Mike Teixeira, board president of Art-Speak (Portsmouth’s cultural commission), saw a point of weakness in the port city once known for tall ships and whales. “We were frustrated that public art seems to take so long to get done for public property like parks and municipal property and the light bulb went on,” says Teixeira. “We could fast track getting art in the city to reflect the real spirit of what’s going on here if we started getting property owners directly engaged.” So they did just that, creating a Craigslist-like website for muralists to connect with business owners in need of art.

The Wilder | Dylan Haigh

This is how it works. First the building owner selects the indoor or outdoor wall that they want to upgrade. Once they’ve decided budget, dimensions, and timeframe, they post their wall on StreetCanvas. Artists can peruse the entries and when they find one that piques their interest, they can submit their ideas for the wall. The building owner selects their favorite submission and gets in touch with the artist directly to start the work.

The Wilder | Dylan Haigh

Since StreetCanvas got its start in June 2017, three murals have been finished. Artist Dylan Haigh, a creative director (among other things) living in Portsmouth, gives StreetCanvas high praise… “I didn’t consider (street art) as something I could really do around here until this year and when StreetCanvas went up,” he says. “Ever since I watched the page like a hawk just waiting for the right wall.” The right wall manifested in the form of The Wilder, a new restaurant within walking distance of Haigh’s home. The idea of having a giant piece of his own art in his neighborhood was too exciting to pass up. “I had the benefit of knowing the folks who own the business. They had been familiar with what I do and they liked the general aesthetic so they told me to go nuts,” he says.

“A city like Portsmouth can get frozen in time,” says Teixeira. The port city is known for its historical elements but that’s no reason to get entrenched in the past. There are troves of artists from newer generations and StreetCanvas was created to give them a voice and protect Portsmouth from falling to the wayside. Why not integrate new art with the more traditional pieces that already live on the walls of Portsmouth?

Live Artfully Chalk Mural | Brian Cartier

While the StreetCanvas initiative has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community, not every exchange between artist and business owner has been strife-free. “Some business owners and property owners came to the table with very specific ideas and unrealistic expectations and it has been an amazing learning curve of how to figure out how to mediate that kind of stuff,” says Teixeira. The nature of StreetCanvas encourages business owners who may not be particularly art-minded to think figuratively and step into the perspective of the artist to see how the process works on their end.

StreetCanvas is still young, but Teixeira has high expectations for its future. “I hope that this takes off, and it’s a place where business owners and artists can connect and create a bunch of cool financial opportunities for artists to get work on a regular basis for what they do.”

Mike Teixeira, president of Art-Speak
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Website
Facebook
Instagram

Top image: Portwalk Transformer Fence Mural | Susan Bartlett Rice

The post Painting Portsmouth appeared first on Take Magazine.

By Hammer and Hand, All Arts Do Stand, 2017
Mural by Ryan Gardell, located in Worcester, Massachusetts

Ryan Gardell–Muralist
Worcester, Massachusetts
Website
Facebook
Instagram

Image courtesy of the artist

The post Street Take appeared first on Take Magazine.

“My entire life is my studio,” says Robert “Bob” Gregson, conceptual and graphic artist, modern architecture fanatic, sculptor, thinker, author, teacher, and prankster. He says this with a laugh. Indeed, Gregson laughs a lot when he tries to explain his art. If you spend any time at all with him, you realize that the world is Gregson’s canvas, and he intends to have fun painting it.

A public artist of near legendary status in Connecticut since his graduation from the University of Hartford in 1970, Gregson has enlisted thousands of strangers over the years to play along with his often audacious stunts. Best known for his years of work in Hartford through the Knox Foundation and, later, his own non-profit, Sidewalk, Inc., he seemed to be on a one-man mission to revitalize the Insurance City’s downtown.

Among his creations was “Thursday Is a Work of Art.” On that day each week in downtown Hartford, he and his co-conspirators unleashed all manner of gleeful mayhem, including skywriters, sword fighters, parachutists, bump dancers, street games, oversized furniture and clowns. “It was very controversial at times,” he says with another laugh. “I had to leave Hartford for a while.”

