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Making art for everyone

Mags Harries says her teaching career has been colored by her own unhappy experiences in art school: "I think I'm more receptive to differences than my teachers were."

Sitting at a table in her Cambridge studio, Mags Harries talks about a current commission - an assignment that is nothing less than to "give character to a place that has no memory," she says. That place is Miramar Park, a community on the edge of Florida's Everglades that has mushroomed dramatically over the last decade. To build new housing, "They're creating land a mile a minute just outside the Everglades Preserve, destroying everything alive," Harries says.

She speaks with an environmentalist's urgency, and she is an environmentalist of sorts, a public artist who wants her public to think about natural resources. In the case of Miramar Park, Harries and her husband and collaborator, Lajos Heder, want people to be aware of what the place used to look like, before the wetlands were destroyed and filled in with pulverized limestone. As part of the 3 acres they've been commissioned to transform within a 200-acre park that will be made of more crushed limestone, they first suggested planting a meadow of butterfly-attracting flowers. "That was nixed," Harries says. "The Parks Department wanted a lawn they could mow. They didn't want a wild look; they wanted something that suggested maintenance, that they were doing their job."

What ultimately wasn't nixed was Harries' and Heder's insistence on keeping a tiny patch of the original land in tact, a circle just 76 feet in diameter. "This protected area will be the only original, untouched environment for miles around," says Harries, "the only place where people will be able to see authentic vegetation and wildlife."

Some pieces of the fossil-rich limestone were too big to smash for fill, so Harries and Heder are using them as the banking for an amphitheater 18 feet high - the only topographical feature in a flat landscape. "The amphitheater will be a center for a community that doesn't have one," explains Harries, "a gathering place for celebrations, even weddings."

And in front of the amphitheater, they're building an artificial bay that will connect with a larger man-made lake. The water would otherwise be eerily dead, she says, "so we're using hidden mechanisms to make it burp and create surface circles that will make you wonder if there are sea monsters under there."

Mags Harries grew up in the town of Barry, eight miles from Cardiff, in Wales, in a house with a view of water. Her father had been a sea captain on merchant ships, not the safest of professions, "so the deal was that Mom wouldn't have me until Dad came in," she says. After 17 years at sea, Dad "came in" and became a dock master. "Because of Dad's job," Harries recalls, "we were always aware of the tides and the sea and the moon."

That awareness stayed with her. She belongs to the first generation of her family not to go to sea. But in a metaphorical sense, she has. In a quarter-century career as a Cambridge-based public artist, and in her increasingly rare gallery art as well, Harries, 55, has often focused on aspects of water, from its preciousness to its hazards, and its role in journeys literal and figurative. Her water obsession led her to celebrate her 50th birthday with a three-week kayaking trip in Alaska, where, she says, "your priority is plastic bags, because you're never, ever dry."

Her work has won her recognition as one of the country's top artists in the difficult arena of public art, where concerns from construction budgets to vandalism to weather prevail in a way they never do in art intended for a gallery. She is the most public-spirited of public artists, many of whom, at her level, confine themselves to high-profile, big-budget projects in government buildings and airports. Harries does those projects, too, but she'll also work for next to nothing for an elementary school - or lose money staging community festivals centered on temporary sculpture and pageantry.

The public art on which she has concentrated doesn't lend itself to museum retrospectives, and, while she is celebrated in the art world, the Boston public is largely unaware of her works around the rest of the country. Which is why she and Heder, a Hungarian-born architect, have set up their own Web site, harriesheder.com, with images and texts documenting 26 of their projects.

Heder, who fled to America as a 16-year-old after the Hungarian revolution of 1956, is as fascinated as his wife with water. "I grew up swimming in the Danube," he says. "You couldn't leave the country then, and the river seemed like a lifeline. We lived in a low-lying area, and there was always the possibility of floods. During World War II, the Russians blew up the dams, and six feet of water turned up in our house."

