Monika Bravo has a history of making art on the brink on grief and political unrest. On Sept. 10, 2001, she filmed a time-lapse piece from the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. It ended up being one of the last recollections of normal life on the site before the devastation of 9/11.
Over the next 20 years, Bravo continued making art inspired by light, words, and her own curiosity. Next up for the Colombian multidisciplinary artist is a large-scale public art work for the new police station in East Boston.
For Bravo, the commission was “fate.”
“I think I’m the perfect artist for this,” Bravo said in a Zoom interview from her home in Miami Beach. “Because I am not here to destroy; I’m here to create and to open a window for people to see the potential that they have in themselves, to have their own agency, without waiting for the government or any other authority to give them the authority to be themselves.”
Bravo’s project is funded by Boston’s five-year-old Percent for Art program, which dedicates a percentage of the city’s annual budget to public art funding. The station on East Eagle Street is the city’s first new police station in nearly a decade as well as its first station to house public art. Bravo received the commission almost a year after the city broke ground on the station in 2019. Her project will be complete and viewable by the fall.
For Bravo, the site is obviously notable after a year of protests and calls to Defund the Police. Everything we do and say is political, she said, but the work itself will not be tied to the current political space.
“I come from a very conflicted country, Colombia, and a lot of the art that was created in the ’80s and the ’90s was all about pointing fingers,” she said. “I never felt inspired to do that. My inspiration has always been about showing that I can learn new things. It’s with that sense of curiosity that I’m really willing to cultivate new challenges — and this is a big challenge for me and for the community as well.”
Instead, Bravo wants her art to start a dialogue within the community, and she plans to get the ball rolling before the installation goes up. She will be holding three community workshops March 12-14 to get feedback from Bostonians and hear what they would like to see from the project. (Pre-registration is required via www.boston.gov.)
The work itself, titled “UNUS MUNDUS,” will take the form of a mobile hanging in the station’s central plaza and will be visible from the street. Rather than calling attention to police brutality or Blue Lives Matter, the work’s bright colors and bold shapes will dangle conversation-starters such as: “courage,” “dia-logos,” “vocation,” and “en-joy.”
“I am not going to save any community. I’m not a saver, I’m not holding a cross, I’m not indoctrinating,” Bravo said. “But I am actually inspiring other points of view. That’s all I’m aspiring toward.”
The East Boston Police Station will double as a community space, said the city’s Chief of Arts and Culture Kara Elliott-Ortega. Organizations will be able to rent out rooms for meetings and events. And Bravo was chosen in part to make the space more welcoming.
“[The space] just seems like it really fits with the vibrancy of her work,” Elliott-Ortega said. “We wanted to celebrate that this is a community space and a community asset. I don’t know that everyone thinks of that when they think of a police station.”
Natachi Onwuamaegbu can be reached at natachi.onwuamaegbu@globe.com.
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March 11, 2021 at 07:00PM
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For artist Monika Bravo, commission for East Boston police station was ‘fate’ - The Boston Globe
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