Cecily Miller and Susan Berstler

Recorded February 3, 2021 Archived February 3, 2021 41:10 minutes
0:00 / 0:00
Id: mby020391

Description

Friends and colleagues, Cecily Miller (60) and Susan Berstler (59), discuss the Somerville art scene and talk about different projects they have worked on.

Subject Log / Time Code

CM asks SB when she moved to Somerville and what she loves about it.
CM talks about an art piece created with pennies.
CM asks SB about Project MUM. SB talks about Project MUM (Meet Under the McGrath) - a dance party under the highway.
SB talks about the Nave Gallery.
CM talks about the Mystic River Mural Project.
CM talks about the art programs breaking down unexpected barriers between races, neighborhoods and individual people.
CM shares that part of their success came from the perspectives they brought from outside of Somerville.
SB shares that they are surrounded by really talented and really crazy artists who are doing great things.

Participants

  • Cecily Miller
  • Susan Berstler

Transcript

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00:05 My name is Cecily Miller. I'm 60 years old. Today is Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021. I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I'm speaking with my friend Susan berstler.

00:24 Susan berstler, I'm 59 years old. Today is Wednesday, February 3rd 2021 in Somerville, Massachusetts, and I'm here having a conversation with my friend Cecily Miller. I always forget that you're a year younger than me. You seem so much wiser.

00:46 So I asked Susan to have a storycorps a conversation with me because we've been friends and colleagues and collaborators working in the Arts in Somerville, Massachusetts for more than 30 years, and I wanted to capture some of the creative projects. We've been able to accomplish and also explore our friendship. So I want to just start today by asking Susan. How long have you lived in Summerville? And what do you love about it?

01:21 Let me get to Summerville in 1985.

01:27 I'm not really sure what that is mathematically but it seems like a long time. I I love Somerville although I have to admit it's changing a lot. I probably love the summer knows about 20 years ago a lot more than I love the Somerville of today.

01:47 Yeah, that was my sort of next question was what you find sometimes frustrating about Summerville. So it's getting gentrified on my street. I live on a 3 Block Street of triple-deckers. And when I moved here they were most of them were owner-occupied in one of the units and they're either two or three apartments in each house. And there were all sorts of creative people ham people played Irish flu and get me sessions and artists and writers and a lot of

02:21 Social workers and teachers and now we've they've been replaced by Condominiums and people who can afford the Condominiums and we have dog walkers on our street and then he's pushing baby carriages around it's just a really really different environment and I have to say people with Condominiums don't shovel the sidewalk as much as people living there which is sort of a metaphor for their connection with the community overall. Yeah.

02:57 So well when I moved to Somerville, I grew up in New York City. And when I moved to Davis Square to a little apartment building, you still remember when the agent let me into the apartment feeling like oh my God, this feels like home. It reminded me so much of a place I lived when I was in on 678 on Riverside Drive something about the architecture and the fact that the moldings had been painted over and over and over a hundred years of layers of paint and the density of the city. I loved it that also kind of reminded me of home the fact that when I would walk out my door and into Davis Square, I was almost sure to run into somebody I knew and that there were

03:46 Cafes in a bar that call Johnny D's I had all kinds of great local music and a movie theater bookstore and basically Italian deli everything that you might need within a few blocks and yet it also had this really feeling like this like Susan is referring to sort of this pre gentrification kind of feeling that that also reminded me of the New York City that I grew up in before Donald Trump took over.

04:24 So

04:27 In a way

04:29 Maybe we are partly responsible for this gentrification because we've both been really active in promoting the art scene in Summerville and making it an amazing place to live.

04:43 Also, I wanted to talk a little bit about that Summerville is known for its vibrant and quirky art scene and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your work in that world may be describing some of your favorite projects or accomplishments and and why you're proud of those.