Heder and Harries have exploited the symbolic potential of water in art both temporary and permanent. Together, they floated a large golden ball down a 10-mile stretch of the Bronx River last year, calling attention to the beautiful and the bedraggled, playing Pied Piper, escorting the ball from a canoe. The Golden Ball is one of three projects that the National Park Service has commissioned from them. In Bangor, Maine, last summer, they deliberately created talking logjams in the Kenduskeag Stream, through a hidden audio system. Next month they'll begin to transform a dump site next to a foundry in Lawrence, where the owner has offered the land for a public park. The kickoff will be a June community event in which participants will create temporary art and architecture using black sand left on the site, thus reconnecting with a forgotten place.

They've also had a trio of major commissions in Arizona, a desert state where water has special significance, including a new Phoenix project in which they're using an existing canal to create two waterfalls and an outdoor room. The room will have a water-covered wall and water running through grooves on the floor. And they've just completed a 67,000-square-foot terrazzo floor for the Convention Center in downtown Louisville, filled with aquatic imagery. Called City of the Falls, it uses iconography drawn from Louisville's importance as a shipping center on the Ohio River and includes everything from flat boats to fossil beds to such non-aquatic references as a Louisville Slugger. City of the Falls is more than pretty. It unifies a two-block urban area, inside and out, and helps orient conventioneers ("Meet me by the Kentucky Derby").

"Some public artists ignore the public," says Pallas Lombardi, executive director of the Cambridge Arts Council, who has worked with Harries for 17 years. "But Mags engages them from the start. She has an innate ability to create something that's accessible in every sense." He adds:

"Public art itself is more accessible to women artists, who are still not fairly represented by the museum and gallery system, because public art usually means public money and a democratic process. I'd rank Mags in the top 10 women public artists working today."

"Mags is among the small set of nationally recognized public artists working out of Boston," says DeCordova Museum curator Nick Capasso, an authority in the field. "I find her projects very ambitious - and not always due to the vision of the people commissioning them. It's because of Mags's passion, tenacity, and uncompromising nature." The DeCordova, which in 1982 gave Harries one of her few museum shows, complete with catalog, is in the process of finally removing an early Harries work, Three Gardens. The 1981 topiary piece was only supposed to be on the museum's grounds for a year, but it proved so popular that it turned into The Sculpture That Came to Dinner. A trio of outdoor "rooms" made of yew trees, it was in the British tradition of nature turned into architecture.

Nothing about the kind of public art that Harries and Heder practice is easy. Some cities are still content with the figurative bronze statue plunked in the park: Boston is a sad example. Harries and Heder are anything but statue-plunkers, which is why they tend to work more in other American cities. They're problem solvers, whether the problem is attempting to mollify Phoenix residents who had just had a superhighway stuck in their backyards - which resulted in city planners commissioning a sculptural solution to an aural problem, which caused even more bitterness - or making sense of the two-block stretch of old and new buildings that make up Louisville's Convention Center. Among their missions: educating people about the environment; creating a sense of ceremony and ritual; reclaiming forgotten spaces in a world where there's a growing shortage of space.

This gets them into trouble. There are often conTROVissies, as Harries pronounces it, in Brit-speak, surrounding their projects, which involve endless meetings with local residents, city councils, architects, and engineers who don't always appreciate the Harries/Heder approach, which goes far beyond decorating spaces after the fact.

That approach is hardly unique to them. The best public artists working today are full partners with urban planners, architects, and engineers, which often causes friction from professionals who feel their traditional authority is being usurped. ConTROVissy is endemic to public art - and has been all along. Bickering over the design for Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, across Beacon Street from the Massachusetts State House, was so intense that the sculpture wasn't installed until 1897, 15 years after its commission. The Shaw skirmishes were precursors to the heated battle almost a century later over Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Now both are among our country's best-loved public monuments.

