Holyoke Center’s Giant Bird’s Nest

According to a coterie of artists, Harvard Square desperately needs “reclaiming.” So the area between Holyoke Center’s facade and the awning of Au Bon Pain will soon be filled by an artistic installation created by the Reclamation Artists (RA), a Boston-based group of professional artists and architects. In collaboration with Harvard students, the group of artists will install NEST, a public sculpture, on one of the Square’s most prominent buildings, the Holyoke Center.

The mission of RA is reclaiming a site in order to tell its story is . Typically working on neglected or endangered land, RA installs public artwork that call attention to the urban landscape and how city-dwellers shape, inhabit, neglect or enhance it. The group formed in 1990 and has built 12 major projects in the area from the Muddy River, to Government Center Plaza to Somerville’s Mystic River shoreline. “It’s a playground for artists to make statements without worrying about selling pieces. It’s about ideas and how to bring them to a large scale,” says RA member and Boston sculptor Leslie Wilcox.

RA was commissioned by the Office for the Arts (OFA) at Harvard and was invited as the Marshall S. Cogan Visiting Artists. “The OFA sponsors public art projects in order to engage students in exploring art making for a public site through dialogue and/or collaboration with the participating artists and to bring this work to the Harvard and Cambridge communities,” explains Teil Silverstein, manager of Public Art at the OFA.

Harvard proposed a number of sites on which RA could build. “We chose the site itself from what they [Harvard] had to offer because it’s front and center,” says project co-ordinator, Terry Bastian. But perhaps it was selected to improve the aesthetics of the area. Matt Daniels ‘01, who attended many of the project meetings last year, circulated a Norman Mailer quote amongst the artists which says, “[The Holyoke Center] expresses a style in architecture known as brutalism, which is unfinished grey concrete. That building is one of the six ugliest buildings in the United States.”

Though the building may be damn ugly, it is not one of RA’s regular run-down or environmentally unfriendly sites. “It’s not a typical site. Harvard Square may be maligned, but it’s not neglected,” says Bastian.

According to Bastian, Harvard Square has a tale to tell and “the story of this site is the NEST.” In deciding what shape the work would take, ideas revolved around the idea of Harvard Square as a home. “We decided a lot of people made it their home: readers at Au Bon Pain, chess players, people asking for money, ‘Spare Change’ sellers, and religious groups,” says Tristan Govignon. The site is being reclaimed as home to these diverse groups.

Last spring, meetings began with artists and students to determine the course of the artwork. In earlier Harvard-sponsored public art projects, this discussion was amongst students and one artist, but RA brings a different approach. “A group like RA, who are very involved in the tug and pull of collaborative art-making, promised to be a very different and interesting process for students participating in this project,” comments Silverstein. In a May meeting, the concept started taking shape when questions such as “How do you create the idea of a home?” emerged.

However, it was only a few weeks ago that the title of NEST was settled upon. “It wasn’t until we got the title that the look of the project really came together,” says Bastian. And a nest is exactly what the project will look like. A series of nylon ropes will be suspended from a bolt in the roof of the Holyoke Center, and from these ropes, a bed or “nest” of woven screen and rope will be hung. This nest will contain large-scale models of objects found in homes, such as watches, keys, a phone and a chair, that will cast shadows on the ground below. “Imagine what would happen if a giant bird went through Harvard Square and gathered up things from people’s houses and put them in a nest, and then you’ll have the idea of the sculpture,” explains Bastian.

One challenge of the project was finding materials that would be light enough to be suspended above an area that has a lot of pedestrian traffic. So, the majority of the objects are made from styrofoam, most of which has been found as post-consumer waste. The Adams House squash courts are now littered with sheets upon sheets and blocks of styrofoam as well as colorful pool noodles, not to mention a profusion of rope, screen and aerosol cans of paint and glue. “I call it slightly controlled anarchy,” Bastian says.

Interesting considerations have to be made when constructing objects, such as the fact that attaching colored tape to a block with toothpicks might not be the best option, because if the object were to fall, the picks could hurt someone’s head. (Pipe cleaners were the accepted alternative.) Also, the structure had to be “designed for resistance to average storms and be able to be quickly removed if a major hurricane is predicted,” according to a technical description.

But it is not solely the physical aspects of the project that concern the artists. “A lot of us do political art. We want to do more than make pretty [things]. We want to say something with our art,” notes Bastian. Govignon says RA lets artists explore “how art can be used for social change.” For instance, an installation at the Muddy River by Jay Kamins put objects such as tea kettles and bottles that were on the river bed on pedestals to bring attention to the pollution of the water. NEST will bring attention to the varied uses of Harvard Square as home, thinking in part about the housing crisis in Cambridge.

In addition to the artwork, there will be performances associated with the installation. On the afternoons of Oct. 20, 23 and 25, a theater troupe composed of homeless men and women from Bread and Jam, a homeless-run advocacy group, will perform. The plays will focus on the plight of the homeless in Harvard Square and Cambridge. Poets who are members of the Spare Change network will also perform. And students with performance ideas are welcome as well.

Although artwork with a social conscience may seem to be something new at Harvard, Silverstein explains that this is not the first time the OFA has sponsored such work. “Kristin Lucas, who created an Internet-based project last year, is interested in the threats of rapidly expanding technology as well as women’s issues. And Richard Fleischner, who installed a permanent work on the facade of the OFA, is concerned with the surrounding environment and how people view it, whether they should be paying more attention to it or not.”

The project attracted Juliana Chow ‘04 to work. Although she’s only been able to attend one meeting (and make a colorfully spray-painted styrofoam skateboard), Chow attributes her interest in the project to a special interest in public art. In fact, Chow is attempting to attract fellow students to work on totally student-run public art in the coming year, possibly snow sculpture in the winter or short, 40-second plays to be staged at the intersection of JFK St. and Massachusetts Ave. during the time for crossing the street.

And RA is still looking for help on the artwork. Up until the day the installation is made, the Adams Squash courts will be occupied every Tuesday and Thursday from 4pm to 9pm by RA and their student collaborators. When the artwork is hung, it will dominate the front of the Holyoke Center, catching anyone’s eye who passes by. The approaching date is exciting to Bastian. “I’ve been living and breathing the project for the last several months, and it’s great to see it finally coming together,” he says.