David Bakalar

Three of Bakalar’s sculptures, We!, The Dance, and Life Force IV grace Boston University’s Fenway Campus. A resident of Boston, Bakalar received a PhD in Physics from MIT in 1951. Bakalar began his career as a sculptor at the age of 62 after being encouraged by the artist George Segal. The artist explores organic and geometric forms through the materials stone and metal. In addition to those on BU’s campus, Bakalar’s sculptures can be found locally on MIT’s campus, in the collection of Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston’s Federal Reserve Bank, and Brandeis University. Of his work, Bakalar states “I’ve always been fascinated by the codes and molecules that are the Life Force. My sculptures…abstractly reflect the complexity of this force and our common identity with all of nature.”

Map It: We! | Map It: The Dance | Map It: Life Force IV

Sergio Castillo

Three of Castillo’s sculptures can be found across BU’s campus: Free at Last on Marsh Plaza, Earth Orbit in the lobby of Questrom School of Business, and Explosions located on the plaza in front of 590 Commonwealth Avenue. Known for creating works that attempt to harness explosive and powerful energy, Castillo worked in direct metal sculpture, a process he discovered in Italy in 1957. Born in Santiago, Chile, Castillo split his time between Boston, Chile, and Spain. The artist came to Boston to work on Free at Last, a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., but stayed to teach sculpture at Boston University.

Free at Last is the first memorial to Dr. King in the United States. The 20-foot-high sculpture, consisting of a mass of birds attempting to take flight, is meant to evoke the famous closing lines, “free at last!” of King’s great “I have a dream speech.” The sculpture considers the relationship of the individual to the collective. There are 50 inter-connected bird forms to connote the 50 states. Up close, each individual bird attempts to be airborne, while from a distance the flock aligns into a singular large bird striving towards the sky.

The potency yielded by Castillo’s handling of materials and his use of dynamic forms can also be seen in his work Explosions. Arthur Metcalf, a physicist and former chairman of the Board of Trustees at Boston University purchased the work for the University, and gave the sculpture its evocative title—seeing the work as an imaginative simulation of the collision of electrons.

Map It: Free at Last | Map It: Explosions | Map It: Earth Orbit

Charles J. Connick

Take a virtual tour of BU’s Marsh Chapel here.

Map It: Marsh Chapel

Carson Fox

Fox’s Blue-Green Brainbow is made from over 13,500 individual pieces of cast resin. This work, made specifically for the Kilichand Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering is inspired by the “brainbow” technique, which allows researchers to illuminate braincells. While in this case, Fox’s inspiration can be found within the human body, much of the Brooklyn-based artist’s work is influenced by complex forms found in nature such as coral and ice.

Map It: Blue-Green Brainbow

Russell Jacques

Jacques received his BFA from Boston University and designs his outdoor sculptures as integrative to the spaces they inhabit, thinking of his sculptures as a soothing and ethereal contrast to the landscape. Most of his work is done in various combinations of stainless steel and bronze. On his sculpture, Jacques says “I consistently try to attain a simple elegance in each composition with an emphasis on thick-thin line variation synthesized with rhythmic and interesting shapes.”

Map It: Point Counterpoint

Armand le Montagne

Armand Le Montagne is best recognized for his life-sized wood and bronze sculptures, often of important sports personalities. In addition to The Golden Greek, his work can be found at the Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York and the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, as well as the New England Sports Museum, in Boston, Massachusetts. In honor of Harry Agganis, a 1954 graduate of Boston University and celebrated student athlete, The Golden Greek is inscribed with the phrases “always excel” and “a sound mind in a healthy body.”

Map It: The Golden Greek

Gregg LeFevre

Two works by Gregg LeFevre can be found on BU’s campus. Both use epoxy over ferrocement, and rely on abstract, organic, and curvilinear forms as well as a singular color to create bold, visually striking pieces. LeFevre has created over 120 site specific public artworks and seeks to contribute to “the unique personality of a place.” A current resident of New York City, LeFevre has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and an award for excellence in design by the Arts Commission of the City of New York.

