A Friendly Artist Makes Cambridge His Galllery

Beneath the generic black on white lettering of Cambridge street signs--"Parking. By Permit Only," "Tow Away Zone"--hang inviting renderings of homes, bridges and snowy streets. A closer look reveals that the bolts fastening the paintings have been turned upward in anticipation of thieves.

The contrast between the effort to give art to the city and to protect it from its citizens is a hard one to reconcile for Tom Dempsey, the man responsible for painting and hanging seventeen streetside works of art over the last two years. But then the whole notion of being a professional artist is something that Tom, who signs his work with the mysterious, yet homey signature of `Tom the Friendly Neighborhood Artist', finds troubling.

"Artwork has a monetary value, but it should have a more emotional value," he says. To make art something other than a static endeavor which is either purchased for large sums of money, or viewed on weekends by large crowds in prestigious museums, Tom has made his art a literal part of the city.

"The paintings were meant as a test for the community," he says, apologizing for his preachy tone. Of the original 17 paintings, 10 are now left. Following the first thefts, Tom returned to each painting, bolting them down as he went.

But if Tom has made this concession to the realities of urban existence, he makes few others in his effort to turn a city into a museum.

And so on the corner of DeWolfe. St. near the Weeks Bridge, as an old man in a dirty blue ski jacket pushes his belongings by in a shopping cart, Tom's view of the bridge on a sunny day hangs on a green signpost.

In another corner of the city, a loud pickup truck comes to a hault, the engine still running. From the truck's back, a large German Shepard leaps out, a thick piece of wood between his teeth. The driver checks the frontdoor of one of his client's homes and calls Dusty back to his place. In the background, almost incidentally, Tom's rendering of a quieter street in a colder season, looks on.

"I'm not trying to lay something on them," Tom says, as the truck pulls away. "I prefer the backdoor approach. The paintings are meant to say, "Welcome, Welcome." Your enjoyment is my reward. It's something as mundane and stupid as all that."

But Tom's arts project did not begin as an altruistic gesture for Tom. Anger, as much as friendliness, spurred the tall, lanky 38-year old to challenge conventional notions of cities and galleries.

With the plight of homeless Americans suddenly becoming visible in the winter of 1985, Tom became increasingly bothered by what he terms the Reagan era's celebration of salesmanship.

"You take the flimsiest idea, and fortify it with talk to turn it into saleable things. Like Reagan--he has flimsy philosophical ideas, but how he sells them is masterful," Tom says in a soft voice. He apologizes often for not being able to pin down the phrases that he wants; his words like his paintings more representational than realistic.

His first paintings, which carried the motto "Greed is not a virtue," were meant to counterbalance the obsessive drive for money which he felt had overtaken the country. "It was a gentle rebuke to all that crap," he says.

In 1985, the teacher at the Massachusetts College of Art put his first painting up, an abstract work, which he now dismisses as being fairly poor. He chose to sign it "Tom the Friendly Neighborhood Artist" because to put his real name on it would have implied that the city had approved his project. They hadn't.

"I was a renegade," he says. "If it's signed, it means it's endorsed."

Tom, a self-described victim of Harvard Real Estate (HRE) no longer lives in Cambridge. He lived in a rent controled, Harvard-owned apartment until the University sold the place to a faculty member. Since it was then owner-occupied, the rent tripled and Tom had to retreat to Brookline. Touring the streets of his urban gallery, Tom greets HRE trucks with a faint call, "Hey there, remember me?"

Intrigued by Tom's project, The Cambridge Arts Council provided funding for him to do his last 10 paintings. The city now approves the posting of his artwork, and as Tom has been endorsed by the powers that be, his tone has tempered. Most importantly, the motto no longer appears.

Tom's political commentary is only part of his motivation. He is also saying something about appropriate settings for art in a community.

"I don't like museums, can't take it for very long," he says. "They smell funny when you go in."

Tom recounts his experience at the blockbuster Renoir exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts two years ago. "It was like we were on a moving sidewalk, and the paintings were just standing still. Or actually, we were standing still, and the art was moving by," he says. "The people were like a snake going through the rooms."

He finds such highly publicized exhibits disturbing, arguing that they determine when particular artists are discussed. Following a recent Van Gogh exhibit, he says, "all of a sudden everyone was talking about Van Gogh. We're really being manipulated." In his opinion art should be viewed in a conscious and concentrated setting.

For Tom, the gallery setting also "deflates" art, by removing it from daily life. He rejects the notion that art is something one must make an effort to enjoy. For his own part, he likes to hang paintings in his living room so that "I can view it when I'm least aware of it."

The gallery system of displaying art is only three centuries old Tom notes, and his is an effort to harken back to the earlier artistic tradition in which artists painted and sold there works in the streets.

And so late at night, he and his wife of five years go out to back streets across the city and bolt on the acrylic and oil paintings.

Tom refers to Lewis Hyde's "The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property" to explain his attitudes towards art. In that book, Hyde argues that "a work of art is a gift, not a commodity." Tom concurs that to be art, a work must have a value which is to some extent personal, and is prior to the monetary worth assigned to it.

The most direct way to give art back into the community was to literally hang it on the street signs.

Over time, the paintings have had to deal with a variety of obstacles--in addition to theft--that most artists never encounter. Tom shows a slide of one painting, its only remnant clinging to the bottom bolt--a passing truck had crushed it.

Despite the hazards the artist is not discouraged. He says he "is having a blast," anonymously bringing art to a city. A private person, Tom is less than eager to be recognized. He says its important to stay detached even as he seeks to place his art and thus himself before the public.

Tom, whose brother and sister are also artists, grew up in Lexington, Mass. His sister is a ceramicist, and his younger brother is a preparator for the Smith College Museum of Art. His older brother is an officer in the Air Force and is "as old as Ollie North," Tom says.

While his parents ended up raising artists, their house never spent much time discussing the subject. "It's not like we sat around discussing the merits of Jackson Pollack," he says.

Instead, he says, his parents were simply very supportive whenever he would bring them a painting or a drawing for them to see.

Tom will soon be having an exhibit at the Maliotis Cultural Center in Brookline of postcards that he and his wife painted and sent back to friends while they were in Greece. All the postcards were sent through the mail system, and thus handled by an untold number of postal employees. "You hope they saw it and said, 'Hey!"', he says. "You hope they didn't see it and rip it up." Again, it is art meant for handling, meant to blend in with the regular goings on of the world.