The Art of Conversation
Art is a powerful thing, and experiencing it can fill us with a range of emotions. Art can incite joy or sorrow. Art can be funny or deeply disturbing. Art induces self-reflection, fosters thoughts about our connections to people and communities, and can even get us thinking about our place in the universe. Art can spark conversations, both frivolous and profound. Art can activate a space and create transformative moments that move us and change the way we think.
Photos by Jim Olson
We were ecstatic when artist Silvia López Chavez accepted our invitation to create an ephemeral work of public art at Fenway Park for Action Pact 2022: Visualizing the Future. Silvia has managed to pique conversations with her work in so many public spaces. She has created murals at Twitter Boston, the United States Embassy in Beijing, MIT, Revere Beach, and the City of Chelsea. And that is just a sampling of her installations from the last year and a half! We were confident she could and would do the same with us at Fenway Park.
As she states in her bio, Silvia tries to make her work approachable and understood by diverse audiences. And, in this instance, she hit an absolute homerun. Using the image of the larger than life Boston legend and recent inductee into the Baseball Hall of Fame, David “Big Papi” Ortiz, Silvia contextualized sea level rise in Boston in a way that is both brilliant and accessible. Viewers of the piece “get it” immediately…something isn’t normal here. Why is Big Papi submerged in water? Then the lightbulb goes off…2ft by 2070! Of course any Boston Red Sox fan knows that Ortiz could probably hit a game winning homerun while fully submerged in water, but the work sends a quick and powerful message about the effects of climate change and the potential for dramatic sea level rise in the City of Boston over time.
While installing the work over the course of two days, we had scores of interactions with fans, tourists, and local residents. One of my main jobs during an install is to answer as many questions as possible so that the artist can keep working. However, Silvia, who cares deeply about the environment and climate change, often stopped her artistic process to engage in rich conversations with onlookers.