Jamaica Plain Branch / BCYF Curtis Hall public art project

This narrative was written by artist Matthew Hinçman.

The lawn at the municipal campus that includes the Jamaica Plain Branch of the Boston Public Library and the BCYF Curtis Hall Community Center has been altered with a sculptural intervention. A series of low brick walls now zig-zag across the lawn on an approximate north-south axis. Some of the walls are capped with brightly colored glazed bricks, while others are more conventionally capped with slabs of granite. Separate from the walls, five chairs inhabit the lawn. The chairs take their form from ubiquitous aluminum tube, vinyl webbed folding chairs found in millions of backyards and lawns. Yet these chairs are constructed of bronze - sculptures of chairs - immortalizing this very familiar, close-to-home piece of furniture. 

Passersby are welcomed into the site via the newly created gate off the South Street sidewalk, where a section of the 150’ iron fence and granite curb has been removed. 

This sculptural intervention provides audiences with a myriad of ways to engage with the work, and resists a didactic and/or singular interpretation. A refined level of craft and material use coupled with the ubiquity of the forms afford viewers multiple vantage points with which to enter into dialogue with the work, and to construct meaning and or narratives. Themes of history, community, and monuments may inform a viewer's interpretation. 

• Wythe: A wythe is a continuous vertical section of masonry one unit in thickness. A wythe may be independent of, or interlocked with, the adjoining wythe(s). 
• Web: A web is something formed by or as if by weaving or interweaving; an intricate set or pattern of circumstances, facts, etc.