{"id":19397,"date":"2021-05-15T18:28:54","date_gmt":"2021-05-15T22:28:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=19397"},"modified":"2021-05-15T20:22:17","modified_gmt":"2021-05-16T00:22:17","slug":"mfa-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2021\/05\/15\/mfa-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"Artists To Turn MFA Lawn Into A Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunflowers and corn will sprout on the Museum of Fine Arts’ Huntington Avenue lawn as part of \u201cGarden for Boston\u201d<\/a> from artists and activists Ekua Holmes of Boston\u2019s Roxbury neighborhood and Elizabeth James-Perry who resides in South Coast Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

The projects, the Boston museum says, are part of its \u201cmulti-year effort to recontextualize\u201d Cyrus Dallin\u2019s 1909 statue \u201cAppeal to the Great Spirit,\u201d depicting a Native American on horseback with his arms spread wide, which has stood on the museum\u2019s front lawn since 1912.<\/p>\n

The museum now says the statue is \u201ca depiction of a Native American figure that represents an icon of the museum for some and a painful stereotype for others\u201d because it is \u201cbased on an inaccurate accumulation of Native symbols and ultimately capitalized on the degrading myth of the \u2018vanishing race.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Elizabeth<\/a>
Elizabeth James-Perry. (Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

James-Perry\u2014an Aquinnah Wampanoag artist known for creating wampum belts, weaving sashes and bags from locally-harvested, hand-spun milkweed stalks with natural dyes, and fashioning pendants, collars and other jewelry from quahog shells\u2014will create the installation \u201cRaven Reshapes Boston: A Native Corn Garden at the MFA.\u201d She and collaborators will surround Dallin’s statue with a field of corn, beans and sedges\u2014grown in mounds using a traditional woodlands Native American method\u2014in the shape of a horseshoe crab and framed by crushed quahog shells.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Raven Reshapes Boston\u2019 is a nod to the eastern Native story about the traditional knowledge keeper, Raven, who brought corn to the region for Native women to grow and sustain their families. The garden is meant to welcome, intrigue and provoke discussion. Situated around the Dallin statue, it will be a lively and authentically Native counterpoint to the controversial figure,\u201d James-Perry says in a museum announcement. \u201cThe horseshoe crab shape, along with the white crushed oyster shell border, connects the planting to my coastal identity. It recalls rich sea harvests and coastal feasts, and is a reminder of the shell middens once ubiquitous in what is now a concrete cityscape. The garden is a reclamation of Boston as Indigenous land.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ekua<\/a>
Ekua Holmes. (Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Holmes\u2019 installation \u201cRadiant Community\u201d will plant 3,000 sunflowers on the east side of the MFA\u2019s Huntington Avenue lawn with help from United Neighbors of Lower Roxbury Community Gardens. The project expands upon her \u201cRoxbury Sunflower Project,\u201d<\/a> through which she\u2019s given away seeds and invited people to fill the neighborhood with flowers each summer, starting in 2018.<\/p>\n

\u201cSunflowers represent, among other things, resilience, self-determination and the ability for a community to evolve and emerge while staying grounded in its history and traditions,\u201d Holmes says in a museum announcement. \u201c’Radiant Community’ is an invitation for the public to be surrounded by beauty, color and fragrance. The sunflowers\u2019 essential attributes mirror those that are reflected in the cultural traditions of Roxbury\u2019s Black community and must now be collectively amplified in our society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Holmes makes vibrant collages about Black life, which led to her becoming a children\u2019s book illustrator, beginning with her 2016 Caldecott Honor-winning book \u201cVoice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement,\u201d written by Carole Boston Weatherford. The exhibition \u201cPaper Stories, Layered Dreams,\u201d<\/a> scheduled to be at the MFA from July 17, 2021 to Jan. 23, 2022, will showcase her illustrations as well as her independent art, including her portrait installations. Holmes is the community coordinator for Massachusetts College of Art and Design\u2019s Sparc! ArtMobile, which brings hands-on art making into the community. And she serves as vice-chair of the Boston Art Commission and helped lead its process over the past year to remove the Emancipation monument from Boston\u2019s Park Square<\/a> in response to community complaints that its depiction of President Abraham Lincoln standing over a crouching Black man newly liberated from slavery was demeaning.<\/p>\n

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If this is the kind of coverage of arts, nature, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, (hopefully) weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2021 or the respective creators.)<\/em><\/p>\n

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Sunflowers and corn will sprout on the Museum of Fine Arts’ Huntington Avenue lawn as part of \u201cGarden for Boston\u201d from artists and activists Ekua Holmes of Boston\u2019s Roxbury neighborhood and Elizabeth James-Perry who resides in South Coast Massachusetts. The projects, the Boston museum says, are part of its \u201cmulti-year effort to recontextualize\u201d Cyrus Dallin\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7598,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,105],"tags":[37,440,857,216],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19397"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19397"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19434,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19397\/revisions\/19434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}