installations were included in shows at the ICA-Boston, Bromfield Gallery, and Artery Arts.  He has exhibited in the past with Thomas Segal and Howard Yezerski Galleries, and he currently shows with the latter in Boston.  Powell’s past projects include illumination of the Charles River bridges (Anderson, Weeks, River Street and Western Avenue) and the Evelyn Moakley Bridge over Fort Point Channel, Boston.  He is currently illuminating the Memorial Bridge in Kittery, Maine. Powell has created other past installations at the Harvard Business School, the MIT Medical Center, Cold Condescend Physics Laboratory at MIT, New Balance Corporate Headquarters, Brighton, MA, and the Cambridge Arts Council.  His studio is in Brighton, MA.

In “Time Out” the impermanence and temporality of the packaging material used to make the sea anemones speak of the transient quality of the environments we have created and the quick use and disposal of the goods we consume.

The sea anemones are made of common plastic materials that are so pervasive and abundant today that no part of the world is without them, especially not our oceans.

Here the anemones are reclaiming higher grounds in all of their strange and fascinating beauty. They burst out into the air like creatures of another world, seductive and disquieting, reaching out to grab our attention and sense of wonder, and perhaps bringing forward our consciousness of the world and what we are doing to it.

 Maria Ritz - Time Out

foam sheets, aquarium tubing, plastic beads and nylon fishing net.

Maria Ritz was born in Portugal and raised in France. She came to the United States in 1975. She earned both her B.A. and M.A. in literature and art history and studied painting with Albert Alcalay and sculpture with Joyce McDaniel at the SMFA, as well as the Mass. College of Art and Design.

She works as a sculptor and designer with all possible media, but increasingly with recycled materials.

Maria Ritz lives and teaches in Cambridge.

What is the present environmental impact of our shortsighted, temporary throw-away culture? This sculpture brings attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a growing mass of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean with an estimated area greater than the size of Texas.

As this ever-growing, vast mass of plastic disintegrates, it becomes a sea of small particulate and chemical sludge that, so far, cannot be cleaned up.  Indistinguishable from food sources, it is eaten by wildlife and either kills them or enters our food chain.  

Consider your actions.  Consider your impact.  Consider your waste.

Kerri Schmidt – From the Plastic Planet Series

steel and plastic bags

Kerri Schmidt is a Boston-based multi-media artist.  Her works are a result of an ongoing collaboration between brain, soul, the magic of chance, her inner four-year-old, and a sense of wonder.  She creates points of entry that explore connections with nature and the greater mysteries of life.

Website: www.StudiosWithoutWalls.org

Barbara Vogelsang constructs flowers, trees and the human form and works with high-quality materials, such as silk and cotton fabrics and handmade paper, to transform the appearance of everyday objects. Even after living for more than 30 years in the Northeast, she still can't get used to the Boston climate and its lack of color.

Barbara Vogelsang - "Global Warming Arrives in Boston"

Wood and plastic

Barbara Vogelsang, is currently working as a free-lance artist and decorator in Boston.  After receiving a degree in fashion design from the Modeschule Düsseldorf (Germany) in 1965, she worked as a fashion designer in  Heidelberg, Berlin, Porto Cervo/Italy and Hamburg.  In 1971, she started working as an artist in Germany in the 1970s.  She subsequently studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1978/79 and 1981/82, and took surface design at Boston University in 1983, followed in 1984 by papermaking with Bernie Toale in Allston/Mass.

In recent years she has worked extensively in soft sculpture, handmade paper and found objects. She has participated in many solo and group shows in the U.S. and Germany.