From Dave Brigham:
When I first saw the work of art above, I assumed it was an old mural that had been uncovered during construction in an adjacent building. Located on the side of the Regal Fenway cinema, the bas-relief work is new, and appears to be part of a larger project honoring groundbreaking women in science and medicine.
When I happened by, the theater was under renovation, part of a project to overhaul the adjacent (and historic) Landmark Center and add a new building on the corner of Brookline Avenue and Fullerton Street. The Landmark Center, also known as 401 Park, started life in 1928 as a warehouse and distribution center for Sears, Roebuck & Company. After the retail giant closed the facility in 1988, it sat vacant for years.
See the video below for more on the latest redevelopment.
As part of the redevelopment, an office tower has risen next door, facing Brookline Ave.
OK, let's get back to the art and the subject.
The sculpture in question features Rosalind Franklin, a British chemist "whose x-ray diffraction studies provided crucial clues to the structure of DNA and quantitatively confirmed the Watson-Crick DNA model," per the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Born in London in 1920, she matriculated to Newnham College, one of two women's colleges at Cambridge University.
After receiving her degree in 1941, Franklin spent the next four years working for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association. She "worked to elucidate the micro-structures of various coals and carbons, and explain why some were more permeable by water, gases, or solvents and how heating and carbonization affected permeability," according to the NLM. "In this original work, she found that the pores in coal have fine constrictions at the molecular level, which increase with heating, and vary according to the carbon content of the coal....Franklin was the first to identify and measure these micro-structures, and this fundamental work made it possible to classify coals and predict their performance to a high degree of accuracy. Her work at BCURA yielded a doctoral thesis -- she received her PhD from Cambridge in 1945 -- and five scientific papers."
It is her work related to DNA that made her sculpture-worthy, though. In 1949, she began a three-year fellowship at John T. Randall's Biophysics Unit at King's College London. It was there that she began doing x-ray diffraction studies of DNA. "Meanwhile, at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, Francis Crick and James Watson were working on a theoretical model of DNA," the NLM continues. "Though not in close communication with Franklin, in January 1953 they gleaned crucial insights about DNA's structure from one of her x-ray diffraction photos shown to them by [a fellow scientist], and from a summary of her unpublished research submitted to the Medical Research Council. Watson and Crick never told Franklin that they had seen her materials, and they did not directly acknowledge their debt to her work when they published their classic announcement in Nature that April. Crick later admitted that Franklin was two steps away from realizing the correct structure in the spring of 1953."
So Franklin got the shaft, earning her the nickname "the dark lady of DNA," according to Wikipedia. Her trailblazing work continued nevertheless. "Working under John Desmond Bernal, Franklin led pioneering work at Birkbeck on the molecular structures of viruses," per Wikipedia. "On the day before she was to unveil the structure of tobacco mosaic virus at an international fair in Brussels, she died of ovarian cancer at the age of 37 in 1958. Her team member Aaron Klug continued her research, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982."
Wow. A brilliant life cut short. I had never heard of Rosalind Franklin before making a photo of the artwork above. Now that we've learned about her, let's find out more about the artist who brought her to Boston's attention.
"Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto...has been interacting visually with the urban environment under the name of Vhils since his days as a prolific graffiti writer in the early-to-mid 2000s," per the artist's web site.
His bas-relief carving technique "was first presented to the public at the VSP group exhibition in Lisbon in 2007 and at the Cans Festival in London the following year," per the web site. "This striking form of visual poetry, showcased around the world in both indoor and outdoor settings, has been described as brutal and complex, yet imbued with a simplicity that speaks to the core of human emotions.
"An ongoing reflection on identity, on life in contemporary urban societies and their saturated environments, it explores themes such as the struggle between the aspirations of the individual and the demands of everyday life, or the erosion of cultural uniqueness in the face of the dominant model of globalised development and the increasingly uniform reality it has been imposing around the world," Vhils continues on his web site. "It speaks of effacement but also of resistance, of destruction yet also of beauty in this overwhelming setting, exploring the connections and contrasts, similarities and differences, between global and local realities."
Since 2005, Vhils has exhibited his work in more than 30 countries.
As for the project in the Fenway, Vhils says, per the LinkedIn account of Cox Engineering, which is working on the 401 Park Drive project, "As the building is intended to house leading organizations working in life sciences, the composition of the mural represents a unity between symbols and important historical personalities from this area of knowledge and iconic landmarks associated with the city of Boston.
"The intervention features 3 main figures: Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross and fought for women’s civil rights; Rosalind Franklin, the chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was essential to unlocking the secrets of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite; and Mary Mahoney, the first African-American to study and work as a professionally trained nurse in the United States and who played a foundational role in the fight against racial discrimination in the nursing profession."
I like Vhils' term "intervention." As you can see in the video below, his work is quite intricate and detailed and involves working directly with buildings and other surfaces (doors, walls) to create art.
Vhils mentions two other female science and medicine pioneers. I'm not sure where those components of the project will (or are) located. I'll keep my eyes peeled.
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