Map It: LeFevre – Untitled 775 | Map It: LeFevre – Untitled BSR

Edward Monti

Two granite fountains sculpted by Monti can be found on BU’s campus. Monti came from a multi-generational family of Italian stone workers and pioneered a thermal sculpting technique in the 1960s, which uses flame lances, or torches, to cut through huge blocks of granite in quarries. Monti began his career by making traditional memorial sculptures, but found that work “boring,” and soon began to take inspiration from his own imagination. His monumental fountains and sculptures can be found throughout New England. In addition to Boston University, his work is also at Quincy’s Veterans Memorial Stadium and on the campus of Stonehill College in Easton, MA. The sculpture Windows is made from Quincy granite harvested from the Granite Rail Quarry and the base is made from Quincy granite harvested from the Swingles Quarry.

The jack-o-lantern is made from Stony Creek granite from Branford, CT. A massively powerful 6,000F liquid O2 and diesel torch was used to shape and subsequently hollow out the oversized gourde. Its playfulness and charm reflect the sculptor’s own personality and offer a different side to his normally larger and somewhat more serious water features and Bauhaus sculptures. When it first came to campus it was placed in a pocket park on BSR where it stayed until being moved to its current location behind the stands at Nickerson Field.

Map It: Fountain | Map It: Untitled

Hugh O’Donnell

O’Donnell was Professor of Painting in Boston University School of Visual Arts for three decades beginning 1996. He has been making digital prints since 1993. First Light, a backlit digital transparency, was commissioned by the Photonics Center in 1998. O’Donnell views the ability of technical invention to push our physical limitations as part of the creative process, and approaches his digital works much in the same way he does his paintings.

However, he says, “I did not want it to imitate painting methodology. I wanted the instrument of the computer to come through. With digital media ideally, I want my work to be like that of a singer—even an unaccompanied singer- being asked to make an instrumental version of a song originated by humming the tune in your head…it’s in painting that I get all my melodies, but I love the collaboration of extended production in theater, in architecture – or anything else promising to amplify my voice.”

Map It: First Light

Virgil Oertle

The new Rhett bench, installed in 2019, is becoming one of the most popular spots on campus. Donated by the BU Alumni Council, Rhett was designed by sculptor Virgil Oertle and is between the BU Beach and the Alan and Sherry Leventhal Admissions Center. A graduate of Lyme Academy College of Fine Art, and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Virgil Oertle has created unique sculptures of all shapes, sizes and for many purposes. In 2013 he began to focus on unique, branded, mascot benches and sitting areas for fans to interact with the sculptures. There was something about his designs that made the tributes a destination point. His concepts perfectly incorporate the story and character of the parent organization, and are an enduring tribute to each of our beloved masked friends.

Map It: Rhett Bench

Briene Rosner and Holland Dieringer

Visual Entanglements is the result of collaboration for course AR521, Site Specific Art taught by Hugh O’Donnell. The work fuses images collected from research groups in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology Departments at Boston University and is designed to show links between sciences and arts as well as the relationship to the natural world.

Map It: Visual Entanglements

Frank Smullin

Smullin worked in sculpture, vector analysis, and computer-aided sculpture before his untimely death in 1983. Smullin’s residencies between 1979-1980 at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Sculpture Space, in Utica, New York enabled him to make large-scale works. His sculptures often celebrated the simple knot, favoring a “simple framework” within which he could expand metaphorically. Alongside his sculpture, Smullin developed and relied on a computer program to help produce his works.  As seen in his work Labyrinth of a Datalist on BU’s campus, Smullin ties large, steel columns in great, tense knots. Of his work, Lawrence Fane writes, “the pipes could squeeze and pull, constrict the space passing through them, and generate a sense of contained and bursting energy.”

Map It: Labyrinth of Datalist

Caution: Cultural Emergency – Erin Genia (2021)

Indigenous artist Erin Genia, a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, comes to Boston University with an installation that explores the concept of cultural emergency, which was developed during her artist residency with the City of Boston’s Office of Emergency management. Genia created the  Cultural Emergency Response framework to examine and implicate cultural roots of a vast array of interconnected and existential crises using methods and materials of emergency management, translated through a critical Dakota lens.

