VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

Meaning-making in, on, and around infrastructure, particularly through visual practices, has the power to mediate citizen and state engagement. ‘Arts in Transit: The Southwest Corridor’ was a pubic arts and humanities program that took place in Boston between 1983 and 1991 as the city’s Orange Line was relocated onto a stretch of land that had been cleared for a subsequently cancelled highway project. The nonprofit group UrbanArts, under contract with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, worked with racially and ethnically diverse members of the neighborhoods where Boston’s Orange Line was to be relocated to describe their neighborhoods and determine the types of artwork they wished to see installed in the new transit stations. Through intentional processes of inclusion, Site Committees were formed to speak for their neighborhoods with the hope of ultimately inscribing their histories and desired, positive self-image into the newly-built transit infrastructure. The acts of citizenship these formations enabled all performed what Lemanski (2020) and others have called infrastructural citizenship, a broad heuristic tool useful for imagining infrastructure as the material and political relationship between citizens and the state. The paper makes use of UrbanArts archival materials such as meeting minutes, Community Profiles, memos, notices, and prepared publications as well as interviews conducted with former UrbanArts staff, artists, and community members. Situating the Arts in Transit project at the nexus of infrastructure, citizenship, and meaning-making, and considering its component parts, the paper makes a case for the role of the visual in the infrastructural.