FINDING FAY FESTIVAL
SEPTEMBER 10-15
By Brian Goslow
Boston & Surrounding Locations- The Finding Fay Festival, which takes place September 10 through 15, celebrates the life and spirit of local artist and philanthropist Fay Chandler with a series of events, memorials and concerts.“Finding Fay at the BCA Fair” takes place on Saturday, September 12 from noon-4 p.m. at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St., Boston. The fair brings arts, cultural and social service organizations loved by Fay together to celebrate with exhibits, performances, readings, displays and interactive activities for every age.Events include instrument playgrounds, performances by Actors Shakespeare, Underground Railway and Nora Theater, Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Arts Academy, Conservatory Lab Charter School, and Handel and Haydn Society, painting and sculpture making, led by students from Mass College of Art, Montserrat College of Art, Boston Arts Academy and Artists for Humanity, and an art giveaway organized by The Art Connection.A memorial of Fay Chandler’s Life and Legacy takes place on Saturday, September 12 at 3:15 at Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St, Boston, MA. All are invited for an uplifting memorial service officiated by the Reverends Ray Hammond, Gloria White Hammond and Robert Randolph with remarks by friends and family and music by Bethel AME Church.Free guided nature walks and painting nature presented in partnership with Montserrat College of Art will be held on Sunday, September 13 from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. at Mass Audubon’s Nature Center, 500 Walk Hill St, Mattapan, MA.Free art-making activities recalling Fay’s role at the gallery at the Cambridge Art Association, 25 Lowell St, Cambridge, MA. will take place on Sunday, September 13 from noon-3 p.m.A free concert featuring some of Chandler’s favorite music will be presented by the Boston Landmarks Orchestra on Tuesday, September 15 from 7-9 p.m. at Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy Street, Cambridge.
Her son, Alfred D. (“Appy”) Chandler, shares the story of his mother’s life: “In 1960, Fay Chandler was a 39-year-old mother of four who was unsure what to do with her life. She wanted to make a difference, but didn’t know how. She was living in Brookline; her husband taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His passion was writing history. She wanted a passion of her own. As she enjoyed painting coffee mugs, she wrote away for a painting course offered on the back of a matchbook. Classes followed: first on Nantucket Island and later, more formally, at Boston’s Museum School.
“In 1963, her husband accepted a job at Johns Hopkins University and the family moved to Baltimore. Fay applied and was accepted into the Hoffberger Graduate School at the Maryland Institute College of Art. After graduating in 1967, she opened a gallery in Baltimore’s very blue collar Fell’s Point neighborhood. In 1973, the family returned to New England when her husband accepted a professorship at Harvard Business School. Fay ventured into Boston’s South End where a community arts center was struggling to find itself. She rented studio space and became a stalwart supporter of the new Boston Center for the Arts.“In 1989, she used an inheritance to buy a long-decommissioned fire station in Brighton which she resurrected as artists’ studios. As Fay aged and her inventory of paintings and sculptures grew, she realized she needed a creative way to place them. In 1994, she gathered a group of friends; together they developed the concept of an organization that would act as a broker between artists with art to give and social service organizations with walls to cover. The concept became a reality. The Art Connection was born a year later and has now expanded into nearly a dozen cities.“Over the next 20 years, Fay continued to paint, holding three major retrospectives at the Cyclorama of the BCA. As her ability to give grew, so did her support of the arts and the underserved. Fay particularly believed in helping young people: as such she supported a vast array of arts programs throughout eastern Massachusetts. Fay Chandler died in Brighton on March 3, 2015. She was 92, a widow, living in her beloved Engine House in Brighton and still painting.”An online talk about the cultural vitality of Boston presented by Sebastian Smee for the Boston Foundationwill be posted and run on the Finding Fay website until December 31.For a complete schedule of events and participants, please visit http://www.findingfay.org.Across the Bridge: Art and Power at the Salem Harbor Power Plant
By An Uong
Salem, MA – The Salem Harbor power plant towers over the rest of the cobblestoned town.
It is hard to imagine what kind of machinery lie within the dauntingly large group of buildings, let alone all of the people it takes to run such a system. On the other side of the North River is the Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, where, though students study art in all kinds of environments, carrying out the artistic process at a power plant is a first for the college.
Montserrat Professors Ethan Berry, Rebecca Bourgault and Dawn Paul developed the idea with Footprint Power, who recently became the plant’s new owner. These teachers, along with 29 Montserrat students and the plant employees, produced the exhibit “Across the Bridge: Art and Power.” The project is documentary by nature in its exploration of the employees’ histories and daily lives. Students spent their time interviewing the plant’s workers to discover the stories that exist behind normally closed gates.
Outside of the world experience that these students have gained, the public has been given the opportunity to learn about the individuals who have worked at the plant for upwards of 40 years. The plant is in the final stages of shutting down and is to be replaced by a natural gas facility.
Montserrat President Stephen Immerman has appreciated the relationship established between the college and Footprint. “As visual storytellers, the students documented, recognized, and honored the workers,” he said.
In the plant’s turbine room, amidst the seemingly tangles pipes and ladders, a maze of walls was erected to house the students’ art. The works in the show span across the genres of photography, video, drawing, painting, poetry, sculpture and installation as the wide range of media addresses the intricacies of the plant and its employees. Acting as vessels for the stories that were told to them, Montserrat students have relayed what they’ve learned by generating art to be shared with others.
Documenting the community through art challenged Montserrat students to leave their realms of familiarity. “Everybody had to step out of their comfort zone to find these wonderful narratives waiting to be told,” professor Berry said.
For Kayleigh Bird Hawes, the project led to the expansion of her artistic reach. “My work is usually very personal,” she said, “so it was interesting to make work for others.” At the completion of the course, she had made eight artist books, some of which are accordion-structured. They are collectively titled “Reflections.” They hold the stories and memories that she has gathered from those she interviewed at the plant. The books’ form reflects the interwoven lives they represent, by displaying the stories in a zigzagged manner.
Among the diverse pieces, Sarah Graziano’s installation, “Remnants,” creates an environment of artifacts. The carefully organized piece sits in a corner of the gallery. It has battered coats hanging from one wall, and a shelf of manuals and jars of coal on the other. A pedestal holds more stacked jars of coal accompanied by old manual pages, on the backs of which are stories collected from employees. The piece encourages audience involvement by asking individuals to pick and keep few stories from a pile.
Through this process, viewers carry the bits and pieces outside of the plant, into other environments where these histories can be retold.
On the more hand-drawn end of the show is Anthony Corrado’s “Turn Around 1-4,” a character study of four employees in watercolor. Each of the four panels provides a view of workers standing in different positions: front, left, right, back. The playful quality of the illustrations turns workers into possible main characters of an animation. Though the piece is 2-Dimensional, it gives us a literal 360-degree view of the people who work at the plant.
The logistically complicated project at first seemed hard to achieve, but at its culmination, students, workers, and community members were left with rare experiences and meaningful relationships. “Across the Bridge” is not simply a documentary body of work. It is a portrait of the plant and the people within it.
(“Across the Bridge: Art and Power” continues through July 2 at the Salem Harbor power plant, 24 Fort Avenue, Salem, Mass. The exhibition will be on display Tuesday and Wednesday from 1-5 p.m., Thursdays, from 3-7 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 2-6 p.m. For more information, call (800) 836-0487.)
View a slideshow of the students’ work, photos by Bethany Acheson:
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