The installation consists of an earthen sculpture of the water monster, Unktehi, that emerges from the ground, showing the layers of fill beneath our feet, illustrating the relevance of ancient and ever-present stories that shape peoples’ relationships to land, water and life systems. A flag bearing the Morningstar, powerful Dakota iconography illustrated in fluorescent colors, flies above to draw attention to the land as a cultural emergency ground zero site.

During Boston’s rise as a colonial city, as Indigenous people were being ethnically cleansed from this land, the site Boston University occupies – a salt marsh and estuary of the Quinobequin river system – was being filled in to make way for development by settlers.

As the threat of impending sea level rise grows as climate change advances, this work explores the impacts of colonialism on the present moment. What are the harmful philosophies that drive the systems, institutions and individual behaviors of people that were set into motion by colonization? And, what can we do to address our current state of cultural emergency?

This project was supported by a Transformative Public Art grant from the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture.

Indigenous Voices Speak Out at BU

Arts Initiative series highlights perspectives that are too often erased

Read More

Hostile Terrain 94 (2020/2021)

Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94) is a participatory art exhibition organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), and brought to Boston University by the College of Arts & Sciences and the BU Arts Initiative, with support from Latin American Studies, the College of General Studies, BU History Department, BU Archaeology Department, and the BU Hub. The exhibition illuminates the humanitarian crisis occurring at the United States’ border, a crisis that has claimed over 3,200 lives since the 1990s and continues to do so each and every day. The installation was on display in the George Sherman Union, 2nd Floor landing from September 3 through December 2020.

Re-Birth – Sheila Pree Bright (2020)

Sheila Pree Bright comes to Boston University with an installation of her work titled Re-Birth in the Boston University Mugar Memorial Library from October to December 2020. Re-Birth, timed to coincide with the 2020 presidential election, addresses themes of equity and access; particularly concepts related to the democratic process, voting rights, institutional change, racism, and equitable representation in keeping with the pedagogical mission of Boston University Libraries. This installation was conceptualized through conversations with BU community and research within the BU Libraries collections. The installation consists of oversized photographic prints of young women from Pree Bright’s 2008 series Young Americans, overlaid with video projection of text taken from archival research and Boston University student interviews.

Francisco Alarcon (2019)

Alarcon was the 2019 Computational Artist in Residence for BU Spark!, a collaboration between the BU Arts Initiative, Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, BU Spark!, Innovate@BU, School of Visual Arts, and the College of Fine Arts. The residency was immersive, providing opportunities for both faculty and students to explore the creative process with and around computational science. Alarcon is a practicing artist, and has been trained in both architecture and as a civil engineer.  During his residency, Alarcon’s work could be temporarily found in the George Sherman Union, the Hariri Institute, and in the Rajen Kilichand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering Lobby. Learn more about Alarcon’s residency here. 

FDA Spoon – Domenic Esposito (2019)

FDA Spoon is one of four spoons created by Esposito, an artist and activist, as a protest intended to bring awareness to the opioid epidemic and spur accountability among doctors and pharmaceutical companies who manufacture and prescribe the drug. Since first installing the initial spoon (Purdue Spoon) in June 2018 in front of Purdue Pharma in Stamford, CT, he has produced new editions of the sculpture. The FDA Spoon, which was on view on BU’s George Sherman Union Plaza, was first placed in front of the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, DC, as part of a larger protest in April 2019 against what opioid activists perceive to be government inaction. This was the sculpture’s first installation on a university campus and was installed at BU from October 12th to 24th, 2019. You can learn more about bringing the FDA Spoon to campus here. 

The Opioid Spoon Project at Boston University was initiated by Gregory Williams, Associate Professor, Department of History of Art & Architecture, to coincide with his Fall History of Art & Architecture course, “Contemporary Art, Politics, and Activism.”

Alexander Golob (2013)

The title of Alexander Golob’s (CFA’16) mural, Kaleidoscope, can be seen as a tool– a way of viewing BU’s campus. Through its  use of angular, faceting shapes and wide-ranging colors, the work depicts easy to recognize buildings and landmarks from BU’s campus along Commonwealth Avenue. The mural, located in the parking lot of 855 Commonwealth Avenue at the College of Fine Arts, was co-sponsored by the BU Arts initiative. Public input was a part of the mural’s conception, with community meetings and student government playing a role in the work’s proposal and execution.