On April 9, 2015, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh launched Boston Creates, an 18-month assessment of the city’s cultural health that will culminate in a long-range Arts and Culture Plan for Boston. Supported locally by both the Barr Foundation and the Klarman Family Foundation, the project will draw heavily on private funding both in the research stage and in its execution. Julie Burros, Boston’s new Chief of Arts and Culture, heads this effort. She has been assembling a broad-ranging team of community-based advisers and outside consultants to assess the needs of Boston’s many arts communities and to recommend “best practices.”

In June through September, she will be conducting extensive neighborhood and community focus groups throughout the city with stakeholders large and small. A preliminary draft will be aired at a “Town Meeting” in January, and she will deliver the final report next June. Her office will then direct the plan’s implementation and coordinate its recommendations with other city departments.

Having directed Chicago’s much larger planning process through to completion in 2012, Burros was a natural choice for the job. Though Boston is much smaller in size (only 21st among American cities) its regional density ranks it sixth among
combined statistical areas. Both Boston’s higher rate of population growth and its unique mix of employment will influence its decisions about priorities in the arts.

After Mayor Walsh’s announcement, Artscope Magazine’s Elizabeth Michelman sat down with Burros to talk with her about Boston Creates and the city’s long-range cultural plan.

WHAT WILL BE THE BOUNDARIES OF BOSTON’S ARTS AND CULTURE PLAN?

The Department of Arts and Culture can only do grantmaking within the City of Boston, but we know the arts ecosystem traverses the city’s boundaries. We’re very eager to have stakeholders from outside the city, involved in our leadership committee, participate in our process and come up with implementation mechanisms. We recognize that city money has to stop at the borders, but other funding mechanisms might flow across the borders.

HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT PROVIDING TRAINING AND SUPPORT TO HELP SMALL ORGANIZATIONS DEVELOP MORE SOPHISTICATED STRATEGIC PLANNING?

I think you’re talking about “capacitybuilding,” which a lot of the foundations in town are already supporting. The Bloomberg Foundation — which just gave us a grant for this — is focused on capacity building and helping organizations become more sustainable. They work with the University of Maryland’s De Vos Institute of Arts Management — who used to be at the Kennedy Center — in supporting leaders of arts non-profits, typically creative persons who morphed into an executive director role. These people often have to wear many hats, none of which quite fits for the roles they play. De Vos worked with small arts organizations in Chicago, so it’s thrilling news that Bloomberg is also investing so heavily in the city of Boston.

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The Artist Wears Many Hats

Artist. Teacher. Blogger. Filmmaker. Vermont’s Samantha “Sam” Talbot-Kelly fits into all of these categories, and many more.

“I’m not a filmmaker yet,” she responds, modestly, when I run by the list of descriptions I’ve amassed for her work. “I happen to go between disciplines, that’s for sure, but I’d just say that I’m an artist and depending on the concept, I decide whether to do it in painting or film or installation or sculpture or illustrations.”

And film.

Talbot-Kelly, who is based in Montpelier, is in the early stages of putting together a film — with the assistance of cinematographer Carlos Diaz — that will look at the studios of professional artists in Vermont and explore how being based there affects their work. “Sometimes, those artists are bringing the world in to their practice, in the sense of, it doesn’t matter where they are, it just so happens they’re able to practice in Vermont and they have enough isolation,” she said.

The film, “Feral State,” will “flesh out” the context of the creative world of Vermont’s professional visual artists, covering all of its generations from those just out of school to those who’ve been doing it throughout most of their lives.

“We visit the artists’ studios to film them and they share their creative process, their philosophy, their manifestos, their discipline and what their relationship is to the land of Vermont, living here as professionals, how does this relationship make impact or no impact on their art work while living on the fringes of big urban centers such as New York and Boston,” Talbot-Kelly said.

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A Celebration of Craft in Northampton

If you really need an excuse to visit Northampton, the Paradise City Arts Festival is a good one. Two times a year, over the holiday weekends bookending the warm weather season, hoards of artists and crafts practitioners descend upon the Northampton Fairgrounds, transforming the agricultural barns and fallow fields that were once the playground of horses into a grand emporium of fine crafts. Jewelry, fiber and fashion, photography, fine woodworking and elegant expressions of furniture are all part of the mix along with painted tableaus and mixed media works in a plethora of sizes and styles destined to find homes on the walls of patrons.

Four art barns feature a stable of artists and crafts folk who regularly return for each show, vending their wares and looking for a unique niche and presentation point. Many have developed an ongoing relationship with collectors seeking to consider the newest offerings of their favored artisans.

The only livestock to be found on this hallowed ground are those fabricated in iron and steel. Adding to the complement of iron beasts of Dale Rogers, always a favorite of festivalgoers, is a fanciful 14-foot dragon fabricated in colorful fragments of recycled material; artist Piper Foreso calls her phantasmagoria “Dragonflies.” Her scales are made from beer and soda cans and her face from color-shifting glass. Additional elemental materials of the beast include copper tubing, foiled insulation, roof flashing, and steel rods. Foreso’s flying leviathan echoes the theme of this year’s special exhibit “UP IN THE AIR,” featuring all matter of winged creatures, great and small.

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Art Blooms in Greenwich

Spring on Connecticut’s Gold Coast and the outside world is imbued with light, scent and color. At the C. Parker Gallery in Greenwich, the “Art in Bloom” exhibition is underway. Within the 2,000 square foot space are many variations from 15 of the gallery’s artists.

In conjunction with the gallery’s monthly lecture series, art historian Dr. Jessica Winston is giving a talk on Van Gogh timed to coincide with the upcoming Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, “Van Gogh: Irises and Roses.” And while it’s rare for a retail business to incorporate an educational component into its daily operations, for Tiffany Benincasa, owner of the gallery for the past three years, a passion for art and an interest in learning has long been an ancillary mission.

Through many of the services the gallery currently offers, Benincasa hopes to instill in her customers, and their children, an appreciation of art not only for its own sake, but also for its role in family life and the creation of pleasurable surroundings.

Benincasa discovered these aspects herself as a child when her grandparents trundled her off to Manhattan and allowed her to select a painting for her bedroom. It was the kind of choice infused with love that she would remember well beyond the actual purchase. Now, through the concierge services the gallery provides, she hopes similarly to shepherd people who are sometimes making their first significant acquisition by helping them articulate their taste and zero in on their specific needs. The services also include appraisals, framing and installation, as well as designer presentations and consultations.

Her customers run the gamut from first-timers to longtime collectors, people who want a muted seascape for their traditionally appointed living room as well as those living in a minimalist modern home looking for work that will make a strong statement. Gallery staff works with families and corporations, interior designers, and established corporate and private collectors.

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