Join the Emerald Necklace Conservancy on Tuesday, September 30 from 3 – 6 for a free open house at its Back Bay Fens Visitor Center at 125 The Fenway. Learn about the the work of the Conservancy, stewarding the Emerald Necklace parks while enjoying tours, games, and more in the historic Stony Brook Gatehouse. RSVP at https://www.emeraldnecklace.org/event/svc-open-house/
In merging hydraulic engineering with landscape design, Olmsted helped to redefine the role of public space in urban areas. Join the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site staff as we explore how sanitation – and imagination – helped create the Back Bay Fens. Note: This is Veterans Day observed. Meets at the Shattuck Visitor Center, 125 The Fenway, Boston. For more information visit https://www.nps.gov/frla/special-events.htm
Starting this August, The Emerald Necklace Conservancy will launch a “climate responsive” art exhibition. Fog x FLO: Fujiko Nakaya on the Emerald Necklace will introduce park visitors to the internationally renowned “fog sculptures” of Fujiko Nakaya. The installations have been designed to complement and enhance Frederick Law Olmsted’s (FLO) enduring landscapes.
Fog x FLO will be showcased at the following five locations, and will be free and open to the public from August 11 to October 31, 2018:
Fog x Canopy, Clemente Field Path, Back Bay Fens
Fog x Island, Leverett Pond, Olmsted Park, Brookline
Fog x Beach, Jamaica Pond
Fog x Hill, Hunnewell Hillside, Arnold Arboretum
Fog x Ruins, Overlook Ruins, Franklin Park
Building on this engaging Necklace-wide exhibition, the Conservancy will also develop and pilot new physical and digital way-finding approaches to orient park visitors along the exhibition sites in the Emerald Necklace and install new educational and interpretive displays in the Emerald Necklace Conservancy’s Shattuck Visitor Center at 125 The Fenway.
As part of the Experience Design Studio, led by Northeastern professor Kristian Kloeckl and organized in collaboration with the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, a group of undergraduate students investigated people’s experience of the Emerald Necklace public park network. Based on a series of on-site interviews and observational studies, students developed design interventions with the goal to positively enhance people’s everyday experience in and around the parks.
The semester-long studio looked at public parks as places of possibility, participation and co-creation; places of destination and of escape; places for encounter; places of proximity and of distance; places for dynamic appropriation where meaning is constantly negotiated. Projects proposed by the students are material as well as digital, orchestrating objects, services, information systems, ambient installations and events.
“Developing experience design projects for the Emerald Necklace in Boston also means considering the deep design lessons of Frederick Law Olmsted who designed the park system in the late 19th century,” explained Professor Kloeckl. “Olmsted is known as a landscape architect but could by all means be considered an experience designer given his holistic and human centered approach to design. He referred to the ‘genius of place’ as the unique qualities of a site to be explored and to let them condition all design decisions of a project. The approach the students of this studio course followed was guided by an exploration of place and of how people make use of these parks over time.”
The exhibit of interventions will be at the Shattuck Visitor Center, 125 The Fenway, through December 2017. Exhibit hours are Weekdays 9 – 5, Weekends 11 – 4. For weekday visits, call ahead, as gallery is a multipurpose room and may be closed for meetings. For more information visit www.emeraldnecklace.org. Telephone 617-522-2700.
For over thirty-five years Robin Radin has photographed both the cultural and natural landscape of her neighborhood in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Her work draws inspiration from the vibrant, diverse street life and from the brilliance in the landscapes of Franklin Park, Jamaica Pond, Arnold Arboretum, and the Emerald Necklace parklands.
She says: “With my landscape work, I seek to elicit the beauty in settings that might otherwise seem ordinary. In particular, my photographs aim to reveal how urban wilds and parklands can unexpectedly evoke a human presence. Over the last few years, I have frequently wandered the woodlands of Franklin Park with my camera and tripod. My visits to the park are charged with the spirit of discovery and adventure. The landscape has the power to heighten my awareness, simultaneously allowing me to reach deep within myself and also to project outward my inner feeling into the captured image. These photographs are my paean to the quiet grace that emanates from these treasured places.”
Robin Radin is a Boston-based photographer whose career as an exhibiting artist and educator has spanned over thirty-five years. She received her B.F.A. from Tufts University and the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts in 1983, and her M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art in 1992. Her photographs have been exhibited and published nationally. Radin’s work has been presented in over fifty venues —The Danforth Museum of Art, The Institute of Contemporary Art, The Cambridge Art Association, Bunker Hill Community College, The Photographic Resource Center, The Aidekman Art Center at Tufts University, to name a few.
