A naval yard is an unexpected place to see public art. That’s exactly why Now + There, an arts organization with the goal of using temporary public art to create change, felt it important to transform an empty lot in the Charlestown Navy Yard into something inspiring. “First of all, it’s an active Navy Yard,” says Kate Gilbert, the executive director of Now + There. “So you have the traces of the industrial complex there, as well as just open, vacant space.”

The federal site, operated by the National Park Service, isn’t far from the Tobin Bridge, which cuts through Charlestown. “And on one side of the bridge, you have one of the largest housing units in a very ethnically, racially, socioeconomically diverse population that historically has not felt comfortable coming over to the Navy Yard,” Gilbert points out.

For the next three years, Now + There, in partnership with the National Park Service and Boston Harbor Now, will be exploring Charlestown Navy Yard’s past, present and future, through a different lens. The new venture, Lot Lab, transforms the empty space by utilizing public art that is meant to facilitate public engagement around a certain theme. “Repair and mend, that’s the theme this year,” Gilbert says. “Repair and mend the space as well as social relations.

It’s a decided departure from Now + There’s previous temporary installations, which have lived across various neighborhoods in Boston. Now, the organization can utilize the Lot Lab to feature and highlight multiple artists making innovative and thought-provoking art that engages the public. Artist Kyle Browne is leading flag-making workshops with Charlestown youth while three inaugural artists — Boston-based Massiel Grullón and Sam Fields and international artists Ghada Amer — all navigate themes of identity and togetherness in their installations, which will be up through October 31.

Ghada Amer’s “Women’s Qualities” circles an empty part of the lot. Metal planters, welded into the shapes of letters spell out different attributes, which Amer sourced from surveys asking people what they feel the qualities of women are. “You can see that there are words like ‘resilient,’ ‘strong,’ ‘beautiful.’ It’s more of an idea of a woman who doesn’t exist or if she did, the world wouldn’t like her anyway.” While highlighting these “qualities,” Amer’s work also questions whether there are unrealistic expectations for women. The planters, filled with plants native to New England, are also commentaries on gardening, a form of labor usually associated with womanhood.

Boston native Grullón has painted a little bit of everything, from murals to leather jackets to banners. Her style often alchemizes visual languages from the 1970s with space-age design and graphic shapes. But for the Lot Lab, Grullón had to think horizontally, instead of a vertical approach, to artmaking for her installation “Knotical Waves.” Her canvas is not a wall or a structure — it’s what visitors walk on. ”I learned a lot from being able to do a design installation that large scale on the ground,” Grullón says. “You learn something new every day, you know. And that just helps you grow as an artist.”

Visitors walk on and around the gradated, blue lines that snake along the asphalt, colors that were inspired by Boston Harbor. Others can take photos in an arch made by the lines that jump up onto the side of a shed onsite. Grullón’s piece is having its intended impact. “So the whole installation is meant to be interactive because it kind of leads the viewer to walk around it and also be part of it,” she notes. “My work is very interactive because you can put yourself into it.” There is an additional hope that by following “Knotical Waves,” visitors will bump into each other and perhaps conversations will happen if they do.

For both Grullón and artist Sam Fields, this will be their most large-scale installations to date. Fields, who lectures part-time at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, is an artist who often works with fiber and fabric to make incisive commentary on the intricacies of women and labor. Nine current and former students of Fields have assisted her in weaving a massive wall hanging called “Stay.” It will be installed in July but for now, visitors can enjoy a preview of the artwork at the Lot Lab. “I was inspired by the older rigging in sailboats,” says Fields. “And so this ‘stay’ is what wraps around the mast and helps hold it up. And it is attached around what is called a ‘mice.’”

As Fields completed more and more research about the rope riggings, she considered the word “stay” and what it means to different groups of people. “What does it mean to stay? What does it mean to stay soft? What does it mean to stay here? What does it mean to stay out?” Fields says. “The piece is responding to the sight of the Navy Yard and its political, racial, colonial history, its economics of rope-making and physical location and the current climate of Charlestown.”

The 360 eyes (a permanent loop at the end of a rope) required to make “Stay” have been a particular site of inspiration for Fields. She and her assistants could simply knot rope together to complete the eyes. But instead, they’re splitting and mending rope together, a process called splicing that Fields found upon further research makes the rope stronger. “I thought the splice is a really beautiful analogy for community building in that a splice has multiple strands that have to come undone and then reconfigure themselves to be woven together.”

It’s a harkening back to the general theme of repair and mend that is the guiding light for this year at the Lot Lab. While Field’s work heavily engages the past and Grullón and Amer’s the present, Browne’s flag workshops look toward Charlestown’s future. Charlestown children of varying ages have already produced myriad flags. They flap in the wind, hoisted high on a flagpole. “The flags represent who they want to see as the future of Charlestown,” says Gilbert. Some reference existing flags of countries, like the yellow and blue of the Bahamas. Others invent completely new imagery.

The Lot Lab isn’t a static space. It’ll be activated by future partnerships with Company One Theatre and Illuminus Boston, an organization that centers the use of light-based immersive art. Now + There also plans to respond to the people who engage with the Lab as a site of art making. “Our philosophy around public art is that it evolves in relationship to people’s inputs,” she says. “We encourage people to come tell us what they think. There’s a QR code. We’re going to have public art ambassadors there at least twice a week. And, you know, we want to hear and be responsive and invite people to participate.”

Erin Shaw’s Protect Us From Ruin shows photographs of three shadowed women confined within wooden panels like church windows. Each panel is wrapped with colorful bands that both imprison and protect the figures. 

That dichotomy, between protection and captivity, represents the friction between Shaw’s identity as a member of the Chickasaw Nation and a Christian. ​“As long as I can remember, I’ve had one foot in two worlds,” she explains in an accompanying statement. ​“It’s been the work of my life to live in that tension as best I can, understand and reconcile it.”

