 And welcome to this episode of Talk of the Town, a favorite of ours. I say that fair amount, but this truly is. I get to periodically speak with Cecily Miller and Stuart Ikela, who are both prominent members of the Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture, ACAC, and this is an ACAC update. So we are going to try and zip through an awful lot of material and I can count on Cecily and Stuart to deliver the goods for us. Let me get out of the way. First I'll say we like to take these opportunities where we're getting kind of a snapshot in time of you guys to look a little bit back and then at what we've got right in front of us right now and then even anticipate things coming up in the future. So I know that we could talk about the past for the whole half an hour if we wanted. But the Spruce Up Arlington campaign kind of has been an umbrella campaign that involves a bunch of different facets. So let's just talk about that and then we'll move into things that are going on currently and in the future. So tell us about how that went and what the different aspects of it were. Sure. Well, Spruce Up Arlington with the tag Get Your Sparkle On, it encourages the town to, you know, we would encourage the town to come together with the business sector and the arts and culture sector to activate some spaces that would allow the community to come together safely outdoors to enjoy entertainment, some solace from the pandemic. We engaged in public art and live arts. We rolled out some of the work that we've been doing in our busking program earlier to bring performers into some of the spaces like the parklets that the town provided, but to beautify them to, again, liven up our neighborhoods this summer. And Cecily did some terrific work, especially in the parklets. We can talk about the utility boxes a little bit, which people have seen crop up all over town. Well, one of the things that Allie Carter in the town's planning department did to help out local restaurants and cafes was create outdoor eating areas in parking spaces and these are the parklets. And they were basically large, orange plastic barriers. And so we were thinking, well, how can we make these look a little better? And the first one that we launched was with Adria Arch in Arlington Heights actually last fall. And then this summer, we partnered with the Audison Art Club and Art Teacher Polly Ford. And so middle school students made a fabulous public art installation in a parklet right on Broadway where they envisioned these giant animals. It was kind of the flora and fauna of Arlington, writ large. Then Tanya Griffin created dragons on the Medford Street parklet. Tanya loves dragons and there happens to be a lucky dragon restaurant there, so it felt appropriate. Her dragon is eating a giant glazed doughnut because there's a wonderful coffee shop there, famous for its doughnuts. And the final motif that she picked up on was the masks that wrestlers wear in Mexico because there's a wonderful taqueria there. So kind of reflected the site. We did another parklet with volunteers from the Girl Scout. It's a wonderful troupe of kids who did pollinators, they did bees and butterflies and beetles, ladybugs, and we put that in a parklet surrounding clay dreams. I thought that would be a great place to put kids' art since kids are working on art in that parklet. And finally, an artist named Cheryl Sorgh, who's actually based in Los Angeles, mailed us these wonderful pop art eyes, really bright colors and patterns that she builds up out of colored tape. And Lori Berenberg, one of our all-long-time volunteers, and I installed them on the parklet in front of Blue Ribbon Barbecue on Massav. So there was a series of these vibrant, friendly, fun parklets and we'd love to do more. Well, I got to tell you, you guys didn't get to those a moment too soon because, as you said, and we've spoken to Ali about this before, it was primarily a way to support local businesses and restaurants, of course, but the orange monstrosities were the best they could do initially just to delineate the space, obviously. But boy, were they ever in need of some beautification and this clearly did the trick. And if I could just underscore, the great thing about this project is it was a fundraiser for public art in a way, but it really gave the business community a chance to support. They were super supportive of this. We was really arts and culture and business helping, so we did this partnership with the Chamber of Commerce and we had the folks from Gales and so forth really participating in the planning of these and really enjoying them. So the same thing was with the utility boxes this year, businesses stepped up and started sponsoring them. It wasn't us applying for grants, it's everybody seeing the benefit of it. That's wonderful and I do think like some other things about the pandemic, the parklets are probably here to stay for a while. So again, we can look forward to future installations that again make these just lovely little spaces instead of just utilitarian as they began. Again, just with the caveat that we could obviously just keep talking about this stuff, I'm going to