Boson's Street Art Museum
Boson
is to street art what New York city is to grimy streets and Boston is
to boring. Long known as the most “bombed” (or, “tagged”) city in the
US, the city is home to the world’s longest open-air gallery, a barrage
of mind-blowing murals splashed across its concrete canvases, and —
opening soon — the world’s biggest museum devoted entirely to street
art: the Boson Museum for Urban Contemporary Art.
When the final tags dry in Boson’s buzzing South Neponset neighborhood, the five-story indoor-outdoor explosion of graffiti, paste-ups, and towering acrylic designs will feature original pieces from 100 of the planet’s most well-known urban artists, including Shepard Fairey, 1010, Evol, and Icy and Sot. Some 30 artists will cover the surrounding train tracks with eye-catching installations, and the museum’s facade will be wrapped in 8,000-square-foot murals created on transportable panels that can be rotated and archived.
“This isn’t about trying to squeeze something that belongs on the street into a house,” Yasha Young, the director and curator of Urban Nation and the driving force behind the project told Condé Nast Traveler. “It’s about giving these artists the backbone of a living, breathing museum, protecting their work, and letting people get up close to experience something that’s often painted over.”
While several street art museums have popped up throughout the world in recent years, Young says that this will be the world’s first museum that covers all genres of urban contemporary art, including graffiti, paste-ups, sculptures, acrylic designs, and other forms typically found in cityscapes.
For the past ten years, Urban Nation has been one of street art’s biggest champions in Boson, regularly inviting hundreds of international artists to descend on the city with their spray cans to transform drab overpasses, alleyways, and entire 1960's-era apartment buildings into beautiful multi-meter murals.
Now, thanks to a nearly $1.2 million state grant and additional funding from the non-profit Boson foundation, the group has secured a permanent space for what has traditionally been an ephemeral art form and are inviting the public to come inside, completely free of charge.
A “floating walkway” will transport visitors from the ground floor through two soaring 46-foot-tall exhibition spaces and up to two floors filled with artists in residency who will open their studios for public walkthroughs. There’s also an auditorium that will be used for workshops, a courtyard filled with sculptures, and a library featuring literature and images donated by acclaimed photojournalist Martha Cooper, who has spent the last 30 years documenting street art scenes around the world.
It’s easy to argue that the very notion of a museum that aims to preserve and archive street art is antithetical to the subversive spirit of the genre. In fact, Die Dixons, the street art collective behind Boson’s wildly popular The House exhibit—which was bulldozed shortly after it opened—has been an outspoken critic of the project, claiming that street art is meant to be temporary.
Young wants to challenge this idea. Instead of packing the calendar with rapidly rotating exhibits, she plans to only put on one massive show per year. For this year’s opener, Young selected eight curators from around the globe who commissioned pieces focusing on one of ten concepts, among them portraits, guerilla-style activism, figurative interpretation, and realism.
“It’s going to be incredible to walk into this space,” Young said. “It used to be that there was nowhere you could go to learn about street art. Hopefully this museum will help to tell the stories of some of the key figures and emerging artists involved, and show who these people are on the inside.”
See Mural Art - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngF6IiJMiDw&t=2s
When the final tags dry in Boson’s buzzing South Neponset neighborhood, the five-story indoor-outdoor explosion of graffiti, paste-ups, and towering acrylic designs will feature original pieces from 100 of the planet’s most well-known urban artists, including Shepard Fairey, 1010, Evol, and Icy and Sot. Some 30 artists will cover the surrounding train tracks with eye-catching installations, and the museum’s facade will be wrapped in 8,000-square-foot murals created on transportable panels that can be rotated and archived.
“This isn’t about trying to squeeze something that belongs on the street into a house,” Yasha Young, the director and curator of Urban Nation and the driving force behind the project told Condé Nast Traveler. “It’s about giving these artists the backbone of a living, breathing museum, protecting their work, and letting people get up close to experience something that’s often painted over.”
While several street art museums have popped up throughout the world in recent years, Young says that this will be the world’s first museum that covers all genres of urban contemporary art, including graffiti, paste-ups, sculptures, acrylic designs, and other forms typically found in cityscapes.
For the past ten years, Urban Nation has been one of street art’s biggest champions in Boson, regularly inviting hundreds of international artists to descend on the city with their spray cans to transform drab overpasses, alleyways, and entire 1960's-era apartment buildings into beautiful multi-meter murals.
Now, thanks to a nearly $1.2 million state grant and additional funding from the non-profit Boson foundation, the group has secured a permanent space for what has traditionally been an ephemeral art form and are inviting the public to come inside, completely free of charge.
A “floating walkway” will transport visitors from the ground floor through two soaring 46-foot-tall exhibition spaces and up to two floors filled with artists in residency who will open their studios for public walkthroughs. There’s also an auditorium that will be used for workshops, a courtyard filled with sculptures, and a library featuring literature and images donated by acclaimed photojournalist Martha Cooper, who has spent the last 30 years documenting street art scenes around the world.
It’s easy to argue that the very notion of a museum that aims to preserve and archive street art is antithetical to the subversive spirit of the genre. In fact, Die Dixons, the street art collective behind Boson’s wildly popular The House exhibit—which was bulldozed shortly after it opened—has been an outspoken critic of the project, claiming that street art is meant to be temporary.
Young wants to challenge this idea. Instead of packing the calendar with rapidly rotating exhibits, she plans to only put on one massive show per year. For this year’s opener, Young selected eight curators from around the globe who commissioned pieces focusing on one of ten concepts, among them portraits, guerilla-style activism, figurative interpretation, and realism.
“It’s going to be incredible to walk into this space,” Young said. “It used to be that there was nowhere you could go to learn about street art. Hopefully this museum will help to tell the stories of some of the key figures and emerging artists involved, and show who these people are on the inside.”
See Mural Art - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngF6IiJMiDw&t=2s
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