In 2010, in collaboration with writer Lynne Anderson, her photographs were included in the book Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories From Immigrant Kitchens, published by the University of California Press. Radin’s work has been reproduced in numerous exhibition catalogues. She exhibits annually in Jamaica Plain Open Studios and serves on the board of The Jamaica Plain Arts Council. Radin is a 2003 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant in Photography.
There will be an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Shattuck Visitor Center of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, 125 The Fenway, through December, 2017, with a reception on Wednesday, June 14, from 6 – 8. Exhibit Hours: Sat and Sun | 11am–4pm. Weekdays: 9am –5pm (For weekday visits, call ahead (617-522-2700) as gallery is a multipurpose room and may be closed for meetings)
The Opening Reception for a new photographic exhibition, Franklin Park: An Enduring and Ephemeral Landscape, will take place Wednesday, June 14 from 6 – 8 at the Shattuck Visitor Center, 125 The Fenway in Boston. For over 35 years, artist Robin Radin has been capturing the Emerald Necklace on film. Now, you can see her work on Franklin Park. The exhibit will run through December, 2017, and Radin’s photographs are also available for purchase. Exhibit hours are Saturday and Sunday, 11 – 4, and weekdays, 9 – 5. For weekday visits, call ahead as the gallery is a multipurpose room and may be closed for meetings. To rsvp for the free reception visit http://www.emeraldnecklace.org/about-us/shattuck-visitor-center/current-exhibit/
Painted over the last twenty years, watercolors by Thomas Loring are on view through November 15 at the Shattuck Visitor Center, 125 The Fenway. They are drawn from Frederick Law Olmsted’s parks and reflect the natural and man-made elements of the landscape that Olmsted created over 150 years ago with his colleagues: John C. Olmsted, H.H. Richardson, and Richardson’s successors, Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge. This collaboration was instrumental in realizing his far-reaching vision for the parks.
Olmsted’s parks are a remarkable orchestration of organic forms in harmony with built structures. The design of the landscape is highlighted by contrasts of earth and water, light and dark, movement and repose. One’s eye is drawn to the sinuous forms, reflections in water and arrays of color at the interface of the natural and man-made. These watercolors were inspired by these splendid parks, and the artist is delighted to have the opportunity to show them at the Shattuck Visitor Center.
Thomas Loring was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Harvard University where he developed a lifelong interest in art and drawing. After beginning a course of study at the Boston Architectural Center, he went on to Carnegie Mellon University where he received a Master of Architecture degree. He started his career with Woollen Associates Architects in Cincinnati and Indianapolis before joining ARC/Architectural Resources Cambridge, becoming a Principal at ARC, specializing in educational and scientific buildings. Painting in watercolor and drawing by hand has been complementary to his work in architecture for more than thirty years. He paints on site and in a studio in Boston and while traveling. For complete schedule of exhibit hours visit http://www.emeraldnecklace.org/about-us/shattuck-visitor-center/current-exhibit/
Join docent Barbara Nazarewicz, as she leads a bike tour from the Fens to the Arnold Arboretum to enjoy the seasonal beauty of the Emerald Necklace. Return to Shattuck Visitor Center. Free, but registration required. Space limited. Sponsored by the Emerald Necklace Conservancy. Register on line at www.emeraldneckace.org.
From foul muddy flats to the parkland of today, the Fens has undergone many transformations in the last 125+ years. Join Emerald Necklace docents as they talk and walk this historic landscape. The May 23 and May 31 tours include stops at the Kelleher Rose Garden with its 1,500 roses and recently restored fountain and statuary, and a stroll along the paths of the oldest continuously operating WWII Victory Garden in the country. Meet at the Shattuck Visitor Center, 125 The Fenway, at 11 am if you attend on May 23, or at 1 pm if you attend on May 31. Free. For more information contact info@emeraldnecklace.org. Image from www.bostoncommittee.org.
The Emerald Necklace Conservancy will present an exhibit of watercolor and gouache paintings by artist Lynette Lombard titled Green Spaces: Paintings from Olmsted’s Parks. The exhibit will be mounted in the Shattuck Visitor Center, 125 The Fenway, and will be on view Saturdays and Sundays beginning May 3 from 11 – 4. An artist reception and talk will be held on Saturday, May 30, from 2 – 4, and is free and open to the public. In her artist statement, Lynette writes that, while painting on site during the summer of 2014, “I was struck by the variety of Olmsted’s visual rhythms and serpentine movements to create paths of light and dark, which weave a drama in my work.” She received her MFA from Yale University School of Art and is a Professor of Art at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. For more information contact info@emeraldnecklace.org, or call 617-522-2700.