05:03 So I got into the business of art programming and I consider myself an artist but you one of those things about Somerville still and it's certainly true 30 years ago is there's not a lot Gallery spaces or places to show your art. So one of you know, I kind of like problems. I like trying to problem solve them. So one of the first things that I went public art projects I did in the city, which was actually collaborating with you Cecily was the windows art project which where we went around and ask businesses in Davis Square, whether we could use their window spaces to show our work and we also expanded into the parks in the sidewalks and the at one point the roof by me things got a kind of

06:02 All over the place and I was kind of wonderful thing. I like a lot about public art is that it impacts everybody who stumbles across tit and when maybe they ignore it when they stumble across it, but the most people have a response of some sort, even if it's negative and art in galleries art in museums, you know, you have to make the effort of going into this building. So there's barriers that there between but you're able to show your work to I think the windows project was a lot of fun and you know in its Heyday we had hundreds of artists over a. Of years who showed their work and I think it really moved them feel very

06:53 Yeah, we had everybody from people who'd never really shown their work anywhere before two people who were really quite well known artists. You never said this the variety of it. That was kind of cool.

07:09 Can you hear my cat howling? Yes.

07:17 Well, I remember so many things from the windows are project from

07:26 We were just talking about the other day the artist who spelled out in giant letters on the street using pennies. It's your honesty. I admire most and pretty much overnight. If not within a day all of my niece disappeared. They lasted 24 hours though. I was kind of impressed somewhere between an installation at a public performance. I guess where she collaborated with unknown Anonymous collect Raiders

08:00 But you did another project where you put a camera on a on a video return box of right? Right. Right, right. That was so we thought that was going to be really exciting. It was the camera. It wasn't my art. It was another is an artist who is part of the windows project. But her idea was that she focus the camera on the inside of the drop-off box. This was back when they were videos and that idea was that the camera would follow the videos on their return back into the store and religious tickle issue. There was that what we hadn't really thought about was during the day which is when the camera work the best because it wasn't dark. Nobody returned the videos in the drop-off box at the counter.

08:55 That was a slight sailed. I kind of liked it because it failed for such specific reasons right like to put lighting inside the video drop off box to get the right video when they return their VHS tape.

09:11 Trey Burton interesting very early example of kind of

09:18 Surveillance and webcam sort of ideas. Another thing that you did out on the public streets that I loved was you called for art to be put in decommissioned phone booths again our life time span. Of historic time before the internet and cell phones were pervasive and they're actually we're still these little structures for bones left in Davis Square where we did a lot of our works but they no longer had a function. Do you want to tell us about I don't know why what inspired you to do that or any of your favorites interesting story because it actually it was a suggestion of Mayor Joe curtatone. He was meeting with him, which I do every so often generally to complain about the lack of space.

10:18 Artist in in the city and this was one of those conversations where I was saying, you know that you are just being driven out there. So you can't afford to live here. There's no place that you can you know, we're losing our musical stages. We're losing our galleries were just losing everything and he's like, I'll have these phone boxes. He had been thinking about them because I guess Verizon or whatever company owned them last had gone through the city recently and removed all of the phones but left behind the box for them said he was really annoyed about that and in so yeah, it was actually a great opportunity. One of the first ones that was done was an artist named Gary door and he created a sculpture of an old fashioned handheld handset of a phone and had it mounted on a pedestal within the the box and

11:18 That one was interesting because it was one of the few it was on the outside of the Subway on Holland Street going into the MBTA and it was actually next to a box that still had a phone in it. So there was a phone and then there was an art phone in there because I like to when I put things out in the public like that should hang around and watch people react to them and make a photo or two, but it wants me.

11:52 A father with his son on his shoulders, right? So however old that is right when you put kids up on your shoulders walked over and they were sort of looking at it and the kid in all honesty was like Dad. What is that?

12:08 He didn't know what a sound like a landline phone well, and there was another project that you did that use that so obsolete technology which was the artome at like that was that was not also through windows or Through the Windows art project for 2 RB that knew that was that was Kelly Kaczynski. I think was the artist name in her partner's name is escapes me at the moment. But yeah, they re

12:42 Siri did it in vending machine and then we use tubes in artist put artwork in and you could get a piece of art that you could walk off with and it was kind of fun that that again it was one of those sort of lowbrow highbrow. There were artists that were there artists. I knew teaching kids classes who contributed kids artwork to the project and then they were people like Bill Wainwright who is a very well-known artist in Massachusetts United States at that time, and he was also putting things in there. So, you know, you put your I don't remember what it was maybe 50 Cent 50 Cent sin and you could get you didn't know what you were going to get in that was kind of the fun of it, right?

