The Art of the Outside

The term “public art” is difficult to define. Yet, the concept is usually connected to the history of a place and the community of people who inhabit it.

Dawn M. Spears is a member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. She and her husband, Cassius Spears, co-founded the Narragansett Food Sovereignty Initiative. Their farm in Ashaway, R.I. is, according to Spears, most likely the only Indigenous-owned and -operated farm in the state. At the farm, they grow Narragansett flint corn, a species that was once a daily staple for the Narragansett people but is now expensive and difficult to find. The corn is used for eating as well as spiritual and ceremonial purposes.

Spears and her husband also grew an acre of this corn on the land they used for the Narragansett Food Sovereignty Initiative. They saw the corn’s ability to bring together their community.

For over a century, Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain has been a “museum of trees” and a picturesque escape from the city. Because of the Arboretum’s long and storied history, there are many trees that used to be important to the Arboretum and the city which are no longer there — like a beech tree that succumbed to beech bark disease and a cork tree named “Corky” whose limb broke when a group of schoolchildren sat on it for a photo. Other trees at the Arboretum are still alive but stand much smaller than their original grandeur, such as a crabapple tree whose stump is still somehow miraculously alive — even after the rest of the tree fell over in a recent nor’easter.

In an augmented reality exhibit called “Ghost Trees,” Sonia S. Ralston, an alum of the Harvard Graduate School of Design designed 3-D digital models of five Arboretum trees, which visitors can superimpose on the landscape behind them by scanning a QR code on their smartphones near the place where the tree used to stand. These five trees, including the beech tree “Corky” and the crabapple tree, are all culturally significant to Boston and the Arboretum.

Ralston came up with the idea in conjunction with leadership at the Arboretum.

In the mid-19th century, American painters from the art movement of the Hudson River School traveled into the nation’s wilderness to gather inspiration from the sweeping landscapes. These paintings were not only meant for enjoyment, but as a way to transform Americans’ perceptions about the West. Train companies used these romantic and realistic paintings — such as Albert Bierstadt’s landscapes of the Rocky Mountains, Yosemite Valley, and the Sierra Nevada — to entice people to move out west. In the 20th century, Ansel Adams’s black-and-white photographs of Yosemite also fostered advocacy for conservation.

Now, the National Park Service continues the legacy of these artists with over fifty artist-in-residence programs that provide lodging inside the park for visual artists, writers, and musicians hoping to stay for a few weeks. While at each national park, the artists contribute to park programming, such as speaker events and workshops, and gather inspiration for a piece of artwork which they donate to the park after their stay.

Los Angeles artist Lorraine E. Bubar, who has done animation, watercolors, and now papercutting throughout her career, has completed several artist-in-residencies in national parks. The program has allowed her to travel to Denali, Zion, Petrified Forest, Lassen Volcanic, Capitol Reef, and most recently, Acadia National Park on the Downeast coast of Maine.