Walking the Walk

Donna Berger, The Mill Girls

REVITALIZING PAWTUCKET’S ART SCENE


In Pawtucket, “Chalk Wall,” a text-based installation by New Orleans artist Candy Chang, curves around a building’s retaining wall on the city’s Main Street. The sweep of the installation’s blackboard surface begins with the words, “In my lifetime… I want to…” Chalk is available for passersby to complete this sentence. The artist’s concept includes instructions pertaining to presentation and often an understanding as to predetermined duration.

On the “Chalk Wall,” people can write whatever comes to mind, including personal insight or a testimony of some kind. The possibilities are endless. This temporary outdoor installation is meant to draw people from interior spaces into an interactive public dialogue. In whatever city it appears — and it has appeared in cities across the globe, including Wellfleet this past summer, thanks to the farm project space + gallery — the installation serves as a unifying project and immediately goes viral. Chang’s idea takes local identification to global context very swiftly.

Just a block up from the “Chalk Wall” and its accompanying new pocket park is a softly ethereal, violet-colored graffiti glyph that traces its way along the length of a building at waist level. As temporary art, it is the result of another revitalization program and a lovely wistfully tender note of anime tagged on a black wall that flows across a neatly boarded up building under renovation.

Suzanne Volmer