Harries and Heder have developed preemptive-strike strategies to minimize the wars. Their new outdoor water room in Phoenix, for instance, is just the first step in redesigning a whole series of canals and aqueducts. "We thought it was a good way to start," says Harries, "so people could meet there as soon as possible. If you're sitting around some boardroom, the engineers usually win out over the artists." The water room will also be a contemplative meeting place for the public, and Harries hopes that experiencing the space will persuade Phoenix residents to support the big picture of the redesign.

As for the Louisville terrazzo piece, the community loves City of the Falls - now. But in the beginning, back in 1996, "We had almost no local support" for the $1.8 million project, Heder recalls. "There were venal folks who maneuvered to get the money put elsewhere."

It took the personal intervention of Louisville's then-mayor, Jerry Abramson, to see the state-run work through. "The state wanted linoleum squares," Abramson recalls. "The place was going to look like a bunker. When it came to push and shove, aesthetics got pushed to the side."

Finally, a new hotel tax allowed some budgetary leeway - and the Harries/Heder floor. Jerry Abramson calls it "magnificent, spectacular." The former mayor says, "You can't walk into that facility without noticing it. In the governor's speech to open the center, what he singled out was the floor."

It's the thrill of doing battle with the authorities, and of having tens of thousands of people experience her work on a daily basis, that has kept Harries in public art for the last 25 years - ever since her very first public piece, Asaroton.

She was selected from a list of 100 artists, compiled by museum curators, for this 1975 assignment from the City of Boston and the Massachusetts Bicentennial Commission. "I insisted on choosing my own site," she says. "I was told I was breaking the rules - which seems to work for me. Making work to fit a site was also a radical idea then." Site-specific work has since become common, in part because of the success of Asaroton.

"The original asarotons were Roman floor mosaics that re-created the look of the floor after a banquet, littered with trash," Harries explains. "I'd already been working with trash, because it was animated and had a history." She decided to locate her bronze street piece on the path between Haymarket, Boston's traditional home to food vendors, and the North End. Then she played urban archeologist. "To research," she says, "I'd go every Saturday and have oysters and beer at the Union Oyster House, then pick up all the stuff on the floor of Haymarket, and bring it back to the studio to cast it."

Harries's Asaroton - now mostly in storage, pending completion of Central Artery construction, with parts of it on view at the Museum of Science - eventually became one of Boston's best-loved pieces of public art. "It was a national model," says the DeCordova's Capasso. "It predates all the other public art paving pieces. It was innovative in its small scale at a time when most public art was gigantic. It was innovative in its humor at a time when most public art was dead serious. And it was innovative in its siting."

But there was plenty of fuss before the happy ending, and not just because Harries picked a trash theme to celebrate our nation's bicentennial; it was more because one of the newspapers she incorporated into the piece had headlines about busing in South Boston.

"I had to defend the piece in public meetings," she says. "There was something so alive about that experience. That art could have such a tremendous impact on people got me hooked. Public art can create such a dialogue. In a gallery, all you get is polite comments and maybe a review."

Asaroton represented another first for Harries. The commission amounted to $10,000, but she spent an entire year on the piece, unwilling to compromise, and enlisted massive volunteer help. Sadly, there's nothing unusual in public artists' paying out of their own pocket or doing their own fund-raising, practices that architects and engineers wouldn't tolerate. Heder has tried to urge Harries to think about the bottom line. "Mags used to say, `I made $5,000 on that piece!' " Heder notes. "And I'd say to her, `But it took you two years!' "

The Park Service budget for The Golden Ball, the Bronx River piece, was $13,500 - peanuts when you realize that the ball is covered with real gold leaf, that Harries and Heder had to hire professional dancers and musicians to accompany its procession, had to specially outfit the canoe, staged a dry run that proved rather wet when Heder fell overboard, and gave a year of their time to the project. It was such a success, luring an estimated 10,000 people en route, that the Park Service is repeating it this year on October 14.

