The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 170

N6 THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE AUGUST 31, 1997 Cambridge tries to answer the 0 for public art tffH ,,1 7 A ::1 BART Continued from Page Nl mering; the outdoor piece was badly affected by sunlight over the decade of its existence and its once-sparkling colors turned to clouds. "Never Green" is more fortunate than the Square piece, though. It's currently the target of aggressive and imaginative conservation on the part of the Cambridge Arts Council, which takes its stewardship of the city's public art collection seriously. Unveiling a work of public art is like bringing the baby home from the hospital. It's just the beginning.

In the case of public art, though, there's no Doctor Spock or Doctor Brazeltori to consult, no owner's manual. There may be one soon, though, thanks to the Cambridge Arts Coun-' cil's conservation and maintenance program. In the year of its existence, the program has assessed the condition of the city's 112 pieces of public art, rescued the most urgent cases, trained interns to help care for the works, and produced an interns' handbook that is so useful it may go national. To back up. In the 1970s, many American cities started public art programs meant to weave contemporary work into the fabric of everyday life, to place art in parks, schools, housing for the elderly, neighborhood centers, and government buildings.

Few cities had the foresight to realize that this art would need upkeep far beyond what its cosseted cousins in climate-controlled museums receive. Few understood that although a work of art may age more slowly than a human being does, it does indeed have a life span and may eventually need replacement parts -just as some people eventually need dentures or bypass surgery or even organ transplants. Cambridge's array Cambridge has a particularly fine array of public art, arguably superior in quantity andor quality to that of any other New England city. That's due to the pioneering activity of the Arts Council and the city's "Percent for Art" program, estab lished in 1979, which mandates that 1 percent of the money spent on capital-improvement projects be allocated for art. The council collaborated with the MBTA on the "Arts on the Line" program, which commissioned dozens of works, including the Wain-wright piece for Porter Square.

Pallas Lombardi, now the council's executive director, was the guiding spirit behind the Ts program. But the collaboration officially ended in 1988, and Lombardi has watched helplessly as works for which she was midwife have fallen into a shocking state of disrepair. She's sad that Gyorgy Kepes's stained-glass mural in the Ts Harvard Square bus shelter is no longer lit. "Kepes is a world-famous figure in the arts," she says, "a genius in our midst, and the won't even replace the light bulbs in his piece." She's disturbed that the "drops ugly green sand boxes in front of Di-mitri Hadzi's sculpture in Harvard Square, when it's not even snow season." She's embarrassed that artist Paul Matisse has to repair his own work in the Kendall Square station for free, even though the contract that artists have with the stipulates a "reasonable fee" for such services. She's outraged that the has installed a fireplug in the middle of Joel Janowitz's mural in the Alewife Station.

"The is going to passively deaccession the whole collection, by letting it fall off the walls," she says. "The deserves to.be sued by these artists." spokesperson Erin Harrington says, "We have plans to hire an art expert within the- next couple of months to work on maintenance and other things related to the art. We need to do that." On the Wainwright work, though, she says, "We have no plans to put it back. It would cost $15,000 to fix. It's a terrible safety hazard because of the lead balls." Making up rules While art owned by the is out of Lombardi's control, Cambridge's mm art is her bailiwick and Hafthor Yngvason's.

As the council's director of public art, Yngvason is in charge il t4 1 u. i I -r, 3X I 1. Ml i 3 TH I .1 fY.j I mm- Hi i glumly notes, "The heads provide excellent nesting and roosting sites for birds and insects; snow can collect and water can pool in recesses." People are even worse offenders than bugs and inclement weather, though. They stick gum on the piece, throw eggs at it, put cigarettes in the mouths. The disrespect is depressing.

But it's essential to keep cleaning away the evidence of it. "Damage attracts damage, so it's important to keep pieces well maintained," Yngvason says. On a brighter note, "cleaning attracts audiences," he adds, "so when we clean pieces, we put up story-, boards about the works." In the realm of public art, conservation is a two-step-forward, one-step-back affair. McNally and her crew cleaned Carlos Dorrien's "Quiet Cornerstone," a flat granite slab carved to look like a corner of a ruined building, in Winthrop Park near Harvard Square. It's a piece that invites viewers to sit on it, and that's OK with McNally.

But using it as a picnic table, and leaving stains from food and drink, is another matter. McNally's team was just finishing the cleaning, having removed as many food stains as they could, when a woman plunked both herself and her greasy pizza on the stone, turned to McNally and said, "You know, they should put some kind of protective coating on this." "But it's impossible to do that and still have it look like stone," says McNally. "It's not a kitchen floor." Beyond cleaning and mending One reason the Cambridge Arts Council's conservation effort is so valuable is that it goes beyond endless rounds of cleaning and mending. The restoration of Wainwright's "Never Green Tree," for instance, is a case study not just in bringing a work back but in planning for its future. "He used materials that are not tried and true," McNally says of the work.

"Iridescence is the most important part of the piece but it was fading fast." The conservators didn't know how fast, though. So they've put new mylar on one branch of the "Never Green Tree," and will carefully monitor its rate of fading. If, say, it remains in good shape for five years, the council may decide that its regular maintenance will include replacing the mylar that often. If the color goes in six months, the council may consider alternate materials. Wainwright used mylar available 10 years ago; Snow and McNally are checking to see if an improved version with ultraviolet inhibitors has been developed since.

