Embedded in the pavement of Boston’s new Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway is a memorial to trash, cast in bronze. It is a spruced-up version of the 1976 Asaroton by Cambridge-based artist Mags Harries. One of Boston’s best-loved public art pieces, its original site was in Haymarket, Boston’s traditional home to food vendors. It was a tribute to the trash that market generated.

Asaroton—the name refers to Roman floor mosaics that mimicked the mess on a floor after a banquet—was Harries’s first public art piece. She and Lajos Héder, her husband and partner, generally don’t bother to apply for public art commissions in Boston because the city has such a poor record in that area. Instead, they’ve made public art from Iceland to Hawaii. In similar situations are other prominent public artists based in the Boston area, including Ralph Helmick and Christopher Janney. Helmick’s Arthur Fiedler Memorial on the Charles River Esplanade is an icon, but for the most part he works in other cities, including, at the moment, Denver, which he says “has a really well-run public art program.”

At least when Janney goes to Logan Airport he gets to experience his two-year-old Rainbow Cove Red and Rainbow Cove Green. The works are walls of glass in varying shades of those colors along the passageways between the central parking garage and terminals B and C. When passengers walk through, they activate a score of sounds from various corners of New England.

Janney’s Rainbows are exceptions to the general paucity of public art in Boston. Sadly, the Rose Kennedy Greenway is perhaps the greatest of the missed opportunities. With precious little art, it is essentially fifteen acres of park land—a long string of gardens. They’re not even adventurous gardens. They could have been—there are plenty of public artists working with garden design—but they are for the most part conventional, not anything remotely as innovative and site-sensitive as Robert Irwin’s Getty garden, an inventive part of that museum’s California campus.

Beyond gardens, individual works might simply have been installed in open spaces. More imaginative results might have been achieved if a range of artists were involved from the beginning of the project. For example, they might have contributed to pedestrian bridges that would have been not only aesthetically pleasing but also a safety feature, especially for a spot where high-speed traffic emerges from the now submerged tunnel around a bend.

Unfortunately, Boston lacks the kind of percent-for-art program that mandates funds for art in construction projects. Cambridge is the only city in Massachusetts with such a program. Cities and states across the country have them, and in each case the law differs slightly. Maine’s version, enacted in 1979 by the state legislature, provides funds for the acquisition of public art for newly constructed or renovated state-funded buildings, including schools, the University of Maine, and all state buildings that interface with the public. Under the law, one percent of the construction budget goes to public art. Recently, John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, wrote an impassioned defense of Rhode Island’s law, which was published in the Providence Journal as a response to an earlier article entitled “Can Rhode Island still afford to pay for public art.” “I commend the state Senate Public Art Commission in its assessment of the value of public art,” Maeda wrote, “and the significant bearing it has on our reputation as a creative economy, place to visit and state in which to do business, and I urge the state to maintain its one percent-for-public-art program.”

The Gravity of Water
Most artists specialize in themes or materials. Harries and Héder frequently use water in their work. “It’s the only place I’m happy,” Harries says. “I can be in a kayak all day.”

For their MoonTide Garden, a commission at the International Ferry Terminal in Portland, Maine, Harries and Héder placed large boulders in the water. Students from the Maine College of Art coated the upper parts of the stones with aluminum leaf, which makes them gleam like silver on sunny days and makes viewers conscious of the dramatic shifting tides. Says Héder of the installation, “It has broad political implications. Water is going to be the next great political crisis, after global warming.”

The most ambitious of their aqueous works locally is Drawn Water at the Cambridge Water Treatment plant on the shores of Fresh Pond. Its goal is to make people aware of where the substance comes from and how it is used. Finally unveiled in 2002, the project took five years to complete because of neighborhood opposition to having a rare green space in Cambridge “polluted” by art. This kind of organized objection is a constant hurdle for public artists, who do, after all, have to gain the support or at least the tolerance of the public.

Among Drawn Water’s several elements is a huge terrazzo floor in the lobby of the building that maps the presence of water in Cambridge, everything from streams to swimming pools. Other features include a drinking fountain outside, linked to a transparent Water Column inside, so that the column reacts with lights, bubbles, and a change in water level when anyone drinks from the fountain.

Harries and Héder also specialize in seating, which, says Harries, “defines your space in the environment.” Their Iceland project features a chair covered with sod. On the summer solstice it faces a spot where the sun doesn’t set.

