By Mark Favermann

Almost immediately, this now quarter-century-old program proved to be a wonderful merger of art and environment, creativity and nature.

Polarity by Zy Baer, 2021. Photo: Zy Baer

Today, a proliferation of exhibits and projects are taking on the topic of our damaged natural environment and the human suffering it causes. But long before conventional arts institutions decided to pay lip service to environmental concerns, Boston’s Fort Point Channel Arts Community (FPAC) was out front on the issue, creatively exploring the dire ramifications that will inevitably follow impending environmental degradation.

Beginning in the late ’90s, Boston Children’s Museum experimented with temporary “floating art” sculptural objects, setting several pieces out on the water for a month at a time. This innovative action set the template for the creation of work that — intermittently over the last quarter of a century — was inspired by our forebodings about a deteriorating environment and a society that was indifferent to this reality.

Founded in 1980, the Fort Point Arts Community (FPAC) is one of the largest art communities in New England. The Art Basin, a program dedicated to the making of temporary floating art, was instituted  after the publication of the City of Boston’s Fort Point Channel Waterfront Activation Plan of 2002. Each year, according to the public art section of the plan, temporary public art was slated to be installed with funding by the Friends of Fort Point Channel and others. From that point on, floating art within the Fort Point Channel became a cultural focal point of the community. Each artwork was best seen from the Congress Street Bridge or Summer Street Bridge.

Tropical Fort Point by Peter Agoos, 2013, Photo: Sylvia Stagg-Giuliano

Almost immediately, this now quarter-century-old program proved to be a wonderful merger of art and environment, creativity and nature. History, as it affected the present, was the spark for generating an ongoing conversation about our world — warts and all. That said, the floating artworks on display could be a bit uneven. At their worst, these public performance pieces were the products of a personal, occasionally physically awkward, vision; at their best, the projects have been profoundly sensitive visual statements about our environment, our heritage, and our basic humanity.

PYR98 and PYR2014 by Don Eyles. Photo: Don Eyles

Part of the initial group of pieces floated by the Children’s Museum was 1998’s PYRAMID98. Don Eyles’s seaborn structure reflected the cobblestone streets and lanes of old Boston. It was constructed of foam painted to look realistic. Dubbed the “godfather of floating art,” artist/engineer /author Eyles installed a similar artwork in 2014 in the Fort Point Channel called PYR2014. Once again, the idea was to evoke the area’s past. Eyles wanted to pay tribute to the old wharf districts and their rich histories while “playing tricks on people’s eyes’’ as they passed over the Summer Street Bridge. Given his background in engineering at NASA and MIT’s Draper Lab, Eyles’s artwork customarily blends art and science along with incorporating historical elements.

Paying homage to Fort Point’s former wool trade, artist Hilary Zelson created a 2015 installation called Who Wears Wool. It consisted of two sheep on top of a 12-foot-by-12-foot artificial turf–covered floating dock: the larger animal was 10 feet tall and 14 feet long; its lamb stood 5 feet tall. The artist layered EPS foam (polystyrene) to create the bodies of the sheep, which were bolted to the dock with an armature of steel. Packing peanuts were used to suggest the presence of wool. The artwork was covered with a white acrylic latex coating.

One of the most visually and politically stunning floating art pieces depicted humans. In 2016, a group of orange-colored figures in inner tubes could be seen floating in the channel. It was a stunning visualization of the environmentally impacted global migration and refugee crisis. Each full-size styrene figure represented 1 million of the refugees worldwide who were seeking a safe harbor. The artwork also alluded to Boston as a safe haven for immigrants. Entitled Safety Orange Swimmers (SOS), the piece was made up of figures painted the same orange color as life vests. It was meant to be a conversation piece and it succeeded; it was created by two Boston artists, Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier.

Concerned with the ratcheting up of the climate crisis, artist Zy Baer created the 2021 installation Polarity, which warned about the threat of rising sea levels. The floating corner of the rooftop of a building dramatized what the Seaport District — where the Fort Point neighborhood is located — would look like if no action is taken to slow down global warming. The artist hoped that, when viewers saw Polarity, they would have a visceral response, an emotional reaction that would trigger them to address the problem, personally and politically. Peter Agoos’s Tropical Fort Point was an earlier attempt (in 2013) to deal with the negative outcomes of global warming. The project was made up of 16 small Majesty Palms, floating on individual anchors in the basin. The artist saw the installation as a preview of the potential disruption of catastrophic sea-level rise.

Safety Orange Swimmers (SOS) by Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier, 2015. Photo: FPAC

Among the least artistically compelling artworks was Jeffrey Beck’s Create Coral Reef. The 2018 piece was made of reclaimed litter wrapped in a collage of fabric mâché, stacked more than 10 feet high on the hull of a deteriorating 22-foot-long sailboat. The result was a tangle of multicolored shapes, many of them cartoonish sea creatures, including a silly, nonindigenous giant orange octopus. This foolish ship wasn’t even seaworthy; it sank during its first week on the water and had to be “rescued” from the briny deep.

Another clunky piece: 2021’s FutureSHORELINE was  installed by Carolina Aragón. At best, this was an academic exercise (Aragón was a professor at UMass Amherst). The artwork purported to “measure” the increase in projected flooding caused by sea-level rise in Boston. It was a 10-foot-tall structure, fabricated from blue lobster cages (really, lobster cages?), that bobbed about in Fort Point Channel. The stacked cages were supposed to record sea rise over the coming three decades. Another weak example: 2008’s House of Cards by artist/designer Lisa Greenfield. A triangular arrangement of large playing cards on a floating platform was alleged to have had something to do with the fragility of artist housing in the city.

At the moment, the continuation of the floating art program is on hold because of a lack of funding and local construction issues. However, new proposed developments in the Seaport District have included — as part of their community mitigation obligation — monies for floating art. FPAC has restructured and strengthened itself this year, so the organization is posed to continue as a regional cultural asset with a major charge of an invaluable artistic mission — the continued creation of a buoyant, socially concerned program dedicated to the making of floating public art.

Mark Favermann is an urban designer specializing in strategic placemaking, civic branding, streetscapes, and retail settings. An award-winning public artist, he creates functional public art as civic design. The designer of the iconic Coolidge Corner Theatre Marquee, he is design consultant to the Massachusetts Downtown Initiative Program and since 2002 has been a design consultant to the Boston Red Sox. Writing about urbanism, architecture, design and fine arts, Mark is contributing editor of the Arts Fuse.