For now, one branch of the Wainwright "Tree" is a rainbow of glistening colors; the others look dead. That one -vibrant branch makes you speculate the way you dqwhen you see fragments of paint on ancient sculpture about the effect of the whole thing when colored as the artist intended. While there's no putting the paint back on the Parthenon, it is possible, one way or another; to restore "Never Green Tree" so it will always be green -and blue, red, purple, and the other colors of the spectrum. year with artist Ritsuko Taho, while Taho was still researching materials for her Central Square installation, "Multicultural Manifestos," which will be unveiled in the fall. "I said to her, This is going to corrode.

This is going to break. This is going to get climbed Snow recalls. "I felt like the Princess of Doom." Princess of Practicality is more like it Among other things, Snow pointed out that the brass cylinders of Taho's design, which are meant to move so people can read words etched on them, shouldn't move in complete circles. Public art that goes round and round gets treated like a riding toy. Sharing the reports So that other communities won't have to reinvent the wheel, the Cambridge Arts Council is passing along its detailed reports to a national organization called Save Outdoor which will put them on line.

SOS! plans to have the conservation treatments of 400 sculptures on line by the millennium. Some are already available. (The web address is www.slris.sl.edu. At the site, select art inventories.) While there are longstanding programs geared toward rescuing older public art (Civil War monuments and the like), Cambridge has one of the few directed at contemporary work. Contemporary art means living artists, who can collaborate on conservation and explain the effects they're Consider David Phillips's "Beach Fragments," bronze medallions set into brick pavement in a pavilion in Lechmere Canal Park.

Over the last decade, the patina on the bronze had changed. "If we hadn't talked to the artist, we would have corrected the corrosion," says Snow. "But he said he liked it. He wanted the graffiti taken off but he wanted the corrosion kept the way it is now. So we put a sealer on it." Artiste in the '90s, she's found, are far more interested in durability than they were in the '70s, when Art for Eternity was considered bourgeois.

"It used to be uncool to aim for permanence," Snow says. "But now the pendulum is swinging back, and artists want an extended life for their works." She's there to help give it to them. She and her team have practiced triage on works, including David Judelson's 1988 painted steel murals "The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming!" The piece, un-. der the Commercial Avenue Bridge in Lechmere Canal Park, had been scratched and splashed by runoff from drain pipes overhead. The conservators advised moving the pipes.

They applied poultices of diluted acid that slowly removed mineral deposits without removing the paint. They filled in the scratches to prevent rusting. If they'd been around to advise Judelson before he'd begun the piece, Snow says, they would have prescribed more durable materials than the ones he chose. Not far from the Judelson is James Tyler's 1986 "Tower of East Cambridge Faces," a column with dozens of heads in relief, based on Polaroids the artist took of pas-sersby. The conservation report "Gatehouse" in East Cambridge.

Cleaning Uoyd Hamrol's sculpture of the new conservation plan. Since coming to the council in 1989, he says, "I've looked at every art work but with amateur eyes." Yngvason, who trained as an art historian at Boston University and had worked at the Harcus Gallery in Boston, looked around the country for cities to serve as models in public art con- vi CO iMUSICjjMQVIESl i VhfV Ifli i I Mi yv I t-J 1 1 if 1 inn li in THE BEST OF i if i rH: I servation and reluctantly concluded there weren't any. Cambridge would have to make up the rules of the game. The city agreed to fund the effort, allocating $35,000 a year for five years to conservation, a modest but workable sum. It was up to Yngvason to stretch the money as much as possible.

"I thought that to assess what needed to be done, we'd hire one conservation company," he says. "But the media in art are now so varied. It's not just bronze and marble anymore. So it ended up we needed three different companies." One was Waltham-based Art Conservation Associates. Two of the firm's three partners, Carol Snow and Rika Smith McNally, have been working together for a year now on Cambridge's collection, along with a quartet of interns.The interns Jennifer Craddock, Rachel Dolmateh, Holly and Beth Waldman -have labored over projects like scrubbing with toothbrushes Lilli Ann Killen Rosenberg's ceramic mosaic on the exterior wall of Millers River Housing at Warren and Cambridge Streets.

The interns, all with college degrees in art, have been carefully supervised. Snow cautions that while sending out a volunteer bucket brigade to clean art sounds nice, it's potentially dangerous. Some household solvents could, for instance, cause irreparable damage. Snow and McNally's first move was a comprehensive assessment of the condition of the city's art, ranking cases the way hospitals do, from emergency to excellent. In one case, they couldn't find the art.

Sculptor Nancy Webb had tucked 28 little flora and fauna bronzes in various corners of Charles Park at Charles and Commercial Streets. The council didn't have a map showing the locations, and the conservators could find only 27. The needle-in-haystack operation culminated in the interns finding No. 28 under an- overgrown bush, which has now been severely pruned. While they were at it, they made a map of all the sculptures' whereabouts for future reference.

Then there's the matter of the artist the council can't locate. Her name is Ellery Eddy, and in the 1970s she painted a mural, "Engine Company No. 5," on the Inman Square Firehouse. The mural needs cleaning, possibly coating, and damaged areas need repainting. No one has been able to find Eddy to ask for her input, which would be most welcome.

The council has mailed forms to all the artists they could locate, though, asking for extensive information on the materials they used, the better to care for the work. Preventive medicine has now been built into Cambridge's public art program. Conservators will consult with commissioned artiste before their ideas fly off the drawing board, ward off potential disasters. Snow, for example, met last iksr Dedham, Dedham Plaza, Rte. .1 (617)461-8353 Nashua NH, Webster Square, (603)888-1335 Keene NH, West Street Shopping Center (603)352-2573 Concord NH, Fort Eddie Plaza (603)225-4660 ckascehi MlllllllllMlUllW.Hl r- His Greatest Hits Plus two from ihv 'tin- At 11 Auoi Available tor thci on vn v.

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