The artwork is at the Knights of Columbus’s Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center at 1 State St., in its exhibition, ​“Altars of Reconciliation,” running now through Aug. 13. 

The traveling exhibition from Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA) explores the complicated history of Christianity among Native peoples and attempts to unify the contrasting — but not necessarily contradictory — identities of faith and culture. 

“Often framed as a ​‘Christian vs. Traditionalist’ dichotomy, the real story is not nearly so clear-cut,” reads a plaque at the entrance to the exhibit. Shaw and fellow artists Tony A. Tiger and Bobby C. Martin use the medium of art to express the relationship between religion and ethnicity.

Shaw uses wooden panels cut and arranged in cathedral structures along with exquisitely detailed paintings of naturalistic images. The combination brings together the church and the outside world, to show that holiness can be found in all aspects of life.

Many of Shaw’s pieces feature tangles, from the layered lines wrapping around the panels in Protect Us From Ruin, to a bowl full of tightly wrapped balls in All My Sorrows, to a painted circle of woven strips in Sacred Unseen. These knots symbolize the enmeshed identities of Christian Native Peoples, with all the confusion and tension that comes from belonging to two separate categories. But Sacred Unseen suggests that faith is to be found within the tangle, and that the identities are not separate at all, but can be intertwined as one.

Tony A. Tiger’s Old Ways, New Vision is one of several prints layering tribal designs over old photographs. The combination of bright colored patterns over the black-and-white figures brings the photographs to life, as if drawing them into the physical world. Tiger has ancestry in the Muscogee Creek, Seminole and Sac and Fox nations, as well as generations of Christianity behind him. ​“Those who employed Christian organizations and churches as a means to end tribalism in North America did so without a true knowledge and faith in its Author,” he says in his artist’s statement. Tiger’s artwork reflects the Christian traditions that align with Native beliefs to create an amalgamation of old and new, and show history in a new light.

Bobby C. Martin, a Christian and Mvskoke artist, contributes a series of charcoal portraits against a background of gold leaf. The gold is reminiscent of Renaissance paintings of saints, exalting ordinary men and women to show that holiness is found within them all. Likewise, the black-and-white charcoal recalling everyday mundanities combines with the gold representing the divine to demonstrate divinity within the mundane. In Martin’s artwork, Native people are holy, and Christianity is found embedded within Native communities.

As one might expect from the pilgrimage center of the Knights of Columbus, ​“Altars of Reconciliation” seeks to find peace with Christianity within Indigenous tradition. In doing so, it avoids an examination of the history of violence within colonization that was the context of much of the missionary work that brought Christianity to Native peoples in the first place. But as Indigenous artists, Shaw, Tiger, and Martin encourage viewers to embrace the unity between faith and culture, not to dwell on the atrocities that led to the initial imposition of that faith. Their artwork invites viewers to find worship through art, to consider the tangled threads of identity that make up a person, and to realize that who we are is an amalgamation of different parts. When they all fit together, it can create something beautiful.

“Altars of Reconciliation” runs at the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center, Knights of Columbus Museum, 1 State St., through Aug. 13. Admission is free. Visit the center’s website for hours and more information.

Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most consequential developments coming out of the art world and art market. Here’s what you need to know on this Friday, June 9.

NEED-TO-READ

Hurvin Anderson’s Dispatches From the Barbershop – The familiar scene of Anderson’s local establishment recurs in the artist’s current exhibition, “Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings,” at the Hepworth Wakefield in the U.K. “Apart from the home, it is one of the places Black men and women can speak freely,” Anderson said of the place that has inspired a range of canvases that delve into the “sociopolitical context of the shops.” (New York Times)

Artist Chinyee Dies at 94 – The first-generation Chinese-American artist, whose native home of Nanjing, China, and travels around the world with the United Nations influenced her colorful abstract canvases, has died. In 2007, her gallery Alisan Fine Arts organized a 50-year retrospective at the Shanghai Art Museum and two of her works are currently on view at the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, France, as part of the traveling group exhibition, “Action, Gesture, Paint: Women in Abstraction, A Global History (1940–70).” (E-mail)

Joan Rivers’s Comedy Trove Heads to Museum – A collection of more than 65,000 typewritten jokes penned by the late comedian will soon be in the collection of the Jamestown, New York-based National Comedy Museum. The cache is in good company, joining collections of works by George Carlin and Carl Reiner. (NYT) 

MOVERS & SHAKERS

Curator of British Pavilion Named – Tarini Malik will serve as the curator of John Akomfrah’s work at the next edition of the Venice Biennale, slated to open in April 2024. Malik has been a curator at London’s Hayward Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery, and said that the exhibition will “draw on the legacies of the work John has made over the past 40 years,” and will both “feel connected to the city of Venice, but also look at the institution of the British Pavilion.” (The Art Newspaper)  

Sukanya Rajaratnam Joins White Cube – The New York-based gallerist will join White Cube in the role of global director of strategic market initiatives this September. Rajaratnam left her position at Mnuchin Gallery after 15 years in January. (ARTnews)

A.I.-Powered Collecting Platform Launches – Docent, billed as the “Spotify for art collecting” is set to launch during Basel art week in Switzerland before going live in Paris, London, and Miami later this Fall. (Press release) 

FOR ARTS SAKE

Tate and Museum of the Home Acquire Rebecca Solomon Work – The two institutions now jointly own the Pre-Raphaelite artist’s canvas, which reflects the gender, race, and religious mores of its time. The central figure was modeled by Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton, who inspired many artists of the period. (Press release)  

Rebecca Solomon, A Young Teacher (1861). Courtesy of Tate and Museum of the Home.

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