{"id":5244,"date":"2018-01-18T07:02:56","date_gmt":"2018-01-18T12:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=5244"},"modified":"2018-01-18T07:27:24","modified_gmt":"2018-01-18T12:27:24","slug":"judith-barry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/01\/18\/judith-barry\/","title":{"rendered":"New Public Art At Gardner Museum Aims To Bring Attention To Refugee Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday morning, Boston\u2019s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum hung a new three-story tall banner on its Evans Way fa\u00e7ade. \u201cGlobal Displacement 1 In 100 People Worldwide Are Displaced From Their Homes,\u201d it reads. And under the text is what appears to be an aerial image of hundreds of people crammed into a boat at sea. Most of them look up, smiling.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was intrigued by the image long before I had a chance to use it anywhere,\u201d says Judith Barry, the artist who created the public art project, which is scheduled to remain on view though June 27.<\/a> \u201cI started seeing these drone photographs as North Africans were fleeing North Africa\u201d during the refugee crisis that spiked in 2015. Hundreds of people overloading rickety boats alone in vast seas. They were fleeing war in Syria and \u201calso places where climate change has produced drought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry says, \u201cThe refugee crisis that summer was intense. There was almost nowhere you could go in Europe and not see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two summers later, Barry was invited by Pieranna Cavalchini, the Gardner\u2019s contemporary art curator, to make art for the fa\u00e7ade, and the drone images of refugees came back to her. She thought to combine refugee photos she found with the headline of a 2016 Pew Research Center report<\/a> that she\u2019d come across: \u201cNearly 1 in 100 people worldwide are displaced from their homes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Judith<\/a>
Judith Barry’s banner at the Gardner Museum, Jan. 17, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Barry is a New York-based installation and video artist who has long commuted to work in Cambridge. She was until recently a professor and director of the MFA Visual Arts Program at Lesley University\u2019s College of Art & Desgn and is now a professor and director in the Art, Culture and Technology Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n

\"Judith<\/a>
Judith Barry’s banner for the Gardner Museum. (Courtesy of the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For the Gardner fa\u00e7ade, \u201cThe imagery certainly started off based in some of the imagery of the refugee crisis,\u201d Barry says. \u201cBecause we needed to blow it up to 32 feet, I needed to change out a lot of the actual imagery.\u201d The problem was the actual refugee images she\u2019d found online got too blurry when enlarged. So she took her own new photos of individuals and small groups and put the people all together in a refugee boat via digital collage.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did several shoots with people having them looking up,\u201d Barry says. \u201cI\u2019d also go to places like MOMA [New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art] where I could surreptitiously take photos of people looking up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Are any of the people she photographed refugees? \u201cNo,\u201d Barry says. \u201cThey\u2019re all normal people. \u2026 They\u2019re not homeless.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDrone photography is now a part of the photographic landscape. When people, even ordinary people, see a drone flying overhead, one of their reactions is to look up and smile,\u201d Barry says. \u201cThere is certainly a delight in looking up and seeing a drone overhead.\u201d<\/p>\n

She means, of course, that people in the United States often look up and smile. Folks in other places have been known to have different responses to drones.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was strange was looking at lots and lots of photos of refugees,\u201d she says. \u201cThey tend to look up with this expectation. To me, they were looking up with this expectation they were going to be rescued or going somewhere safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I had to replace all the people in the drone photos I thought it would be really interesting to put people in the photos that look like us all over the country,\u201d Barry says. \u201cI really wanted the viewer when they look at the work to think they look a lot like U.S. people or Western European people. There are people of color [in her image], but there aren\u2019t the great number you saw in that drone footage of people fleeing North Africa. I hope people will look at it and say, \u2018That could be me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Help us keep producing our great coverage of local arts by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Judith<\/a>
Judith Barry’s banner at the Gardner Museum, Jan. 17, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Judith<\/a>
Judith Barry’s banner at the Gardner Museum, Jan. 17, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday morning, Boston\u2019s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum hung a new three-story tall banner on its Evans Way fa\u00e7ade. \u201cGlobal Displacement 1 In 100 People Worldwide Are Displaced From Their Homes,\u201d it reads. And under the text is what appears to be an aerial image of hundreds of people crammed into a boat at sea. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5248,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,100,105],"tags":[37,215,31],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5244"}],"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=5244"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5260,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5244\/revisions\/5260"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}