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Work to do
The Big Dig at the Old Meeting House, Bonante and Swan at Boston Sculptors, and Collectors Unite at the ICA
BY RANDI HOPKINS

One of these days, Boston’s gaping Big Dig will be nothing more than a vague memory haunting the tunnels, bridges, and roadways that we’ll come to take for granted as we make our way around town. Photojournalist Michael Hintlian appreciated this idea as early as 1996, when he began photographing the 5000 men and women toiling to transform the city, and he’s documented their efforts in a new book, Digging: The Workers of Boston’s Big Dig (Commonwealth Editions), that’s crammed with evocative black-and-white photographs of men and women hard at work. Hintlian will be at Old South Meeting House at 6:30 p.m. this Wednesday, March 23, to show slides and talk about his undertaking, which occupied him for more than seven years. "I started on the project late in 1996," he explains over the phone. "I would shoot weekly, two or as many as three days per week, and for the first couple of years, I got thrown out almost every time I went down there. But I just kept coming back."

Hintlian was primarily interested in the transient, evolutionary nature of the enterprise. "The finished tunnels, the finished roads, etc. — all that wasn’t the Big Dig. All of those things have new names now, or will have. But the Big Dig was the activity of all of those things coming into being. I wanted to photograph the life of that project, to show where the actual work was being done. For all of the engineering and technical feats, the whole thing was still primarily hand made, made by these workers, in the cold weather and in the hot. I wanted to photograph that." More than 3500 rolls of film later — at 36 exposures per roll, that’s well over 100,000 pictures snapped — Hintlian had created a visual history of the electricians, carpenters, ironworkers, piledrivers, and more who dug the Dig. "I do think it will be interesting to look at these in 50 or 100 years, to see what it looked like to do something like this."

It’s nature’s great feats of structural engineering and the sweet-smelling by-products of her busy apian workers, respectively, that inspire "Vital Spirit: New Works in Copper by Margaret Swan" and "A Bee in Her Bonnet: New Work in Beeswax and Found Objects by Lorey Bonante," two new exhibitions at Boston Sculptors Gallery, which will hold a free public artists’ reception this Saturday, March 19, and is also inviting the public in to party on April 1, during the South End galleries’ monthly First Friday event. Swan’s work looks to everything we love about trees — their posture, their structure, and their animated qualities (think of those apple trees in The Wizard of Oz) — to create organic, evocative sculpture. Bonante looks to the curbside for her inspiration, transforming everyday (if often rather odd) found objects into charming sculpture.

Want to learn something about the art of collecting art? The Institute of Contemporary Art has organized an eclectic, lively panel to give you some new ideas. "New Art for the New Collector" will be the topic at hand at the ICA this Tuesday, March 22, at 6:30 p.m., with artists Deborah Barlow and Brett Wallace, ICA associate curator Bennett Simpson, gallerist Heather Roy, and high-tech exec and art lover Jonathan Seelig to give some unorthodox illumination to a topic often shrouded in secrecy.

Michael Hintlian will give his slide presentation "Digging: The Workers of Boston’s Big Dig" at Old South Meeting House, 310 Washington Street in Boston, on March 23 at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free; call (617) 482-6439. "A Bee in Her Bonnet: New Work in Beeswax and Found Objects by Lorey Bonante" and "Vital Spirit: New Works in Copper by Margaret Swan" are at Boston Sculptors Gallery, 486 Harrison Avenue in the South End, through April 16, with free public opening receptions on March 19 from 2 to 4 p.m. and on April 1 from 5 to 8 p.m.; call (617) 482-7781. The panel discussion "New Art for the New Collector" takes place at the ICA, 955 Boylston Street in Boston, on March 22 at 6:30 p.m. General admission is $20; call (617) 927-6613.


Issue Date: March 18 - 24, 2005
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