move us forward to the things that people can see around them right now. And just very recently, we had an event at the Fox Library that anybody who might have missed the event is going to be able to see what the public art on display there is for a long time to come. So just tell us a little bit about that, please. So this is part of a complicated project that we've been working on for some time now. There is an artist who's also a professor of graphic design at Northeastern, Tom Star, and he conceptualized, he conceived of a project to draw attention to climate change and its impact on the world around us by creating markers commemorating events imagined in our future. It's called Remembrance of Climate Futures. So could be something devastating, a high water mark during a flood, temperature, extreme heat temperature, an invasive species, an extinction event anytime in the next 50 years. And he's doing this project in a variety of towns in New England. Here in Arlington, we're doing the only model where it's youth led. So Rachel Oliveri and I worked together to recruit 12 interns from Arlington High School, and we met with them for eight weeks during the summer. They had guest speakers and they went to all kinds of commission meetings, volunteer activist meetings, interviewed people from sustainable Arlington, Zero Waste, the Mystic River Watershed Association, and many other community groups to find out what are the citizens of Arlington doing now to prepare for climate change? What do people see as the immediate and future challenges? We received funding from a wonderful organization, MAPC, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. And their goal is to get the word out about what can cities and towns do to be more resilient as we face these challenges. So the students could have focused on the kind of dire events that we can predict unfolding if we aren't able to take the kind of action we need to to get to carbon neutral. But an important part of their work was looking at how can we, how can we mitigate? How can we use green infrastructure to handle floodwater? They came up with ideas like painting roofs white all along Mass Avenue to reduce, to reflect heat and reduce the amount of heat absorbed on roofs. They came up with the idea of having a climate curriculum taught K through 12 so that students, young people can sort out misinformation and understand the science behind climate change and the social impact and environmental justice issues involved in climate change. They even came up with a pretty fanciful example of a knotweed café, the concept of eat the invaders. We have climate change, we'll weaken native species, invasives will become more prevalent. What can we do? Well, let's figure out how to eat knotweed and other, you know, other invasive species as a way of reducing them. So this is a project we'll culminate in small aluminum markers that will be placed around town in the spots where these events could happen. So at Spipond, at Thorndike Field, along the Mass Ave corridor in Monotomy Rocks Park, where the students imagined events unfolding. But in preparation for that, we did a week paste on the Fox Library that brought all of the markers into one spot for a temporary art installation so people can see all of the ideas that the students came up with. And what I'd like to do now is share a clip from an event that we had just a couple of days ago where the students spoke about the impact of their project and their hopes for action. So future is a funny word because it implies we won't have to face it. And a lot of people use the future when they're talking about climate change, but I don't feel like that's the way we should talk about climate change because it's our present. It's already here. So some of the markers over there have already happened. And I feel like that's a really important thing to realize about this project. It's like the temperature continues to rise with sea levels and storms. And we keep on looking back for the next landmark. The foggy, unforeseeable, no turning back, but we've already hit it. Climate change has already become irreversible and we have to live with that fact. The horrific events can happen and some will, but we can be here. We can listen and we can make a future possible by working together, by dismantling corruptive legislation and companies, only focused on money, and by taking actions ourselves in our own house. I'm not here because I know climate change will take things away from me. I'm here because I know when the bike path near Aylwhite is submerged, thousands of people will donate money and time to build a new elevated path. There's work for that. That word is resilience. When I look at that wall and I see something I don't like, I try not to think about what I'm losing. Instead, I think about the positive change those disturbances will produce because our community is resilient. I hope that we can all be resilient together. The project itself couldn't have been produced without the help of many groups and individuals. Their time and dedication made this project what it is today. Thank you. Just try to work with your local