Women’s Memorial Sculptor Meredith Bergmann Addresses Students on Public Art
Thank you for inviting me to speak tonight, and for giving me the opportunity to see the wonderful work you have done. I want to speak directly to the students: Public art can help us get to know great heroes, by keeping their faces where we can see them whenever we want to, as in the sculptures by Keon Campbell and Sahar Lawrence. Public art gives form to important ideas and emotions by using vivid symbols like the colors of the tears in Kapryse Hall’s sculpture, or the camera that’s also a crashed car in Heather MacNeil’s piece. Public art can powerfully evoke events and places that are long gone, or far away, or right here but hidden, out of sight, out of mind, like the women in prison evoked by Nyenpan Tarpehdo. And public art can explore both its own tradition, as in a monument in a park, or new expressions in unexpected places or materials, or other media like music, as in the pieces by Tony Alston and Claudia Carty. It’s exciting for me to see how much thought you all put into the questions of which women to memorialize and how to do it. I’m struck by the amount of thought because many people ask why we should bother to make art when there are so many problems in our society.	Well, to solve problems you have to think about them, and this is a way of thinking about them. Once the thinking is good enough, people of action, like Mayor Menino, can go out and fix them. So making public art actually helps us do what Lucy Stone told us to do: “Make the world better.” I hope you will all consider making your lives in art. I don’t mean that it will be quick. When I was in 8th grade I won a poster contest for a local theater production in my hometown in New Jersey, and it was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. Anyway, my mother thought so. It took me 13 years from that poster contest to win my first public art commission, and that Women in the Park by Sahar was for a temporary piece. It would be 30 years from poster contest to winning the commission for the Boston Women’s Memorial. The good news is that you are still the same person after 30 years, and if you enjoyed this project you may have a really good time after some years of study and travel and look-ing at art and working hard at what you love to do. I’m having a very good and interesting time in this stage of the work on the Women’s Memorial – I’m sculpting the faces and expressions of the three women. Making art is a very, very satisfying thing. I hope you will all con-tinue to do it. Thank you.
Back	Next