NEW BEDFORD — This isn’t the summer Massachusetts Design Art and Technology Executive Director Lindsay Miś envisioned when they were planning two large-scale art projects, but in a sense, it turned out to be exactly what was needed in the era of COVID-19.
On Saturday, DATMA will launch the city-wide collaboration “LIGHT 2020” featuring two large-scale art projects that can be viewed from the streets downtown. With museums and galleries shuttered at the moment, the art installations bring a visible needed dose of culture to the streets where they can be viewed safely with social distancing in mind amid the era of COVID-19, said Miś.
Based on New Bedford’s legacy as “The City that Lit World,” DATMA selected two artists that each use light as their medium. Soo Sunny’s Park’s “Photo-kinetic grid” is an ever-evolving assemblage of the images and light transmitted onto surfaces ranging from glass and reflective mirrors to sheetrock. “Photo-kinetic grid” is installed in the UMass Dartmouth CVPA Star Store Swain Gallery. With the gallery closed, the art project was re-envisioned to be viewed from outside on Purchase Street.
The second art project, “Vessels,” by MASARY Studios is a video work and live performance that will start out being projected on to a building that can be viewed from the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Captain Paul Cuffe Park. “Vessels,” large-scale digital animation murals with original sound scores that spotlight the maritime industry, will rotate through a few viewing areas over the course of the display.
Earlier this week, as the Park’s piece was being installed at the gallery, Miś said she stepped in to help with the installation in an effort to minimize the number of people working together on the install. “It’s certainly had its challenges trying to put on shows during COVID, but as the exhibition has started to develop we’ve been looking at each other smiling through our masks, really feeling like it was the right decision to move forward with the exhibition,” said Miś.
Though she hasn’t been directly involved with the installation of MASARY Studios’ “Vessels,” Miś said even the owners of the buildings whose properties will serve as the conceptual gallery spaces for “Vessels” are “so happy to bring some respite through the arts right now. It’s been really a joyous experience to learn from community members who want to make a difference,” she said.
“I don’t know if it’s the energy in New Bedford, or the energy in the Southcoast - because I know there’s a lot going on in Fall River - but there’s something special going on and people are having this ‘wanna help unity’ that makes up for all the complexities of entering a room without having to make five phone calls because you need to make sure you’re authorized because of COVID,” added Miś.
The UMD building where Park’s piece is installed is entirely closed, but they hired a guard and have been completely cooperative in Park’s installation coming to life in the downtown, she said.
Park, said Miś, has never designed a piece to be viewed from outside of a gallery, so the installation entailed lots of tweaks and going outside looking at the project from that vantage point and at different times of day.
While that was happening, the response from those driving and walking by came in the form of resounding support. “We’re getting thumbs-up, people are clapping, we finally had to put signs up in the window saying what we were doing because people were trying to ask us through the glass,” she said. “They’re so happy to see art.”
In “Vessels,” MASARY studios bring the New Bedford Fishing fleet’s ships “inland as a part of the conversation between vessel, navigation, character, and community. The captains, crew, provisions, gear, ice and of course the fish - all orbit around these mechanical centerpieces of the lives of the fishermen,” according to the press release for “LIGHT 2020.”
Because DATMA isn’t an established institution or aligned with a university, Mis said they are able to create their own rules and take some risks with their projects like MASARY Studio’s building mapping project in which the artwork is projected onto buildings. “We were really lucky to be working with MASARY,” she said. “They were able to create this project that took several months and it’s truly about the SouthCoast, about New Bedford.”
The COVID-19 shutdowns began just as DATMA had announced all of its plans for “LIGHT 2020,” which included a live performance as part of the MASARY project, partner exhibitions and STEAM projects with area students. Those aspects of the collaborative city-wide project have been postponed for now. Though part of their mission is to draw people in from outside of a 50-mile radius of the city, Miś said they decided to go forward with the two art installations amid the uncertainty of COVID-19 restrictions for the community. “We realized (we weren’t going to draw people from outside of 50 miles), but what was going to happen was we would be able to activate arts and culture in the SouthCoast…. We really just wanted to go forward for our community partners who had been working for decades and decades trying to use the arts and culture to boost the economy here.”
For more information: www.datma.org; www.soosunnypark.com; www.masarystudios.com.