13:27 Unfortunately, I would have liked to have kept that up longer. But the MBTA is not one of the best Partners to work with it was really difficult to get the the permit to be able to put the automat in there and they were not at all receptive to the idea of continuing at even though the the response from the people in the community was hugely favorable.

13:54 Southern there is one other project that I really wanted you to touch on which is Project mum do people have to know the city to really understand Mom. So the like many other cities at the time of when cars take over the world they built highways that cross neighborhoods in really disrupted communities 93 is one of those in the Boston Summerville area in the graph Highway leads into 93 in it. Does its own job at dissecting what used to be a formerly very close neighborhood and it is kind you just wanted the few artist buildings in Summerville is on one side of the highway and then Union Square, which is one of the more

14:54 Active squares in the city is on the other side and in between to get from one to the other you have to sit across this no man's land that really is. You know, you're walking under a highway. There's pigeons everywhere. Sometimes homeless people at one point the man who is selling cars a block away with parking all of his automobiles there. I'm not sure he ever had a permit to do that. But he figured it was empty real estate. So why not use it? So anyway our idea my eye is really my idea. I guess it happened because I work with a lot of great and talented people was Mom's dance for me under my grass and we had a dance party and we did it I think.

15:46 So I can't remember brain right at least three years, maybe five years something like that and it will have to pick this at night under an elevated highway it's dark but cars are going by with their street lights and there's some street lights on and if you brought in the most amazing technical rig, you know of changing lighting displays and go go dancers on elevated platforms and DJ's playing music and completely transformed the space into some kind of

16:32 Disc attack it was it was so much fun. It really was amazing. Todd Sargent was my friend who did the lighting and Emmy he does that for his profession so he knows what he's doing. But boy we had the most amazing disco ball hanging from it. And and we had BJ's or DJ's were amazing. But again, my favorite part of that was I was sort of hanging on the end where people would walk in and just eat a we had the sort of people in the know people in the Arts Community who knew me who we did Outreach to who showed up and you know, they are all there and then we just had the people who stumbled upon it. I remember one gentleman just parked his car in the middle of the street and left it there and came over and said what the hell is going on here and he had lived in the neighborhood had grown up in the neighborhood. You'd love The Neighbourhood.

17:28 Idiot never thought of doing something under the highway. So he was like he ended up spending the evening with us. We gave him a chair. He's kind of old gave him a chair. He sat there telling me stories about what the neighborhood used to be like he was like, you know, you should do this every Saturday you can have, you know, a film under here and EMP family to come watch movies under the highway and so, you know, and that's the feedback that I I get off on is that people who

17:59 Art in some way Changed by what they see by something that I've been programming.

18:06 So

18:08 Absolutely. I mean the Somerville of our day there was was a really diverse City and it still has some diversity despite. It is still have a lot of diversity despite gentrification. But in The In Crowd of the Heyday of the Arts were providing common ground for people to meet and discover each other and connect and Converse people who might have started out thinking they had nothing in common and

18:40 You know would have would have refused to have anything to do with each other negative stereotypes about each other. Like I do recall that cars were sometimes vandalized parked around the artist buildings just for fun bike it by local kids cuz they were a bunch of weirdos, you know who living in the making art in this building and their neighborhood and I think we we did a lot to bring the city together and

19:16 To create a space where everybody's contributions were valued and I think one of the one of the most impactful exhibitions I also went on to create the Nave Gallery which is been in existence now 15 years. It's inside of an old church up near Tufts University. We have their old chapel space in a separate question, but we also had a gallery for a few years in Davis Square and a run-down house. That was awesome. But one of the best exhibits that ever happened when you talked about community in the Nave Gallery was called the was called villains, which is what the local kids from Somerville mostly boys, but also girls identified as in that you don't have T-shirts and sweatshirts in as a term. They came up with that for themselves and we had an Exhibit 2