Gregson’s latest foray in the public sphere is “Out of Order,” at Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven. In it, Gregson invites visitors to create their own art space by remodeling his wall installations and sculptures, the latter mounted on the wheeled casters on the floor. All of the pieces are painted in geometric Mondrian-like patterns, in every conceivable permutation, from bold (yellow, red, black) to muted (grey, silver, brown). A prodigious amount of work went into installing the month-long show, which ends June 30. I counted 32 moving parts in the downstairs gallery alone. Think: Playscape for adults.

Out of Order opening

Outside of two years at the Art Institute of Chicago, earning his master’s degree, Gregson has lived in the Nutmeg State since his undergraduate years in Hartford. “I never felt a part of where I came from, New Jersey, and I was not good at suffering alone in Brooklyn like a hipster,” says Gregson, who was also creative director for Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism for 22 years. “I had a lot of friends here. Early on, people became a medium for me. I started off in art school doing traditional representational work and was even highly mocked for it by other students. At some point, I was taking one of my pieces down from the wall and noticed that some of the other students had started to play with them. It was more fun than just hanging stuff on the wall, more dynamic. I thought, ‘The art work is a prop for this experience.’”

That was the proverbial lightbulb-over-the-head moment for Gregson. “I began to ask, ‘What is it that I’m contributing with my art?’” The answer was a framework that gives people permission to play.
After looking back over the past half-century of his art career, Gregson concludes, “I have led a lot of lives.”

“Just A Phase” offers a closer look at Gregson’s many lives; the short film was created by his nephew, also named Robert Gregson.

Robert Gregson-Artist
Orange, Connecticut
Website
Facebook

The post Connecticut’s Merry Prankster appeared first on Take Magazine.

In a dusty mill building on the outskirts of downtown Manchester, New Hampshire, urban artist James Chase and an intern are struggling to hoist the massive iron frame of an old printing press onto a rolling flatbed cart. They are working late, with plans of cleaning and reassembling the device. Chase does not have letter blocks, but he hopes to use the press to roll out posters, or maybe even give his students a taste of turn-of-the-last-century printing techniques.

“I got word of a guy who owned a pizza shop who had this in his basement,” Chase says. “That happens a lot—somebody will show up at my door with old stuff, building material.” He pauses. “Junk!”

Chase’s specialty is found art. He takes old slats, bricks, or burned wood, and re-purposes the objects into colorful, modern installations. Then, those pieces can be fitted up in a location or at a pop-up exhibit, sometimes in site-specific installations like the one Chase once built on the grounds of a recently burned building.

Flux, photo courtesy of James Chase

The result is what he calls “art in the moment.” “That’s what gives the art life and energy, to not be in the vacuum of a museum, to never know how long it’s going to last,” he says.

To that end, his most recent installation, called Surge, is an enormous modernist mural painted directly onto the roll down gate of an old mill building just a few blocks from his studio. Against the drab red brick of the building, the mural pops like a sunflower in a parking lot. Chase, 35, was born and raised in Manchester and used to skateboard as a kid around that section of the city’s Millyard. Now, Chase believes that art, as temporary as it might be, can be a form of economic development, a way to breathe life into a depressed neighborhood.

James Chase in front of “Surge,” Manchester, New Hampshire, photo by Ashlyn McKibben

“That’s why it’s called Surge,” he says. “Art is about energy, and that space needed it!”
Chase is currently working with officials in Rochester, New Hampshire, to create a mural series for that city’s downtown. He sits on the board of the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts and is convinced of the project’s promise to revitalize the city. “The art is there so they come have dinner or drinks, take in the murals or catch a pop-up,” he says.

Placeholders, photo courtesy of James Chase

Chase also works in the art departments of Manchester Community College and the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and takes a similar hands-on approach when it comes to teaching his students, offering them volunteer opportunities, exhibitions, and art exchanges.

His own love for art developed when he was in high school in the city he now calls home. “I was a quiet, shy kid,” he says. “That’s why I took every art class I could. It gave me support and a foundation. Art was the way to get my voice heard. Still is.”

James Chase – Mixed Media Artist / Printmaker
Manchester, New Hampshire
Instagram
Twitter
Website

Top image by Dan Szczesny

The post Now You See the Art; Now You Don’t appeared first on Take Magazine.