"Temporary events like that take a lot of energy, but they create even more," says Harries. "With projects like the Park Service ones, we know we're not going to make any money," she acknowledges. Even in the Louisville center, funds allocated for the art were slashed and parts of the piece remain unrealized. The artists did substantial work on the project for free, and some parts of the floor never were filled in with the images Harries and Heder designed. They're in solid-color terrazzo. "They're ghosts," Harries says.

There was no identifiable career path called "public art" when Harries was a child. Growing up in a Welsh Methodist family, "I wasn't allowed to play on Sundays," she recalls. "But at my grandfather's house, there was wax for making models, and I was allowed to melt it by the fire and make little sculptures. They were always animals. I became a hands-on person, like my father. He could do everything from darning socks to plumbing - it came from being at sea. I learned to sew, to make extensions for dresses to make them longer. It was after the war, and there was no question of new dresses."

The recycling concept would stay with her, both in imagery and ideas. She has recycled everything from vegetables to lost gloves, and her proposals that don't work out in one venue tend to be reworked for another. Nothing goes to waste. Before the Asaroton commission, her education and career were art-centered, but never centered on public art, "which I'd hated," Harries recalls. "It was all Henry Moores stuck in front of buildings," she says, referring to Britain's most influential postwar sculptor, whose ubiquitous quasi-figurative works weren't where Harries was headed. (Bostonians became familiar with Moore through examples on the Harvard and MIT campuses.)

"I was a bit of a misfit," she says. "I grew up Welsh-speaking, and when I was around 7, I got very confused about language. People even wondered if I was retarded. But the conclusion was, `She's not dumb. She's a dreamer.' " A few years later, she was the highest scorer in all of southern Wales on the standardized 11-plus exams, which won her a scholarship to a fancy private girls' school in Cardiff, where she was miserable. "My solace was in the art room," she recalls.

Art and sewing pointed her toward a career in fashion, which she began studying at Leicester College of Art and Design, over the border in England. She soon switched to sculpture. But at the end of her first year, she was told by the head of the art school that she wasn't good enough and should get out.

"I was determined to prove him wrong," she says, which she did, staying to graduate despite considerable opposition to her experiments with color in sculpture, and odd materials like mirrors. "Everything I tried was `wrong,' " she says. "Everything was supposed to be figurative or constructivist."

After graduationOA, she briefly worked in the library of the British Museum, where the pay was so meager she supplemented it by cleaning houses. ("I did live in the Beatles' old apartment, though," Harries says, "near the Gloucester Road tube station.") She quit the library to train as a croupier, to make enough money to go to America, "where I felt I wouldn't have to compromise myself or my art. You know, the American Dream."

That was in 1968. She applied for a grant from a Welsh private agency to go to graduate school in the States. In her interview, she recalls, "I said, `I'm going whether you send me or not,' and got pissed and stalked out of the room." She got the grant and earned a master's at Southern Illinois University. "I decided I should go to the heartland of America. It was at the time of Vietnam, drugs, free spirits."

At Illinois, she says, "I was considered shocking. Everyone was doing minimalist steel sculpture. I was the first woman in the graduate sculpture school. They actually thought I was going to be a guy, because of my name."

Her own work switched from time-consuming, life-sized fiberglass figures to clay, "which could react immediately to anything I had in my head that day," she says. "I was in a new country, observing new things. I was unburdening myself from being a Brit, and I was growing more quickly than I could make the fiberglass pieces. I had to work faster, to get out what was in my head."

She was living on a farm. One day, a newly arriving student had two flat tires at the end of her driveway, and so she invited him to live with her. "It was the '60s," she says by way of explanation. The flat-tire victim was Bernard Toale, now a prominent Boston art dealer. "Mags was the hot ticket in graduate school," Toale says. "She wore these platform shoes that made her about 7 feet tall." Harries is actually 5 feet 8 1/2 - 2 1/2 inches taller than the average Welshman," she notes. When she graduated from Illinois in 1970, Toale drove the artist and her belongings East for her first job, teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design for a year.

