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| From the Car Photo: Angela M. Counts |
At the prompting of my Mexico Art History professor, Eulogio Guzman, my classmates and I at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts were given the task of documenting the city of Boston via a weekly journal. No other specifications were given and thus a range of possibilities were available. It occurred to me that a blog would give me the opportunity to virtually see the city on the go and in some cases document it from my car, as I spend a good portion of my days driving around Boston and cities in the vicinity.
Boston Metro Journal A-Z is a weekly blog that I started with the first entry on February 9, 2011. Perhaps one of the most important tasks was to conceptualize the blog for the readers – whom I hoped would extend beyond my professor and myself.
The blog in its entirety is a collection of photos, observations, poems, lists, links, and a film excerpt that covers a period of 2-½ months. The journal’s description at the top of the blog was designed to give readers an idea of its scope and conception:
“Each week, I look at the City of Boston through new eyes. Like the photographic dictionary -- ABC DF: Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City -- I use the Spanish and English alphabet each week to examine the experience of the city more deeply. I use the term ‘city’ to broadly mean those places literally, figuratively and imaginatively that surround Boston.”
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| Blue Cafe Photo: Angela M. Counts |
The weekly letters were assigned by the class syllabus and did not follow the order of the alphabet. In preparing the blog in its final installment, I decided to leave the entries in their weekly order to give the reader the feel of the blog from its end point, to the beginning. Of course with a blog, the navigation is one’s own.
Through this experience I’ve been able to learn about the city’s buried “treasures,” people like Phillis Wheatley the former slave buried in the Granary Burying Ground in downtown Boston, who rose to prominence in her short but brilliant life, as well as the man I encountered in the Boston Public Library over the turnstile of books for immigrants learning English as a second language.
While this was a class-inspired project, it took on a life of its own. In fact, a section of the blog was selected for a group exhibition, “Whistling Past the Freedom Trail”, a collaboration between the Museum of Fine Arts’ Library Exhibit and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:
“Most often, place applies to our own ‘local’—entwined with personal memory, known or unknown histories, marks made in the land that provoke and evoke. Places latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there.” (from co-curators, Leah Craig and Erik Benjamins exhibition description)
This description of the show aptly described what this project has been for me, an excavation as much as an exploration of myself within the city and the city within me, as it were – a dialectical relationship, an ongoing relationship.
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| The Bags Photo: Angela M. Counts |
Each person and each city is a complicated soul onto itself. And each has a story to tell.
It has been a gift and pleasure to tell my story – how as a returning student, commuting to and from fine arts school, enjoying the city on weekends, and even documenting performance art on the T for a school project, I came to know the city of Boston and its environs, her history, her present, and her inhabitants a little be more fully, and in doing so learned a great deal about myself.
I feel better for it and hope that you the reader will glean from the readings here, something of your own relationship to the city, whether it is Boston, New York, Mexico, or a small town.
(Originally posted May 2011. Postscript: to date, there have been over 2,700 page views. Thank you for reading!)
It has been a gift and pleasure to tell my story – how as a returning student, commuting to and from fine arts school, enjoying the city on weekends, and even documenting performance art on the T for a school project, I came to know the city of Boston and its environs, her history, her present, and her inhabitants a little be more fully, and in doing so learned a great deal about myself.
I feel better for it and hope that you the reader will glean from the readings here, something of your own relationship to the city, whether it is Boston, New York, Mexico, or a small town.
(Originally posted May 2011. Postscript: to date, there have been over 2,700 page views. Thank you for reading!)
