Public Art in Cambridge    2005                                                                     h a n n a h    b u r r



       Project Description:
In July of 2005, I was invited to work with kids from the Mayor's summer employment program and Cambridge Arts Council's Art Among Us initiative, to bring my designs and concepts to four electrical boxes at various sites around Cambridge.

The idea for two of four boxes was to observe the space around the boxes for signs of repeating patterns, and then to work representational marks for all things observed into the design of the boxes. I chose the color scheme and primary composition, and then each artist added her own element to the box. The other boxes were more of a direct transfer of my own design to the box, with collaboration on how to apply the design and a group effort at making it happen.
This is an image of the central square box in afternoon light, with the surrounding Mass Ave environment. The box is in partial sunlight, and is a range of greens from a bright spring green to white, with all variations of green in between. The shapes are painted from a center of the darker spring green to the lighter, much like the shapes drawn on a topographical map. There is some reference also to spots of sunlight through the trees in the light to dark forms painted on the box. There is also a bright pink/red form along the bottom edge of the box, with a curving lip above, with writing in a light colored pen, explaining who painted the box etc. There's a tree in front of the left side of the box and a light green gray pole in the right foreground. There's a bike parked just beyond the box and the sidewalk surrounding the box is brick.
 
    Mass Ave in Central Square, in front of the MacDonalds
 


This electrical box is taller than it is wide, and stands about 5 feet tall. It's surrounded by woodchips and is nestled in front of a wall of greenery and a four foot high black fence beyond which is 6th street and cars parked along it. The box itself is bright yellow, and has bursts of color randomly all over it. The colors painted on the yellow include a saturated bright blue, light green, darker green, bright red, a butter colored light yellow and white. The shapes painted are thick u-shaped lines like petals, about 6 inches square, one overlapping the next like the petals of flowers or scales of a fish. Within these u-shaped lines in light green, are circles painted in thick clean strokes of a bright green, red u-shaped lines, butter colored lines, and sometimes a circle with two rings in different color, an inner, and outer ring. There are some free floating white and light yellow circles of the same general size or slightly smaller, and little squiggles of white painted like evenly spaced dots all over the yellow surface. The bright blue marks are slightly curved lines, also painted thickly, originating from the top left corner of the box and cascading down a ways into the center of the box. The metal box itself is embossed with words and has a front door to it, hinges on the left and an old fashioned quality to it. However, the bright paint makes it hard to make out any words on the embossed metal, in part because it reduces shadows that usually highlight the words.
 
    Sixth Street Park, East Cambridge. One of two boxes painted in the park.
 


 
This box is about three feet tall by three and a half feet wide. It's a bright red, and the forms painted on it are painted in black, light pink, medium pink, and a deep red pink that is very subtle against the red background. The forms are similar to the yellow box above, with circles of above three inches diameter to five inches, in thick paint, and then u-shaped 'petals' coming off of those, creating forms that though abstract, look like anything from cartoon monkeys to cutely painted flowers. The bottom left edge of the box and the top right, as seen from the street facing in toward the park, have areas where the background color switches to the lighter pink color. The photo is taken from the left front corner of the box, which is standing in a light rectangle of concrete, surrounded by the blacktop of the playground. In the background someone is sitting in a beach chair reading against a black chainlink fence, there's a big tree trunk to his left, and the shade from this tree creates a dapple sunlight on the box and the blacktop surrounding it.
 
    Sixth Street Park, East Cambridge. Box Two.
 


This electrical box is about three and a half feet by three feet (height), and is painted varying shades of a deep, slightly milky but saturated jay blue, to a very light blue, in layers from dark to light, top to bottom, and then covered with playful, rounded forms in black, wrapping around the box. There's a white smaller metal box perched atop the box, with a picture of a dog: a plastic bag dispenser for dog walkers. There is a chainlink fence about two feet behond the box, and bushes with green leaves grow to about a foot above the box, on either side, along the chainlink fence at its back. There's red wood chips on the ground beneath the length of bushes, and then sidewalk. On the other side of the black chainlink fence is the back of a simple metal waterfountain painted blue, another project of the week, featured in a photograph below. There's the blacktop of a playground stretching out beyond the fountain, and the scene is in sunlight dappled shade. The forms on the box are black, abstract, but involve swooping lines and square, c-shaped 'wings' or planes, fanning out at random, one from the next, twisting around to make overlapping, playful, floating forms that might resemble thick legged, cute folding chairs or other similar forms that bend and fold in armature. The deeper blue color comes up from the bottom, and then is replaced by a wave of lighter blue. Some coin sized shapes in the deeper blue bubble up from into the lighter blue which covers the midsection of the background of the form.
 
    Schiarappa Street in East Cambridge, just outside the park.


 
This is the fountain, just visible from the last photograph. It's L-shaped, and mostly plainted the deeper blue, with the wavy swathe of lighter blue halfway up the thin rectangular base of the form. A variety of shapes interact with these two color grounds, in the colors of grass green, bright red, orange, yellow and black. The shapes are smaller, in scale to the narrower surfaces of the fountain, and include green vertical lines, running straight down the base, light blue dashes and peanut-like shapes, red and orange blobs with ovalish shapes and bends, and some squarish thick loops of paint that play off of the larger black shapes on the electrical box on the other side of the fence. A couple of light blue rounded squares float, slightly larger than the brightly colored shapes, and behind them, wrapping corners and creating more of the overall playful feel of the fountain.
 
    Schiarappa Street in East Cambridge, fountain inside the park.


 
A close up of the green mass ave box, the top, street facing corner, with spots of sunlight interacting with the spots of white paint among the green forms. The painted white is bluish in shadow, and the bright sun spots are warmer and much brighter than the white paint.
 


 
A group photo of eleven of the painters and their summer counselor, everyone's crammed in and lots of smiles.
 
    The Art Among Us team painted four boxes and a fountain in one week!


 
The backs of two student painters, working on a partially finished green, mass ave box. There's a lot of white on the box and the pencil lines demarcating where to paint what is almost visible. There's blue tape edging the base and some plastic visible.
 
    Working on the Mass. Ave box.


 
A close up of the bottom front corner of the red box in the Sixth Street park. Handwritten, is the topsy turvy message: Designed by Hannah Burr and painted with youth from 'Art Among Us.'
 


 
The red box, top left corner, with a complex pattern of shadows from the tree above it, stretching off and getting smaller along the blacktop behind.
 


 
The top, back corner of the tall yellow sixth street box, with the glass meter visible, and some painted pipes running along the back corner that faces the street. The green, red and white shapes are shown up close here, and some smaller dots and funky overlapping that may or may not be intentional is also visible at this close range.
 


 
The green Mass. Ave box in the snow, after a big storm in the winter of 2005-6. Everything is white or the gray of the street, with bright green, white spots, and the red base glowing and covered with little spatters of clean snow.
 


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