20:16 City Memorial ice actually was my next door neighbor died in a very very tragic accident and I use local to the city of his mother was a friend of mine. He played hockey like a lot of the other Sommerville kids in for some reason his high school classes hockey team. It seemed like they were just Jinx like some ridiculous number of kids died in his class, you know, a couple from drugs couple from accidents. One of them served in Afghanistan and did like three tours overseas was in Texas came back and was walking home from a bar and got mugged and died. I mean just bizarre horrible horrific sad stories and Brian died and we put the call out to his friends and the artwork that showed up there and there used to be a you know,

21:16 Give me that the kids never really thought of the artist is as the art space is a space that they couldn't have it in for us to give them a show where they could try to express their grease over all of this day. And we had a couple panel discussions and talking about violence in the city and drug abuse in the city and it really

21:42 It was quite

21:44 It meant something and it made me really proud to be able to provide a space to have that kind of dialogue.

21:54 Now, it's awesome.

21:58 I am makes me think about some of the

22:04 Projects that I organized and one of them is called The Mystic River mural project and it has now been going for 25 years. It's a summer Employment Program. We're at risk kids at-risk teenagers low-income teenagers got summer jobs learning how to

22:26 Paint and making panels for this mural that was mounted on the

22:32 On another section of the same Highway that divided the city and in particular it divided the large family housing development public housing development from Riverfront Park. The Mystic River was on the other side of this highway, which I had worked in Summerville for I don't know like 7 years or something and never even really realize that we had a river and a park in within our city limits because of the traffic that made a barrier to accessing it. But in fact there was an underpass if you knew best kept secret you could just walk under it and be in nature. So the concept wasn't the kids would explore that River and learn about its ecology and create this mural that would Landmark that entrance and I didn't really know how long

23:30 When I started that how long it would keep going but it's now hundreds of feet. If not a thousand feet. The muralist is David Victor incredible muralist has painted murals all over the country, but not only an incredible artist but like a wonderful human being who I knew that he would have an effect on the kids just from Derek hanging out with someone who had such

24:04 Well Progressive an anti-capitalist values really, I mean, he's led a life that has an alternative lifestyle and his wife is a theater director who organizes political.

24:20 Theater with political content and a lot of these kids. Some of the kids came with an interest in art others were just looking for a job and

24:33 They

24:35 Also had lived.

24:39 In a way where they never really gotten to go camping or walked in the woods or knud on a river and they got to do all of that kind of stuff to as part of this program. So I'm learning about the river ecology becoming a little more comfortable in nature or they were the kind of kids who would freak out if they happen to get touched by a bug not even a bug looks like a long piece of grass like walking through the grass along the river was, you know, a new experience. Oh,

25:17 Anna mural has never been defeated the fact that it isn't as I think the only damage to it is there's been a car accident or two that's run into it, but it's right across from the projects and it's totally respected by the neighborhood and in by the city. I mean, it's it's one of my favorite projects in all of Summerville. I mean, you know that I keep telling you that but it's also one of the longest murals I've ever seen unless you count the Berlin Wall, which is really the same because that was different art. Well, this is different artists to Lakes Ematic Lee they all fit together and it flows as opposed to it being separate, you know.