Solar power is yet another theme in their work, a presence in a major project in Denver and another in Austin. The latter is a collection of twenty-foot-tall ”sunflowers” in which the petals are solar panels. The city selected the artists, while the developers paid the $595,000 cost of the work but also got a rebate from the city for using solar power.

Profiles of the City
Two hallmarks of Ralph Helmick’s work are suspended sculptures and human heads. The famous example of the latter in Boston is the giant Fiedler head, composed of Helmick’s trademark horizontal striations that suggest the head might be only a temporary presence, that those layers of sandblasted aluminum plate might float away from each other.

Helmick’s Denver Convergence, a work-in-progress in the courthouse atrium of the Denver Justice Center, is a delicate, porous mesh of steel and aluminum, fifty-five feet tall and fifteen feet off the ground. It tapers gracefully, from an eighteen-foot width at the base to two feet at the top. While the design seems abstract at first glance, it is actually made of series of interlocking human profiles that represent the city’s demographic as of 2008, with an equal number of men and women and a range of ages and ethnic groups. Each of the fifty-five layers has twelve portraits, meant to represent the twelve people in a jury, locked in deliberation. “I look at every project as a possibility for consensus,” Ralph Helmick says. In Convergence, he has managed to meet that goal in the work itself, creating a portrait of Denver’s citizens in the process of reaching consensus.

Public artists can’t just move on after completing a piece; they have to provide for its maintenance. So Helmick’s proposal for the Denver work includes provision for an almost primitive cleaning device—a feather duster at the end of an extension rod.

When a Light Falls in the Forest, What do You Hear?
Christopher Janney’s signatures are color, light and sound, the last reflecting his experience as a musician in rhythm & blues bands from the time he was fourteen. He has also used movement, most notably in HeartBeat, in which a dancer’s heartbeat is amplified, becoming the score for improvised choreography. Janney created the piece in 1981, and it gjained a new lease on life in 1998, when Mikhail Baryshnikov started touring with it for two years. In March of this year, HeartBeat gained another new life when it was performed accompanied by the famed a cappella group The Persuasions.

This sort of evolution over time is typical of Janney’s work. Consider his 1995 Sonic Forest. He wrote about the piece and made drawings of it, but still people didn’t understand the idea. So he built a demonstration model, a “forest” of twenty-five columns, each eight feet tall, emitting lights that shine down on audiences and preprogrammed sounds, some drawn from real forests. He built the model to be portable. “I’d say to people, ‘Let me bring this model to your city.’ A crew of two or three can set it up in twenty hours.” By now there are two traveling Sonic Forests, one based in London and the other in Boston. The piece has been included in music festivals. “My electronics never sleep,” Janney says. “And people at music festivals don’t sleep much either. So from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. I’m the happening place.”

So popular is the piece that it now has permanent versions, including one in Cincinnati and another in Zaragoza, Spain. The latter was the site of a World Expo last year, and the theme was water. So Janney programmed the score to reflect that, using bamboo flutes and water drums, some of which actually have the liquid in them.

The Cincinnati piece was also customized. This variation on Sonic Forest is called Whistle Grove: The National Steamboat Monument, and the twenty-four towers in it actually emit steam when visitors move among them. The sounds, intended as a portrait of life on the great American rivers, range from the voices of men loading ships to text from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “As long as Sonic Forest has a life,” Janney says, “I’ll continue with it.”

Another part of his life as a public artist is parking lots. “I’ve done four now,” he says. “They’re a necessary evil on the urban landscape. Cities and developers will pay a lot of money to have a beautiful building made and ignore the parking lot next to it. But,” he says, sounding the incurable optimist that a public artist must remain to survive in the field, “because they don’t have big art components, I can do what I want.”

For exhaustive information on Mags Harries, Lajos Héder, Ralph Helmick and Christopher Janney, check their websites: http://harriesheder.com; helmicksculpture.com; janney.com.

Janney is also the subject of the fine book Architecture of the Air: The Sound and Light Environments of Christopher Janney, with an essay by Beth Dunlop.

Christine Temin was the art and dance critic at The Boston Globe for over two decades, and now writes for a variety of international publications. She has taught at Middlebury College, Wellesley College, and Harvard University. Her most recent book is Ballet Behind the Scenes, published by the University Press of Florida.

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