A Berkshire County art project that combines writing, architecture, and public spaces has a new season underway this month.
Co-founder and director Tessa Kelly says the Mastheads began as an architecture graduate thesis at Harvard in 2011.
“Mastheads is a literary program that is paired with architecture and design experiments,” she told WAMC. “So, the Mastheads runs a writers’ residency, it supports literary research, and it provides poetry programming in the Pittsfield Public Schools – all kind of grounded in five architectural studios which move throughout Pittsfield and the Berkshires and also expressed through public art installations in the summer.”
Working with the city of Pittsfield, the project got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2014 to turn a school curriculum into public programming. Its first season launched in 2017, bringing writers to the Berkshires to make site-specific contributions to the region’s rich literary history. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic derailing events in 2020, the Mastheads is going to look different.
“We realized in the spring that we would not be able to bring our five selected residents to Pittsfield this July,” said Kelly.
Kelly and the Mastheads team pivoted.
“We have paired each of the five writers and residents with a different locally-owned Pittsfield essential business and we have installed excerpts of their work throughout each of those five stores,” she explained. “So, we are at Elm Street Hardware, Carr Hardware, Guido’s, Harry’s Supermarket, and Pittsfield Health Food Center.”
“I did see my lines in the grocery store, and that was like the most fire thing I’ve ever seen done with my work," said Kendra Allen. She's the author of essay collection “When You Learn The Alphabet” and the winner of the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction for University of Iowa Press. The Mastheads resident says she’s never seen her work displayed like this before – people discovering it woven into a public space.
“I really hope when that when they come across it they see that their own way of speaking, their own way of talking can be translated in a professional form – because I’m very country, I have horrible grammar, and I write like that as well," Allen told WAMC. "So I hope when they come across it they just feel, like, at home.”
Poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney says she hopes her writing – which can be found at the health food store – will offer a sense of connection and meaning during the isolation of the pandemic.
“Poetry really is everywhere," she told WAMC. "Like, if you sit around and you look long enough, you’ll find something weird. Maybe if you see poems at a place or just a couple of words in one place, you start to see little phrases like ‘men working’ or ‘men at work’ – maybe that becomes poetry to you too. All words everywhere sort of even out maybe. That’s the effect.”
In addition to the installations, workshops, and talks, the Mastheads will have another presence around Pittsfield this month.
“We also have six billboards going up for the month throughout the city of Pittsfield around different themes – like scale, memory, color, place," said Kelly. "And within each of those themes, we’ve taken one line from a historic Berkshire writer like Edith Wharton or W.E.B. Du Bois, one line from one of our 2020 writers in residence, and one line from one of our Pittsfield school poets.”
There is also a July 19th talk on “Black Artists Who Found Their Voices in the Berkshires” by Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts Professor of History Dr. Frances Jones-Sneed.