26:00 Subject matter anyway, it it does share with the Berlin wall that it was a barrier that the panels are on the retaining walls of this highway that that are a barrier and the other thing about that Mystic River mural project was that we did as you would with a public art project. We did Outreach to the small neighborhood on the other side of the highway, which was it pretty much uniformly white neighborhood and

26:33 Wired all of the household and invited those folks to a community meeting to hear about the funeral and had the kids present their ideas and also solicit comment and suggestions from the neighborhood residents who came to the meeting and the kids were mostly a color is a big Haitian community at Mystic Housing Development and

27:00 One of the older gentleman who went through that process confided to me later that he thought this was just going to end up being graffiti and B, you know b a

27:16 Kind of an insult to the neighborhood degrade the visual experience and then he was just

27:25 Deeply moved by how committed the kids were to making something beautiful for everyone and he contributed a photo from his use of him and a couple of friends making a kind of pyramid group on what used to be a peach the water used to be clean enough that neighborhood kids would swim on that beach and they're wearing their old-time bathing suits and not got Incorporated very prominently into the mural. So these programs broke down all kinds of unexpected barriers that they are a barrier between neighborhoods and a barrier between races and an individual people. It was really went when we had the Nave Annex in Davis Square, which I rented for a minute very interesting.

28:19 Person and the programming we did there was kind of amazing that I remember one day. There was this elderly I'm surprised you still work, but one of the parking meter people was this elderly gentleman who I had seen around Davis Square for years and years and years and one day he came in. I don't know what true him in but he came in to look at the artwork and we ended up having a conversation and he said he had never been in an art gallery or Museum before in his life.

28:52 And he was really impressed and it I don't have no idea what show was up then but he was really excited to find this in his neighborhood. You know what he considered his Turf and he was like, well, you know, when are you open? You know why I'm working here all the time. I'll come back and see your next show any did he became a regular I need show up with his little parking pass to Inna Right tickets to have them hanging off their belt and stuff and people would always be like, why is the parking meter guy here? And I'd be like a real man right now.

29:27 I want to clarify for the folks who might be listening to this interview that Susan I was an extraordinary volunteer. All of this was it is a passion project for her and I was going to ask you know, what motivated you to contribute your time in this way, but I think it's been pretty clear in these stories that you've told and in contrast I was the director of the city's Arts Council not to say that I didn't volunteer time to in the sense that that job really was my life and I worked Around the Clock I

30:09 Can remember many evenings driving Grand applications at midnight down to the central post office with another Arts council member to get you know our plea for funding in on time by the deadline, but I'm never met such a dedicated group of people mostly artist some curators or other kinds of Arts organizers performers musicians. The Arts Council was able to do the work of a much larger organization because of this the generosity of and Civic spirit and desire to

30:54 You know two.

30:56 Desire to express themselves on the canvas. I mean his kind of a cliche but it's true. Should to make the whole city a platform for artists age of you know, a place where people could connect through the Arts and so Susan I wanted to ask you how you would describe the character of what I've of the way that I work in the Arts are the character of the programming I've produced or it's it's it's personality or how you see how you see it as

31:39 My unique is a grand word. But how how you see it as mattering and and distinctive.

31:49 That's a very complicated question and we have not so much time left. I would say that.

32:00 Your dedication to connections making connections of of placing the artwork or the programming of whatever type it is in making the in the right place. One of the my favorite projects that you did that I loved was wasn't in Summerville, but it was the with the lanterns in Forest Hills.

32:33 And I think that's

32:38 I don't know if you want to describe that at all. But you know that was in The Amazing Project in socially was working as the I'll get the title wrong but is the director of everything in our local Cemetery that that's historic Cemetery that sort of famous internationally really in his lot of famous people buried there. But for a few really precious wonderful years she managed to bring a lot of life to the cemetery through programming and through artwork is do performance and I had some amazing experiences there when they were playing sound from one of those honest a crypt, but it wasn't really a unit. You know, I I just think that

33:31 Again, it's a Visionary sitting right some people see a cemetery and that's a cemetery and you see a cemetery and you start making connections to the people who had lived in who are buried there in their artwork or their work or their lives and bringing in an artist to interpret that and reinterpret it and make it alive for people, you know, 100 200 years later and that's kind of amazing to write.

34:02 Yeah, I think.

34:05 All right. Well my first I just want to say that I was I think the steward of that Lantern Festival but didn't actually start it. I I definitely grew it and Managed IT and enhanced it but there was a lot that I did at that historic cemetery and I'm going to bring the focus back to Somerville, but I do think that

34:28 Maybe part of what distinguishes the two of us and makes us a really good compliment is I see Susan you as

34:38 Really?