community. Not only wetlands, but public transportation. We've had those blue bikes and I'm glad to see people have been using those. Maybe we can try to get public transportation more accessible for others, make more areas pedestrian accessible. We want to see more of that. Other things we can do, I've seen a lot of people doing composting. We could try and have a town-wide composting site because one-fourth of our solid waste is food. That actually gets incinerated. We want to try reducing our carbon footprint. If that gets incinerated, well, we're not doing exactly that. If we could try composting, thank you. That was great. Wonderful to hear right from the students themselves, but also I was struck in just looking at all of the markers, as you mentioned, with that combination of them acknowledging a lot of the more dire, as you put it, events that can happen, but also combining and balancing that with things that we can do proactively and that hopefully folks their age and our age will spearhead going into the future. Yeah, and if I could just add one more thing, we all know climate change is going to impact the younger generation, and they've shown great leadership, not just with our program, but with school strikes, composting, reducing plastics. It was a very natural and organic concept to have them lead the way on this project. So Rachel and I could not be more proud of how hard these students worked and at how impressive their ideas are. So Arlington is really grateful to have such incredible ideas. And we will be blessed with the fruits of that for years and years and years to come, hopefully not flooded away at any point. Stuart, we also have a new artist in residence to welcome in for the year. We do. We have a wonderful artist, Chanel Thurville, who has been meeting with residents around town. We had a first kickoff event at reparations of business in Arlington Heights. And she has a really wonderful project envisioned for portraiture of Arlington citizens that comes out of an interactive interview process where she really works with the community. And along the way, we're creating a space for Arlington's black community to to find connection in a way where it can be very difficult to in town through art. So that's really wonderful. And Cecily planned this with Chanel. Do you want to share some of what's coming up? Yeah, I want to say that really we're doing this in close partnership with Jill Harvey, the town's director of diversity, equity and inclusion. I think she shared updates on this project too in her interviews with you. And it's been fantastic working with her on outreach and more than outreach. Really, we have a partnership planning every aspect of the project. But I thought in this case, it'd be nice to for folks to kind of virtually meet Chanel, brought a little three minute clip where she shares a little bit about herself. So maybe we can take a look at that. That would be great. Hi there, my name is Chanel Thurville. I'm a Haitian-American artist and educator. In the context of my artwork, it's good to know that both of these things are very important because they complement each other. In terms of my work as a visual artist, you can see some examples of what that looks like around me. Traditionally, I'm trained as a painter. I have my bachelor's in fine arts from Pace University. And I have my master's in art education from Mass College of Art and Design. So in terms of thinking about what I do as an artist visually, that tends to manifest in portraits. Some that are more traditionally painting base. Others that are more mixed media that include materials like yarn, fabrics, different kinds of paper and wood. And now I've started to venture into murals in addition to installations that I've made in partnership with a number of nonprofits that include schools, community centers, museums, colleges and universities across the box. As an educator, it's important that people feel seen in her through engaging with my work. The process for creating these things often involves some form of reflection, exchange of stories and capturing of reference images. Sometimes that reflection and the exchange of stories takes many forms that can include written responses, facilitated discussion with groups or one-on-one interviews where folks are prompted with things that make them think about their experiences, their identity, their interests and stuff that makes them unique. Between the exchange of stories and using my camera to photograph some reference images, I'm able to generate a likeness that embodies an extension of the presence of the individuals I'm depicting. As a person who values action led with intention, it's been a pleasure to begin my residency in Arlington in partnership with the Arlington Commission of Arts and Culture and the Division of Diversity and Inclusion. Thus far, in an effort to get to know the people of the neighborhood, I have done an artist talk that was open to the general public there. I participated in a group exhibition celebrating Black artists created by Cedric Douglas at 13 Forest Art Gallery. I've had a tour of Arlington, so I've been able to meet some of the local