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A movable feast of public art
Cambridge is one stop in an unusual road show
By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent | January 11, 2006
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CAMBRIDGE -- Artist DeWitt Godfrey rolled into town from his home in upstate New York on New Year's weekend in a flatbed truck loaded with rusty steel cylinders. He piled them into the courtyard outside Café Pamplona, where his eye-catching sculpture now stands nearly 30 feet tall, a mountain of holes of all sizes, squashing into one another and gaping at passersby. Six weeks from now, he'll break the sculpture down (and a second one, now up at Cambridge Arts Council Gallery), load up the truck, and take his cylinders to New Haven to erect another version.
Godfrey's sculptures ''Pamplona" and ''Pamplona, inside" kick off a series of exhibits called Public Art/Moving Site which takes three art projects to three different municipalities through the spring. An innovative take on public art, which is typically permanent and localized, this is a road show unlike any other. Shows by Godfrey, Michael Oatman, and the art collective Spurse will rotate through Cambridge, New Haven, and Bellows Falls, Vt. The opening for Godfrey's installment takes place tomorrow evening at CAC Gallery.
''Normally, we consider 'site' in public art as something that is stationary," says Lillian Hsu, CAC's acting director of public art and exhibitions. ''But a site can be a path, a journey through three towns. Each piece will maintain its integrity while it is moved, but also respond to each community and physical site." CAC is collaborating on the project with Artspace in New Haven and the Rockingham Arts and Museum Project in Bellows Falls.
Godfrey, who teaches at Colgate University and has been creating public art for a decade, says he was excited about the Café Pamplona courtyard. ''The walls were not parallel. It's the narrowest site I've worked in," he says.
In New Haven, the cylindrical building blocks -- and a few spare ones -- will fill an 18-foot-wide empty lot. In Bellows Falls, they'll sit on a plot of land in a residential neighborhood.
''Each time I install, certain components will be different," Godfrey says. ''Place, context, architecture, and the cylinders themselves," which change shape depending on what frame they're in.
Patrons at the café who watched Godfrey and his team build ''Pamplona" in the space normally used as a summertime patio expressed concern, the artist says, that the sculpture would spell the end of dining al fresco.
''People are relieved it's not permanent," says Godfrey. ''One thing with public art is its permanence. Permanent change is difficult for people to accept."
Josefina Yanguas, 89, the owner of the 47-year-old café, a Harvard Square institution, might be one of those people.
''I think it takes time to get used to," she says of Godfrey's imposing sculpture, which is steely and industrial-looking but also lets people see through it as if it were a cluster of bubbles. ''Modern art is difficult for me, but the more you look at it, the more you like it."
Yanguas signed onto the project without hesitation, though. ''I said yes," Yanguas recalls, ''and then I said, 'Josefina, do you know what you are doing?' But if you don't gamble . . . "
She took a liking to Godfrey and his team. ''They're fantastic people. Very professional," Yanguas says. ''I don't know what they're doing, but they're doing it very well."
Oatman's piece ''Model Citizens: A Miniature Epic" opens at CAC Gallery in late February. This week, the artist, who teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., is distributing posters around Cambridge advertising for local hobbyists who make models -- dollhouses, model railroads, dioramas, and scale models. He will curate what he finds into a show at the gallery, as well as in New Haven and Bellows Falls.
''I want to find people who spend their time making tiny things," Oatman says, ''people who spend part of their day as giants."
His exhibitions in each town will be weighted to local model makers, but he's already got some model citizens whose work will appear in each installation. Ultimately, Oatman plans to make a documentary about the people he meets working on this project.
The international Spurse collective specializes in tweaking the public's assumptions about space. Public Art/Moving Site fits right into its aesthetic.
''A lot of us are out of architecture school," says member Iain Kerr. ''And we think of space not geographically but vectorally. For instance, imagine that the largest city in Haiti is New York City, because there are more Haitians in New York than there are in any city in Haiti."
For its artwork, the group will create a provisional restaurant in an empty Cambridge storefront in April, following stints in New Haven and Bellows Falls.
''We'll walk through all of Cambridge, following a score so that we don't have control over where we walk, knock on people's doors, and ask if they have stuff they'd be willing to give us," Kerr explains. With that stuff -- food, flatware, dishes, chairs, and tables, Spurse will form its restaurant.
''It creates a community from whomever you meet," Kerr says.
CAC got a touring grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts, as well as a grant from the LEF Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, to help fund Public Art/Moving Site. Hsu says it's the first time an NEFA touring grant has gone to a visual arts project rather than a performance project.
But Godfrey actually sees his work as a performance.
''They may be steel, macho, and modernist," Godfrey says, standing in front of his cylinders at CAC Gallery. ''But these are ephemeral. They exist in performance. People are going to remember the experience, not the image."
DeWitt Godfrey's ''Pamplona" is at Café Pamplona, 12 Bow St., Cambridge, and ''Pamplona, inside" is at Cambridge Arts Council Gallery, 344 Broadway, Cambridge, through Feb. 17. CAC Gallery hosts an opening reception tomorrow, 5:30-7:30 p.m. 617-349-4380, www.cambridgeartscouncil.org.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
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