After gigs at several local art schools, in 1978 she landed at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where she has taught ever since. In 1986, she became the first faculty member to teach public art at the school. Her teaching is colored by her own unhappy art school experiences, she says. "It's always surprising which students pull through, and when. I think I'm more receptive to differences than my teachers were."

The late '70s and early '80s represented a brief high in the otherwise bleak 20th-century history of public art in Boston, thanks in part to ambitious art programs that accompanied the modernization of the country's oldest subway system, the MBTA. Harries made two works for the T, both a combination of the witty and the poignant. For one Red Line car, she sculpted a handprint into one of the metal poles that standees hold on to, suggesting someone clutching desperately in an effort not to keel over. Her Glove Cycle in the Porter Square station is a series of bronzes cast from real gloves that Harries collected. She had already done an installation, Victims, of gloves found after the blizzard of '78, and also a cast pile of gloves that, according to the distinguished New York critic Donald Kuspit, alluded to the clothing left behind by other victims - those at Nazi death camps. The Porter Square gloves, which initially strike many people as sly, have a darker side as well.

"The pieces that get me stuck in time are Asaroton and The Glove Cycle," Harries says. "I was a kid then. I've moved on."

Moving on and the passing of time have become themes in pieces both temporary and lasting. With her public art class at the Museum School, she staged a 1996 performance piece, Twelve Brides, that involved a group of women in thrift-shop gowns marching with excruciating slowness through Copley Square, headed toward Trinity Church. Their mesmerizing walk had the pace of a Robert Wilson play - and suggested a bevy of brides who would never make it to the altar.

Harries's new entrance for the Brooklyn Zoo is a series of permanent pieces about the passage of time - eight animals on an architectural scale, including a fluttery octopus archway and a snake eating a frog, all outlined in aluminum and planted with boxwood, which will take 20 years to fill in. She could have done a quickie with kudzu, but that wasn't the point. "Children will grow up with the piece, and bring their own children to see it," she says. "It's about experiencing time and change."

A mother herself - she and Heder have two daughters, 22-year-old Sian and 15-year-old Thyra - Harries has a history of making magical works that are child-oriented but never cloying. For two elementary schools and the public library in the town of Norfolk, 20 miles southwest of Boston, Harries recycled thousands of surplus books into giant thrones where the town's most avid young readers are honored annually by having their pictures taken sitting in the chairs. For Boston's Mission Hill, she created Ben's Circular Tower, a granite storytelling area that memorializes a child from the neighborhood who died and also alludes to the Welsh castles of Harries's youth.

Norfolk and Mission Hill aren't wealthy places, or known for their artistic vitality. But all it takes is a determined activist to get a visionary project going. In Norfolk, it was Shirley Boulay, a town resident who had trained as an art historian and currently heads the Norfolk Arts Council and who helped raise funding for the chairs. "They're actually controversial," Boulay says. "I see them as celebratory and beautiful. But some people think it was a waste of money, or that it's a crime to cut up books. This is a conventional, white-bread town. There are people here who would have preferred the little duckies on Boston Common. But the kids love the chairs - so much they climb on them and pick at them. That's both tough on them and a tribute. We're working on a maintenance program. The chairs are like books: After a dozen people read a book, it gets shabby."

Boulay is currently contemplating raising the money and support for an outdoor piece by Harries. "Mags is making a difference here in Norfolk," she says. "She's got people here talking about art, and that's a good thing."

The Harries/Heder Collaborative Inc. is headquartered in a handsome old barn-red building in a quiet enclave just off Porter Square in Cambridge. The studio was once a storage facility for the old Porter House Hotel, home of the Porter House steak, says Harries, who is deeply interested in local history even when she's not making a public art piece for the locale.