business owners and talk to residents about how they have felt living in Arlington. And most recently, I did a meet and greet specifically catered to the Black community in Arlington at a local business called Reparations, who prioritizes selling products related to Black hair care. With your support, you can continue to strengthen these relationships and make something beautiful. All right, well, thanks for that. That was definitely worthwhile. Zooming right along here. Stuart, you and I were talking before we went on air about the successful and almost viral expansion of a program that we have spoken about before on these very updates that go outdoors. Tell us what has been happening with that. Right, well, just very briefly, you might remember last year we had installed a couple of artist-decorated doors and strategic locations along the Man-A-Man bike path as part of a close regional exhibition and partnership with Lexington and Concord to encourage outdoor activity and safe enjoyment of public art. As a proof of concept, we worked collaboratively with three town visitor centers, three cultural districts, and so forth. Well, since then, the idea caught fire, as you said, virally. And this year, there are now art doors installations in towns all across Greater Boston, including neighboring Medford, Groton, Westford, Carlisle, Newton, and there are about half a dozen more coming online. We've expanded a number of new artist-decorated doors that we've commissioned here in Arlington. They're all up all around town. There's a new kind of digital way-finding map that shows the collaboration among the towns. You can travel to up to 10 different towns, 50 different artworks all connected in this way with more to come. Just this week, the Umbrella Art Center has partnered with Minuteman National Historical Park to install contemporary public art doors that are inspired by significant historical locations in the park. And that's really a common problem. Right, the Umbrella and the Minuteman Park is in Lexington, right? And one of those places is in Pippo? In Lexington, some in Lexington, some in Lincoln, some in Concord. The wonderful thing is that so many different communities are able to connect through art. And really kind of encourage inter-town tourism at a time when we need to visit our neighbors and support our neighbors and promote inter-town tourism. So that's a really great project that's coming online. And you can see it all over town in Arlington. And thanks to Lori Bodden of Art Links Arlington who coordinated the Arlington installations this year. Great. OK, well, that's a great kind of synopsis of what we can see around us at the moment, as you were both saying. Let's talk about what is coming up for folks. And I'm actually going to throw it to you guys and let you decide which are the things to highlight. Well, I'll say one thing about Chanel's project. In December, she'll be working on a video, an online kind of workshop. So people at home, we weren't really sure where we'd be with COVID in the winter months. But so in January and February and March, people will be invited to do portraits of their friends, family, neighbors and be thinking about a portrait not as necessarily a literal likeness. You don't have to know how to draw. You could put together some words. You could do a collage. You could take photos. Or you can try your hand at drawing or painting. But it's mainly an act of appreciation. Like, what is it about this person that brings you together? What are their qualities that you appreciate in terms of their generosity, their kindness, their courage? Could be any number of things. And one of the reasons I've asked Chanel to do this is in her own portraiture, those kinds of qualities come through. You feel like, I can tell this is a person I would want to cook with. I can tell this is a person I'd want to dance with. You really get a sense of the qualities and spirit of the people that she's portraying. So there are a lot of ways to do that. You don't necessarily have to do it the way Chanel does. But she's given a lot of thought to how you represent, how you distill, how you identify those qualities. So hopefully that will be something that people can do at home in these colder winter months and maybe share through social media. And you said that's gonna get going in December? She'll be making that video in December and then we'll have some kind of a nice celebration kickoff in January to make it available to the community. Yeah, I look forward to delving into that project more deeply in general with you, with Jill and with Chanel. So that's a promise for a future broadcast. But I know also, Stuart, you had mentioned about... Even before December, we've got a lot of art coming online. Exactly, and a cultural district that kind of encompasses a lot of that and that people can now have a self-guided tour for, I think, right? That's right. I mean, just in November, we've got a lot of packed programming. Obviously, Porch Fest is coming back, Open Studios in a different form this year from ACA. We're really supportive of that. Concurrent with that, there's going to be a new holiday pop-up