Artist Silvia Lopez Chavez has been collecting packing protectors and nailing them up on her studio wall. A combination of corner protectors and various holders for retail items, all made of paper pulp, the assortment looks a bit like a 3D, topographical map. But this isn’t an installation, or a new project that she’s working on: Chavez is simply storing them until she can figure out what to do next. “Paper is one of my most beloved mediums,” she says. “I have seen piles of these paper pulp packing items out in the dumpster behind my studio, and they are just beautiful. I am trying to figure out how I can utilize them rather than letting them go to waste, so they have been slowly building up on my wall.”

Fresh Air explored the environmental and political aspects within air quality issues in Chelsea, MA, inviting the community to participate by sharing their story and serving as models for mixed-media portraits. The one-year project was partly funded by a LCC, Massachusetts Cultural Council grant | Photo courtesy the artist

Chavez breathes art in her daily life. On any given day, she can be found fervently working away in her studio at the Boston Center for the Arts, where she is also a board member, or collaborating on brightly colored projects with children at the Boston Children’s Hospital, where she is an artist-in-residence two days a week. While in her studio, Chavez concentrates on making her signature layered multimedia works that utilize a mix of monoprint, illustration, watercolor, and collage. “I love color,” Chavez says, “and illustration is something I always go back to. I am an illustrator at heart.” In her series, Fresh Air: Portrait of Chelsea Project, Chavez focused her talents on the residents of Chelsea, her home court in Boston. The series of portraits addresses the growing health problems in her neighborhood, due to the high density of diesel trucks commuting through it to service greater Boston. As she notes on her website, “Chelsea is the third most environmentally overburdened community in Massachusetts.”

Chavez’s passion for her community is also deeply interwoven with her love for working with children. Her current artist residency at the BCH has opened her eyes to the capacity of art to heal. “It is hard in some ways,” she says, “but also very beautiful, because you are able to really see the power of the creative process, which is something I greatly believe in. The power of the creative process to heal, to connect, as a way to engage in something different and connect with yourself and with others.” Chavez teaches the kids at BCH how to do collaging and printmaking, much of what she does in her studio. “They get into that mode of making and completely forget they are at a hospital in a room full of cables and machines,” she says. “Instead, they imagine this world of color and characters; all of the sudden, they are not in the hospital, they are in their imagination.”

A series of collaborative pop-up art installations throughout Boston with artist Elisa Hamilton. The artists invite the public to identify their “lemonade.” Project was funded by the New England Foundation for the Arts Creative City Grant. | Photo courtesy the artist.

In the summertime, Chavez focuses her energy on public art. Last summer, in collaboration with artist Elisa Hamilton and with funding by the New England Foundation for the Art’s Creative City Program, she completed a pop-up series of “lemonade stands” in association with the Eliot School in different neighborhoods around Boston. Lemonade Stand was used as a project to bring children and their families together, to “identify their ‘lemonade’—that positive motivator that helps each of us rise above challenges, turning the sour to sweet in our day-to-day lives.” Other projects include creating public art and murals with teenage girls through a free program at Raw Art Works, as well as her own commissioned murals and public art projects.

Silvia Lopez Chavez might very well be the wonder woman of the Boston art scene. Her practice and artistry can be found on city walls as well as in galleries, public schools, and hospital corridors, lighting up the lives of children and adults alike. Unsurprisingly, she has many things in store for 2017, including two murals that are currently in the drafting process, as well as a series of mixed-media illustrations called Imaginary Islands that will debut in the spring. “I always have a hundred things brewing in my head because I get bored so easily,” she says. “I find myself constantly coming up with projects because I need to create for myself.” Details for these shows are still in the works, so we’ll keep you updated on dates and showings.

Chavez at the studio. The project behind is a work in progress, using found recycled pulp paper packaging | Photo courtesy the artist.

Silvia Chavez Lopez – multimedia artist and educator
Boston, Massachusetts
Website
Twitter
Instagram

Top photo North Shore Community Development Coalition in Salem, MA | Photo by Dominic Chavez

The post From Lemons to Lemonade appeared first on Take Magazine.