Arts in Transit

Arts in Transit was a public art initiative undertaken between 1984 and 1991 on the Orange Line in Boston's Southwest Corridor. It was designed and implemented by the nonprofit organization UrbanArts, working as a subcontractee of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The program installed artworks, poetry, and prose in nine stations along the Orange Line, from Tufts Medical Center in Chinatown (formerly New England Medical Center) to Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain. Arts in Transit included off-site projects in photography and oral history. It involved the community in the selection of artwork and was the second project in the country to use federal dollars to site art in public transportation after Arts on the Line in Cambridge.

History
Arts on the Line was finishing its work on the Northwest Extension of the Red Line when the non-profit group UrbanArts applied for, and won, a bid to site public artwork on Orange Line. Pamela Worden was the first director of the Cambridge Arts Council and helped to approach federal transportation authorities for Arts on the Line before founding UrbanArts. Worden oversaw the Arts in Transit project. UrbanArts was solely responsible for working with both the MBTA and the communities around the soon-to-be-built stations. The bid to facilitate the public art in the stations was won in 1983 and work started in 1984, though the design process of the stations was already completed and construction had begun.

Boston Contemporary Writers poetry and prose
Boston Contemporary Writers was a literary competition and poetry and prose siting that ran from 1986 to 1987 and was launched to provide a written component to balance the visual emphasis of the permanent art of Arts in Transit. UrbanArts held a state-wide competition that solicited works of either poetry or prose that would eventually be permanently inscribed on granite in each of the nine stations. To achieve this, they built a community advisory board to conduct outreach and formed a separate selection panel that would conduct a blind review of submitted manuscripts. Two works were chosen for each station, for a total of eighteen pieces of writing. Some authors had never had work published before, others, such as Gish Jen, were relatively well-known and well-regarded writers with popular publications to their name. While some of these works are within stations, others are within surrounding parkland or adjacent to station entrances. Poet Sam Cornish directed the project for UrbanArts.

Along the El photography project
Along the El (sometimes also The Artist’s Lens: A Focus on Relocation) was a documentary photography project completed between 1985 and 1987, proposed to UrbanArts by Linda Swartz. Boston’s elevated Orange Line, which ran from Chinatown to Forrest Hills Station in Jamaica Plain, was built in 1901. By the 1980s the line was showing its age and abutting neighborhoods were suffering from lack of sunlight, noise from rusted brakes, and grime. The MBTA and Department of Transportation planned to dismantle the old elevated line and relocate it along the Southwest Corridor. The project paired five professional photographers with seven high school students from Hubert H. Humphrey Occupational Resource Center in Roxbury to document the architecture, the people, and the general feeling of the “El” before it was demolished. The five photographers were Linda Swartz, project director, David Akiba, Lou Jones, Jack Lueders-Booth, and Melissa Shook.

Images from the project were donated to the Boston Public Library and were digitized for wider availability through the Digital Commonwealth initiative.

Sources of Strength oral history project
Working together with Roxbury Community College, UrbanArts let current students and Southwest Corridor residents learn how to collect oral histories. Sources of Strength eventually included interviewers and community advisors, who together collected oral histories from communities surrounding the Southwest Corridor. In 1988, a theatrical performance using these oral histories as text for the script was presented at the Massachusetts College of Art together with Northeastern University. Northeastern also showcased an exhibit that included text and portraits of the storytellers in 1991.

Arts in Transit: The Southwest Corridor artworks
The nine stations that comprise the Southwest Corridor were built after the historic cancelled I-95 highway project. The following is a list of the ten artworks created for Arts in Transit, all installed in stations along the Southwest Corridor of the Orange Line.

Links
Along the Elevated: Photographs of the Orange Line at Digital Commonwealth