34:40 A huge advocate for the artist and and having

34:46 While while it is key to you to have art happen in these border areas and to have it reach we hear this from what you're saying reach the unexpected to be unexpected to be a surprise that everyone anyone can I encounter on the street?

35:06 It's

35:08 I admire how it's really rooted in the

35:14 Adventurous vision of artists and I

35:21 Feel like my projects have sometimes.

35:27 Reached out to other partner. So for example, like the Summerville Garden words that I started was sort of celebrating how gardeners are artists or starting a program for kids in a community garden so that they could a free art program so that they could make art inspired by the nature. They are out of the way that the other mural project ecology and environmental activism was as important in a way.

35:59 As the art that the kids were doing so

36:04 So that and that probably reflects to our different roles that I was embedded in the city and you were an activist artist volunteer.

36:19 We have hardly any time, but I wanted to ask you.

36:25 I wanted to ask you if you if you've ever wanted to well. I know you want to bust out or Somerville sometimes and so

36:39 I don't know to share a memory from somewhere outside of Summerville and adventure in another place that has inspired you and like if we get out into the World At Large the large world's great. I was lucky enough Fortune enough, whatever you want to call it to work with a group of really crazy artist back in the 90s where we ended up in Prague 1995 which New Prague in 1995 was 5 years after the Berlin Wall had fallen into communism was dying but capitalism hadn't quite come in yet and there were a lot of really confuse people hanging out in the city and I was working in this Arts and Cultural Center that had been funded by George Soros. And at one point we were getting ready for our opening in that was a whole nother crazy thing, but I was up on the roof with the the organizer of the whole event is this man named Norm Davis. So I love unfortunately past couple years ago.

37:39 And we're up on the roof of this building putting flags up and I look up and there's an office building with people working in the office is just staring at us. Like what the heck are they doing them there and you know, it turns out there was this whole history where the building part of it had been used by the police the secret police during the Communist days and we just had all sorts of Great Adventures their my partner Charles got taken off by this Russian theater group in their van and they went on a week's trip to Slovenia where they would pull up into a little village and just like park on the side of the road on the Square and start performing they had been trained in Circus and in buto so that the end Charles was just tossing speak Russian and they didn't speak English. So I'm not really sure what they talked about for a week, but he came back with the most amazing photographs ever.

38:37 So, you know, I love connecting with other creative people that I never really thought about this but I think that part of our success in this kind of Small Town Summerville. I mean, I'll I don't know hundred and forty thousand people or something is that we also both brought perspective me from New York City because I didn't get to travel a whole lot and you from a life of adventure more adventurous travel. I think we brought, you know, a perspective from the greater World outside Summerville to Summerville and and routed the things that we did in Summerville Salon culture and incredible artist Community. I'm absolutely extraordinary artist Community right because of their poor grandson Studio spaces, but but I don't think our work with ever provincial. No, not at all.

39:34 Yeah, I mean that's actually one of those things. It's nice to get irritated about when people start saying yo community yard and then there's this implication that it's not quality whatever we can argue about that. That's a whole nother hours discussion, but I feel like the work that both of us have presented. I'd have been happy to show it like, you know, what the Lincoln Center.

39:59 Seriously eating out in it. It's just a

40:05 Really talented really crazy people around us doing great. Thanks. And so it's hard not to be inspired by them in as crazy as it is to work with artists and to work with other groups of people. I really like it because whatever you end up with is going to be so much bigger and so much Bolder and so much so much so much. Then what you ever would have thought of by yourself, right? So that's the thing about collaboration. I think you and I are in sync after working together on so many projects where we tend to say, I will go for a walk in the woods and bring our little pirate ship and suddenly we have all this great footage of the pirate ships sailing through the trees. Not sure what we're going to do with it, but we have it right. So yeah.

40:55 So I think that might be all of our time but it's been a pleasure talking to you. So sweet. Thanks for inviting me. It's been a lot of fun.