How a UFO in Boston sends a message of hope amid environmental despair

This July, an artwork set up resembling a pink flying saucer materialized at Boston’s LoPresti Park. “Beam Me Down” sits on the fringe of the waterfront, alongside the rocks that border the harbor, showing to have crash-landed there.

“It is extra about presenting questions than solutions,” artist Eli Brown mentioned of the general public artwork show.

Brown is one in every of 5 native artists chosen for this yr’s Now + There Public Artwork Accelerator. Now + There’s a Boston-area nonprofit “dedicated to fostering artists who break down biases and make clear often-overlooked individuals and points.” Its Public Artwork Accelerator, launched in 2018, is an annual program providing coaching alongside financial {and professional} assist for its cohort of native creators.

Watch Eli Brown talk about ‘Beam Me Down’

Brown obtained his grasp of nice arts diploma from the College of the Museum of High-quality Arts at Tufts College. His work has been featured in cities of Tampa and Philadelphia, in addition to again right here in Massachusetts with previous public artwork shows at Boston’s Distillery Gallery and the New Bedford Artwork Museum.

The Seaport, the place “Beam Me Down” is positioned, is a precarious spot for a murals contemplating the danger of coastal flooding, however that’s precisely the purpose Brown hopes to make.

With local weather change being a key supply of hysteria amongst younger adults, and a rising concern amongst voters, Brown hopes that their sculpture — which is presently surviving the weather and the lapping waves — will probably be a supply of hope.

“I needed to problem this concept that we’re all doomed,” they mentioned. “I actually needed to handle that and provides this object that possibly introduced some pleasure and possibly surprise.”

Jacob Garcia / GBH Information

To present individuals a way of hope concerning the future, Brown appears to the previous.

Every of the sculpture’s small, spherical home windows reveals totally different tidal animals resembling barnacles, sea snails, oysters and bay scallops. Brown was impressed by the longevity of the featured species, lots of which have survived for a whole bunch of tens of millions of years. He mentioned people ought to “attempt to study one thing from species who’re almost certainly going to outlast us.”

Along with the endurance that these tidal animals signify, in addition they resonate with Brown on a extra private degree. As a transgender individual, Brown has an affinity with these tidal animals as a result of in addition they have a number of genders or swap between genders. Brown, who can also be an avid farmer, elaborates that the biology of animals and crops was one thing he wasn’t taught in class: “It’s info that’s been saved from us. Particularly as somebody who has been caring for crops and taking good care of them, it simply felt like, ‘Oh yeah, after all this isn’t only a human phenomenon.’”

Brown is worked up to have “Beam Me Down” function a solution to share that data and validate the trans expertise.

Caitlin Cunningham Images LLC. / Courtesy of the artist

The sculpture was created alongside a comic book e book that Brown made in collaboration with virtually 90 college students at Boston’s Sam Adams Elementary College. Photographs from the comedian e book, all drawn by the scholars, are accessible to viewers through a QR code embedded all through the exhibition.

Brown says that whereas he offered some prompts for inspiration, the kids “did some fairly fascinating work on their very own. It’s the very best a part of the present.”

“Beam Me Down” on view at LoPresti Park by means of January 2023.

Eli Brown / Courtesy of the artist