A project headed by Lesley Professor and Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges is again bringing poetry to the public and inspiring art installations worldwide.
This marks the second year of Raining Poetry, an art/literary installation of poems painted in water-resistant biodegradable paint that lasts for up to three months. Every time it rains, the poems appear on Boston’s sidewalks.
“People are delighted by it,” Legros Georges says. “We got tons of feedback on the project.”
"Mnemonic" by Charles Coe
For the inaugural year, the poet laureate had the help of two Lesley students, who created hand-cut stencils of the poems. In the fall, Legros Georges again looked to Lesley designers as she, the City of Boston and Mass Poetry, prepared to install a new set of poems on streets.
Associate Professor Heather Shaw, who teaches in our College of Art and Design, enlisted her second-year typography students for the project.
At this stage in their education, Shaw said students rarely have the opportunity to create work that makes it to the public eye. That made it a particularly exciting project for the coincidentally named Raine Ferrin, a rising junior who was acquainted with Raining Poetry before she took Shaw’s class.
“I think this is such an opportunity for students to get a real world experience and also to be tied to the city and have their work actually seen by people walking by,” she said.
A poem in Spanish by Rosario Catellano appears outside of the Mexican Consulate. Photo courtesy | Mass Poetry
Poetry in practice
Designing stencils sounds like a simple enough task, but it wasn’t without challenges. More accustomed to working on typography for posters, the poem stencils would be laser-cut and painted in a 3-by-4-foot area on a concrete surface traversed by thousands of people. And given the less than precise nature of the hydrophobic paint, the fonts and arrangements had to be eye-catching and easy to read. Students also needed to maintain the integrity of the text.
“We had the limitation of how the poet actually wrote the poetry. . . We had to keep that structure and make it expressive in our own way,” says student Kevin Nguyen, also a rising junior.
Before they drafted their designs, Legros Georges gave the class a primer on the poems, guiding the students through the nuances and cadences of each piece, encouraging them to read the lines aloud and analyze each stanza so they could bring their own typographical interpretations to the poems.
Says Legros Georges, "It was important for us to ingest the poems and get a feel for them before the students could then translate them into another kind of language, a visual language."
Shaw also commented on the uniqueness of the experience.
“It was really interesting to hear them read the poems out loud in class,” says Shaw. “That’s something we don’t commonly do in design. It was really beautiful – to see them work and speak in a different medium.”
The 15 students in Shaw’s class each took a poem to design, with Georges and members of the Boston Art Commission making the final selections. The poems were installed on Boston streets in May at locations listed on Mass Poetry website, bringing “more poetry into the everyday lives of the unsuspecting.”