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Back to the garden
‘Sifting the Inner Belt’ and ‘Just for Men’
BY RANDI HOPKINS
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"Sifting the Inner Belt" — a reference to a never-completed inner-beltway-highway scheme that wreaked havoc on the South End before it was halted in 1971 — is a community project that’s been looking at the emotional, conceptual, and physical links between the South End’s arts community and its diverse population. Representing those two entities are the Boston Center for the Arts and the Berkeley Street Community Garden, the latter a thriving urban green spot created by immigrant and working-class residents on land that became available after the failure of urban-renewal schemes in the 1960s and ’70s. The project was conceived in the summer of 2004 by artists Hiroko Kikuchi and Jeremy Chi-Ming Liu, who working with Jeremy Chan Peng Chu, Catherine D’Ignazio, Natalie Loveless, Kim Szeto, and William Ho have generated a series of participatory performance and research events delving into the history and the current state of the neighborhood. Coinciding with the popular "First Friday" art openings in the South End, these have ranged from a concerted communal effort to measure shade in as many forms as possible in front of the BCA — using sidewalk chalk and a tape measure — to smashing unshelled nuts one by one in a line stretching from the BCA to the Thayer Street Galleries. (Instructions read: "Spacing between nuts is up to each performer.") All this exploring and performing has culminated in "Sifting the Inner Belt" the exhibition, which, up at the BCA’s Mills Gallery through July 31, offers site-specific installations, video, photographs, written documentation, and a display of final and in-progress research. The Mills is getting into the spirit of the project by hosting a free public tour of the Berkeley Street Community Gardens on July 9. What’s more, manicurists from the South End will be offering free manicures to Mills Gallery visitors from 4 to 8 pm every Thursday and Friday through the run of the show. It’s part of their "Nail Salon Exchange Project"; in return, you have to contribute a story to the project’s archive. In the Mills Gallery’s Project Space, meanwhile, gender and hair care are at issue in Andrew Mowbray’s installation "Just for Men," which also runs through July 31. Mowbray re-creates Janine Antoni’s 1994 performance in which she mops a floor with her long hair after soaking it in Loving Care hair dye. Her sweeping gestures as she flips her hair about recall Yves Klein and also Cinderella. Mowbray, whose art explores contemporary notions of men and masculinity, filmed himself scrubbing the floor with his close-cropped hair; he looks as if he were cleaning a toilet with a toothbrush. You can ask him what it’s all about when he gives a talk at the Mills on July 7. Berkeley Street Community Garden Tour | Mills Gallery at the BCA, 539 Tremont St, Boston | July 9 at 2 pm | "Sifting the Inner Belt" | Mills Gallery | Through July 31 | "Just for Men" | Mills Gallery Project Space | Through July 31 | Andrew Mowbray talk | Mills Gallery | July 7 at 6:30 pm | 617.426.3186
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