There Is a Lot of Art Going on in Boston
On the forth floor of a building that’s had an empty storefront as long as I’ve lived here and that I’d assumed was completely empty, walking by it nearly every day, I attended a reading last night at a pop-up art gallery. There were five readers. There was a lot of art on the walls. There was wine, snacks, seltzer. The artists whose work was being shown, being sold, in the space were in attendance. People I do not know but recognized from other events and shows and galleries were in attendance. There was a lot of talking and mingling and connecting before and after the reading.
There is a lot of art going on in Boston.
Earlier in the day, on the walk that I take to avoid becoming too despairing at my desk job, I overheard two young women in the Public Garden — students at Suffolk, or maybe Emerson, no doubt — discussing the arts scene, culture. Decrying the ways in which people who want to start things start them in a vacuum, without looking out at what might be going on around them. And maybe this is true or maybe this is how we learn how to start things but in any case what I heard is that there is a desire, an interest, an investment in arts and letters and the local.
There is a lot of art going on in Boston.
Weeks ago I found myself in the basement of a building near the Somerville Market Basket for some other opening thing and there were recording studios and artist studios and cottage manufacturing studios and I heard the end of a music set played in what felt like a cave with oriental rugs thrown on the ground with the most perfect dim-orange lighting I have ever seen. I came home with my pockets full of business cards and fliers and candy wrappers.
There is a lot of art going on in Boston.
The reading itself was very excellent — for they had assembled a really good line-up of readers — and I got to hear work by folks who were new to me and enjoy getting to know further the work of folks whom I already knew and admired. It was a mix of new work and published work and everybody seemed so excited to be getting together to share it, to enjoy it. To be in a beautiful large room together, to flirt with plans for further events, further collaborations, further additions to the city’s landscapes of arts and letters.
There is a lot of art going on in Boston.
And this is a very exciting thing.