market for artists in town that's being spearheaded by Art Links Arlington and will be in partnership with the Roast of Granola Cafe up in Arlington Heights. And yes, we have a major project coming out for the Arlington Cultural District. We have commissioned a new self-guided audio tour, a digital tour that was masterminded by Ed Gordon of Old Chua Mill. Very well researched, recorded with Loop Lab in Cambridge. That will be coming online at the same time for Porch Fest and for the holiday market. People will be able to really go and deep dive into all the sites of significance, some historical and some very contemporary here in the Cultural District. And let's just remind people, sorry for the interjection that the Open Studios and kind of Porch Fest redux that is happening that day all on November 13th, right? Yes, yes, that's right. Coming up pretty soon. I'm in town hall. So that's very exciting. That's great. So one of the things that I want to make sure that we hit on, because we have spent our time just, like I said, zooming through a number of the things that people can see that are the result of your labor and your collaborations with other groups, with artists in the area, et cetera. But I think that it needs to be said that the ACAC is also working behind the scenes on a lot of stuff and kind of providing the scaffolding for a lot of things. So let's take a minute and just recognize that work that you're doing as well. Thank you, yeah. I mean, that is part of our mission to create a sustainable environment where arts and culture can thrive. And so so much of the work, it's the work that's not seen on a stage. And some of that includes most recently we've been really investigating how to support artists who need live workspace. As we all know, it's getting harder and harder to find housing here, much less large work spaces. And so we're trying to work with the town to find ways to support artists there. We're also working very hard to conduct research for how some of the ARPA funding could trickle down to support just the small and medium sized businesses in town, but also the nonprofits. And the hard hit arts and culture sector. Many artists are out there, their schedules see small businesses themselves who have not had the opportunity to apply their trade throughout the pandemic and are also in need of relief. So these are some of the kind of infrastructure building activities we're undertaking now. Well, and as always, we have this extensive website and the purpose of that is to create one place that people can come to to see what's going on. So we have a calendar of events and really encourage everyone in the town who's producing events, an artist who's holding an exhibition in the library, a restaurant who's hosting a jazz series, go to put it to submit that to our calendar, artsarlington.org so that folks in the town residents can find out about what you're doing. So this is really a service. It's not just to promote what we do and our programs, it's for anything anyone is doing in the town to do with arts and culture and science as well. And it's a free resource for artists, businesses and audiences alike. It's great. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that website again because it is such a, you know, it's a nexus for finding out all the things that you need to, to enjoy either the art or, you know, some mixture of art and local commerce that you guys are involved in. Cecily, I'd like to ask you, let's take the last minutes that we have to have a last chance segment. So what is the last chance for people, you know, what are some of the things that there's a, we're getting to the last chance for people to see? Well, there are three large installations in the town that will be coming down in the next month or so. And that is Nilu Muchela's wonderful reflecting on our pandemic experience in Monotomy Rocks Park. There's still a couple of weeks to go and experience that sort of spiritual place for remembrance, reflection, healing. Leslie Wilcox's marvelous sculptures based on historic costumes that are wrapped around trees at the Jason Russell house. That will be coming down in mid-November. And Michelle Lougie's fantastic extended sculptural installation along the Minuteman Bikeway that so many people had a hand in creating probably will be coming down at the end of December. That was made to warn people to call attention to the environmental dangers of single-use plastic. And so we, it's been up for a year at this point. Yeah, we spoke about current artist in residence, Chanel Thurville. And, you know, why not wrap things up by mentioning previous work, Michelle Lougie, artist residence in the past, and then Nilu as well. So, great. Thank you guys a lot for being here and for being willing to speak so quickly about so much. Thank you so much for having us. It has been a pleasure. I have been speaking with Stuart Ikeda and Cecily Miller of the Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture for this ACAC Update episode of Talk of the Town. I'm James Milan. Thank you guys again for being here. Thanks so much, James. And thank you as well. We'll see you next time.