Underground, Overlooked: Art of the Red Line

Hoping to find my way back to Harvard Square from MIT, I ducked around a tarped fence on Main Street per the advice of a roadside sign. Its oversized letters — too imperious for its situation, I thought — promised that my subway commute in the “RED LINE - ALEWIFE” direction would start around the makeshift corner. My tentative steps carried me to an open door on the ground floor of a sleek office building, and a demure paper sign posted on the window with two pieces of Scotch tape confirmed that “MBTA KENDALL OUTBOUND” would be found within. I descended a staircase inside into a temporary tunnel of white walls, fluorescent lights, and what looked like masking tape baseboards — along with one of the most compelling art installations I’ve encountered in any space, tunnel or otherwise.

25 square images stared back at me from the walls, the glowing nebulous forms at the center of each blinking, undulating, pulsing, and writhing as I approached. The hollow ring of air and trains hurrying off somewhere just out of sight faded away as the installation derailed my journey and beckoned me to its abstracted masses. I had exited the subterranean “MBTA KENDALL OUTBOUND” and lifted off into an otherworldly realm.

I soon learned that the images, ranging from just bigger than my head to over seven feet in width, are a set of lenticular prints of glass lantern slides overlaid with various glass objects created by artist Ligia Bouton, a professor of studio art at Mount Holyoke College. The technology is essentially a large-scale version of everyone’s favorite childhood bookmarks — the ones with tigers that magically appeared to run or dolphins that shimmied through the water when the bookmark was tilted from side to side. But while the tigers and dolphins of the Scholastic Book Fair are allowed movement in only a few frames, Bouton’s prints feature anywhere from two to thirty digitally layered images slotted into a single square. Rather than by motion of the object itself, each square is animated instead by the passerby’s motion of passing by. To view the installation means to move with it, to lead it even as it holds you captive.

One of Harvard Square Station’s liveliest art installations was born in a graveyard.

“I began with the gravestones,” said artist Joyce Kozloff on how she developed her public artwork “New England Decorative Arts.” A colorful, eight by 83-foot-long ceramic tile mural against a gently curved wall, the piece has enlivened the Harvard bus terminal’s double-ramp walkway since its installation.

The work was Kozloff’s first public art commission, received in 1979 and installed in 1985 with hand-painted low-fire tiles and glazes. Having been selected as an artist for the station, she traveled to Boston to mine for local inspiration as she consulted with the architects designing the space.

I spent an hour and a half in the Harvard Square bus terminal. It wasn’t long enough.

I had recently been reminded of Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts’ article “The Power of Patience,” in which she emphasizes the value of strategic deceleration in a world of immediacy. Roberts details an assignment for which she asks her students to spend “a painfully long time” looking at an art object, urging a crucial distinction between looking at something and actually seeing it.

So I resolved to decelerate, hoping to see more of the art I encounter. What better place to start than the public art installations of the MBTA, I thought, which I’d so often looked at but never really seen?