The "clean," office, space is on the second floor that Harries and Heder added five years ago. Downstairs is the "dirty" working space, home to models, artifacts, and a 250-pound ball of string perched precariously on a cart, a relic of Winding Down the River, an interactive piece performed by Harries and a team of volunteers during the 1997 and '98 Cambridge River Festivals. The participants wound 78.4 miles of string, equal to the length of the Charles, which took over 40 hours each year. The string threaded its way from giant riverside spools through five elevated towers spanning 300 feet, after which the winding began, another of Harries's meditations on the passage of time. "We had no idea how long it would take," she says. When night fell, the volunteers disappeared, leaving Harries to sit and wind alone. "It wasn't the least bit scary," she says. "No one would mug someone crazy enough to wind string all night."

To tell the entire saga of another Cambridge project that Harries and Heder are currently working on, at the Fresh Pond Reservation, would take as long as winding all that string. Here's the short form. In 1988, Tufts University commissioned Harries to design a sculptural installation for its new Aidekman Arts Center; she came up with a prow-shaped balcony over a prow-shaped pool. The project fizzled along with the university's commitment to it. Harries recycled the prow idea in the Fresh Pond project, where it was going to be a lookout over a waterfall the artists wanted to create by cutting a pipe that feeds the pond, thus creating consciousness that the water comes from somewhere. That idea was scratched after acrimonious debate and opposition from some community members to anything man-made on Fresh Pond's patch of nature. "The attacks were amazing," says Heder. "The irony is, the environment they're protecting was woods that were chopped down 20 years ago."

The Fresh Pond project, meanwhile, has dragged on for four years, and Harries and Heder have redesigned it four times. In the final, city-approved version, the sculpture is moved to the perimeter of the reservation, and will be both inside and close to the new waterworks building. The floor will be a giant map of the city's water pipes and water sources. A 10-foot glass tower will symbolize the Belmont reservoir that actually supplies Cambridge's water. When people drink from a bronze fountain in the form of a squirting arc, located outside the building, they'll be able to look through a huge Palladian window and see the water in the tower bubble. When they turn in the opposite direction, they'll see an exposed bronze pipe - not the real, water-bearing, one Harries and Heder wanted to reveal, but one the same size. The ensemble, as linear and formal as a miniature Champs-Elysees, culminates with a Moon Gate framing a view of Fresh Pond.

"We wouldn't have kept going with the Fresh Pond project if we didn't live in Cambridge," says Harries. "By now, it's home. I like walking to Harvard Square. And because Lajos is a refugee, it's important to him to stay in one place.

"We work in cities where we wouldn't want to live," adds Heder, "but they're cities that work hard on amenities and attractions. People in Boston think it's already such a desirable place, they don't have to do anything except let developers develop. The whole South Boston development plan has no public art provision. The new $700 million convention center has no art program, which would be unthinkable in other cities."

"Visitors to Boston are always asking me what public art they should see," says Harries. "And it's hard to think of much of anything."

Still, for public artists, Boston seems a desirable base for reasons ranging from family ties to educational institutions to airline connections. A clutch of nationally important public artists are based here, including Ralph Helmick and Stuart Schechter, who currently have major projects in six US cities, and Ellen Driscoll, who has recently completed a much-praised series of 13 mosaic murals for New York's Grand Central Terminal North. Artists of this caliber are more likely to work in other cities than here, largely because of indifference to public art from both Boston and Massachusetts authorities.

Meanwhile, Harries's career is rippling outward like the rings on that "burping" Florida pond. While Harries, Heder, and I consume a takeout lunch of potato soup in their studio, a call comes from Cardiff. She's been chosen as one of five artists to work on the Wales Millennium Centre, a new cultural complex that's a mini version of New York's Lincoln Center. The invitation, to create a vast concourse floor, came after the Cardiff people saw photos of the Louisville project. Harries and Heder are reaching the level where they don't enter many open competitions anymore; usually, they're invited to submit ideas. This is Harries's first major international project. And it's right by the waterfront.