After a long, drawn-out winter, Boston comes alive in the summertime. Cold, dreary weeks give way to sun-filled days, and public places that for months stood sparse as city-dwellers holed up indoors spring to life with music, crafts and theater events, many of them headed by the Boston Parks and Recreation Department.
Through its ParkARTS program, an umbrella term for its performing and participatory arts programming, the department enlivens pockets of green space across the city, bringing arts workshops, concerts, movies and puppet shows to city-run parks year-round, with a more concentrated calendar in the summer months, all free of charge.
It’s “a super exciting way for us to activate parks in a broad swath of the city,” said Elizabeth Sullivan, director of external affairs for the department.
Sullivan estimates that the city’s music programming began in the 1970s while ParkARTS is a more recent bundling of all the city’s arts initiatives, which were grouped to make promotion easier. ParkARTS introduces attendees to neighborhoods they may never have frequented, she said, and exposes artists to new audiences.
The Boston Parks and Recreation Department hosted an outdoor movie night as part of its ParkARTS program. PHOTO: BOSTON PARKS AND RECREATION DEPARTMENT
Part of the department’s programming includes arts and crafts workshops for children led by local artists. At various locations around Boston, residents and their children can participate in “high-quality arts projects” through mid-August just steps away or across the street from their front yards, Sullivan said.
“So not only does it allow us to activate our [parks] and enrich the lives of children, but it also allows us to support local practitioners and artists in the community,” she added.
One of those artists, Carmen Powell, was initially tapped by the city to host a limited number of events. That first collaboration turned into a longstanding partnership. Powell has since led dozens of acrylic, watercolor and face painting workshops in playgrounds and parks in several neighborhoods, including downtown, Brighton, and Jamaica Plain.
This summer, her focus has been 2-hour-long workshops for children of all ages, taking place in two locations every day for six weeks from 10 a.m. to noon. Powell said the Parks and Recreation Department gives her the flexibility to choose how she wants to structure the workshops. In turn, she provides participants with the same space to be creative and express themselves.
“I think that people really enjoy playing with it and getting to experience it on their own, and not really having someone say, ‘Do it this way or that way,’” she said.
While she brings templates that children can use to trace images, most participants want to experiment. The kids have fashioned characters out of paper bags and made sea creatures out of muffin cups. Apart from paints, Powell also brings chalk and clay for the kids, mediums that make for easy cleanup, she admitted.
La Selección performed at the O’Day Playground in Boston as part of the Tito Puente Latin Music series on July 6, 2023. PHOTO: STEFANIE BELNAVIS
The programming “brings people together in the community. It brings people to these really beautiful public spaces,” Powell said. “Some people don’t always go to some of these spaces in general, but sometimes they may just use them in one kind of way. So it’s another way of thinking about how that space could be used…. And I mean, art is such a peaceful activity.”
These events serve more than just the attendees. For Parks and Recreation, partnering with local artists is what makes ParkARTS possible, since the department doesn’t have the internal bandwidth to lead all the programming, Sullivan said.
For local artists like Powell, these events offer much-needed income and a chance to network.
“We’re dependent on these types of opportunities in order to survive,” Powell said. By participating in ParkARTS programs, she has received inquiries from other agencies who wanted her to lead similar events. “And so it helps to build yourself as an artist by getting … more recognized and creating more opportunities to earn a living,” she said.
ParkARTS also includes a variety of song and dance gatherings. Now through the end of August, the Citywide Neighborhood Concert Series sees various artists bring their talents to parks across Boston. Yoron Israel and High Standards are set to play in Roxbury’s Highland Park on Aug. 4, and E Water Band is scheduled to brighten up Hunt-Almont Park in Mattapan the following day.
Running every Thursday until Aug. 15 is the Tito Puente Latin Music Series, which began as a joint effort between nonprofit Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción and the city to activate O’Day Playground in the South End.
Former Berklee College of Music employees were tasked with leading the effort and decided that music that celebrated the culture surrounding O’Day Playground would be the ideal way to animate the space, said Abria Smith, director for city and community engagement in the Office of Community Government Relations at Berklee.
Saxophonist Jonathan Suazo performed at Mozart Park in Jamaica Plain as part of the Tito Puente Latin Music series on August 3, 2023.PHOTO: Omari Spears
The ensuing series started as a couple of Latin Music concerts in the South End and has since expanded to an annual, citywide series in Jamaica Plain, Mission Hill, East Boston, downtown and Boston Common.
When putting together the lineup for the music series, Smith said she looks for bands who can play danceable music “because these concerts are just wonderful outdoor parties where people come expecting to dance and just enjoy the music for an hour and a half or two.” She keeps the programming fresh each year by inviting new artists and showcasing Berklee alumni talent. It’s important to her, she said, to allow audiences to experience music in a way they maybe haven’t before.
“Not only are the arts kind of like a universal language that connects people, it’s like there are a lot of people who don’t normally have access to the arts,” Smith said. “So it’s definitely great to be able to provide access to folks, and not [only] to the arts, but to really, really high-quality performances.”
The partnership with the Parks and Recreation Department has streamlined the process of organizing the annual Tito Puente Latin Music Series, she added. The department takes care of permitting, sound engineers, staging, portable toiletries, water trucks and other logistical details. IBA and Berklee focus on the music.
The Parks and Recreation Department knows what summer arts programming is popular and sticks to it for the most part, with some tinkering here and there to allow for new partnerships, Sullivan said. For example, for one of its upcoming ParkARTS outdoor movie nights on Aug. 12, the department will collaborate with childhood educators who will provide science instruction before a showing of “A Million Miles Away.”
On Aug. 19 and 27, the city will screen “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” and “Wish” at Malcolm X Park in Roxbury and Ronan Park in Dorchester respectively.
Much of ParkARTS programming depends on what community members want to see. Sullivan said her department visits different neighborhoods to seek input on details as small as what movie to show at an outdoor screening or as big as which artists to invite for a summer concert. It’s a “two-way street,” she said, in which the department tries to listen to each community and meet its needs by offering events that appeal to people of different cultures and ages.
“We’re really lucky to have those relationships,” Sullivan said, “because that means when people are a part of creating the program, then they’re much more likely to come out and enjoy it.”
