Painting a Brighter Community

The phrase “EVERYONE IS PRICELESS,” in all-capitalized letters, graces the murals on Bow Street behind Tommy’s House of Pizza and Tommy’s Value. The pastel yellow background and the spontaneous strokes of paint that border the brick wall add a note of whimsy to the sweeping proclamation. The big block font looks like someone took a giant rubber stamp and, while passing by the industrial-sized trashcans one day, decided to label the walls behind them with a self-esteem booster.

But like the few surviving nooks and crannies in Cambridge, the wall has a tagged past. Around this time a year ago, graffiti in psychedelic swirls and dark hues plastered the walls. Add to the picture some trashcans and a few stray cats that perpetually inhabit them and you have a wholly depressing image. But Sarah L. Gogel ’06, founder of Art Squatters, saw something entirely different. She envisioned a public art space behind the graffiti. While painting over the lonely names painted in colors of bruise, Gogel hoped a community between Harvard students and local residents would form to experience art as a unifying process.

Community is indeed the focal point of Art Squatters, which bases its motto upon Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community.” The group hopes to foster stronger bonds between Harvard and its community through all-inclusive art projects, according to Gogel. One way to do this is through seeking a “safe space” for creating and displaying art outside of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department, says Gogel.

Already, the group boasts 65 members subscribing to its Yahoo! Group mailing list, with the breakdown between Harvard students and the members of the larger Cambridge and Boston communities at around half-and-half.

“The Art Squatters are people who see art as a necessity and exchange, not a luxury housed in galleries,” Art Squatter Amar C. Bakshi ’05 says.

For passersby on Bow Street, the murals have become as much a part of the urban landscape as the Tommy’s stores. But they are unfinished—the train emanating from the giant washing machine in one of the panels is empty. The white tiles in another panel are left blank.

Come this Arts First weekend, these will change as the Art Squatters people the trains and paint in the tiles. According to Gogel, Art Squatters will have free paintbrush and paint ready for anyone looking to leave their mark on the wall. Already, the proposition has drawn the attention of nostalgic seniors.

“The project is appealing to seniors because they are looking to leave their marks in Cambridge,” Gogel says.

Apolitical marks, that is. According to Gogel, the owner of the walls on which the murals are painted supports artistic expression but not political statements. Gogel refrains from identifying the owner out of respect for the owner’s wish for anonymity. But a few tiles in one of the panels, which Gogel calls a “community quilt” because the panel is divvied up into many small tiles to allow for individual expression, already sport a mixture of art and politics.

The boundary between art and politics seems hard to control. According to Gogel, when the words “ISRAEL” appeared as the motif of one tile, Art Squatters painted “Palestine” next to it to neutralize the political intonation. But a similar neutralizer for a tile that reads “NO WAR” is nowhere to be found.

“We have to cover it up by Arts First because the owner has been asking for a long time that we do so,” says Gogel. She adds that “As long as the image is visual, it’s ok.”

This explains the panoply of national flags in the “community quilts.” Gogel stresses, though, that the Art Squatters would like to incorporate as many viewpoints as possible despite the “bit of constraint from the owner.”

“We want to be as respectful of ideas as possible and provoke without offending,” says Gogel. “There’s no avoidance of public art, so the many voices in a community mural mitigate the problem by balancing viewpoints.”

The murals are the Art Squatters’ first community art project, and they have already encouraged bonding with its across-the-wall neighbors, the Tommy’s stores. Gogel describes the mutually beneficial relationship in organic terms.

“Now we have a symbiosis with Tommy’s. We got money from the Undergraduate Council to buy food from there, and the people from Tommy’s Value lent us their basement to store our paint,” says Gogel. “We get along really, really well.”

However, this year Art Squatters will not be able to use the same space to store paints due to fire hazard concerns. “The landlord [of Tommy’s Value], Janet, decided that we shouldn’t keep any more paints where we had stored them last year due to fire hazards,” Gogel says

Art Squatters hope that the new owner of Tommy’s Value, whom the group will meet this week, will allow paints to be stored in a locked area of the basement, according to Gogel.

Tash Chamal, who works at Tommy’s Value, agrees that the relationship between the store and the Art Squatters is a good one and says the Art Squatters are “very friendly.” When prodded for his favorite painted tile, he jumps from his cashier counter and slips through the back door to take a better look.

“There are some funny ones,” says Chamal with a big grin. “Like that elephant one. What’s the point?”

Some students, and not just those in Art Squatters, agree that the compatibility between Art Squatters and Tommy’s is apparent. John P. Blickstead ’06 looks out the Adams Dining Hall window at the murals across the street and sees what to him is a match between the murals and the community.

“I like them there, perfect complement to the perfect pizza,” says Blickstead. “Inside, the taste is explosive and outside, the colors are explosive.”

—Staff writer Yingzhen Zhang can be reached at zhang9@fas.harvard.edu.