| STOP 11 |
Commonwealth Avenue Mall:
Progress & Process
Commonwealth Ave. Mall at Exeter
The Commonwealth Avenue Mall, designed in 1865 to resemble the boulevards of Paris, is a showcase for public art. A variety of statues related to Boston history guard the landscaped greens linking the Back Bay’s “alphabet streets”: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, and Hereford. Here near Exeter Street is sculptor Penelope Jenck’s depiction of sailor and maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison seated on a granite rock. Women created half of the art on the Mall: Jencks did Morison, Anne Whitney modeled Leif Eriksson, Yvette Compagnion sculpted Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento, and Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson worked with her husband on the bust of Boston Mayor Patrick Collins.
All of the statues between Arlington Street and Charlesgate are of or about men, but this will soon change. The Boston Women’s Memorial, a piece created by and about women (designed by sculptor Meredith Gang Bergmann) is due to appear in 2002
between
Fairfield and Gloucester Streets. It will portray three women with connections
to Boston who are associated with written words, deliberately set off their
pedestals: revolutionary correspondent Abigail Adams, newspaperwoman Lucy
Stone and poet Phillis Wheatley. This is the last stop on this tour. If you walk to the end of the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, you will see Anne Whitney’s life-size Leif Eriksson (1887), commissioned in the belief that the Viking was the true European discoverer of America. Once you have traveled that far, look for the Fenway Studio Building (1905) at 30 Ipswich Street, where many women artists lived and worked. It is the oldest surviving structure specifically designed and still used for artists’ residences and studios.