Art by Anna Shapiro

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Anna Shapiro is committed to creating public artworks that provide a sense of community and that educate about ecosystems within which we live. Creating a sense of place is the most important component of Anna's public artworks. Her site specific work responds to a location and/or an environmental concern. She initiates dialogue with the larger public audience that passes by, looks at and interacts with her public murals, installations and window exhibits.

3 different projects with Urban Furniture at
the Steel Yard

A Very Brief History of Somerville is a mural addressing the unique industrial history of the city of Somerville (shipbuilding, bricklaying and manufacturing the Ford Edsel) commissioned by Gravestar Co.

Soaring

An installation of five, suspended, brushed and painted aluminum birds in abstracted shapes of hands. Each bird spans three feet by four feet and has a characteristic shape that evokes the language and movement of American Sign Language. The Baxter School is the only residential school for the deaf in Maine and is situated on a small island just beyond downtown Portland. The birds are suspended so they follow the buildings curved main corridor and culminate at the entrance to the library, a place where aspirations, ideas and the imagination take flight. Garber collaborated with Providence, Rhode Island sculptor, Anna Shapiro, to construct and install the work.

UNTITLED FRIEZE (Providence 2004)

This powerful site-specific work generated interest and dialogue about the arts in an emerging arts community in The Steelyard in Providence RI. The Frieze was conceived to relate to the site, its history, politics, environment and activities.

ARCHIPELAGO

Archipelago, a temporary, reflective, floating installation provided the illusion of an alternate space within the context of a real place. It was an oasis of reflection, presenting the real (the water, the sky the trees, the islands) as a displaced illusion, an alternate dimension in an inaccessible location.

This installation by the artist collaborative Wavelady Projects, was launched July 22 in Echo Lake- Acadia National Park, near Southwest Harbor, Maine. Archipelago is an accumulation of reflective, lightweight island formations created out of hundreds of mirrored tesserae. This project was part of the Mount Desert Symposium in the Arts: LANDESCAPES 2004: Desire Lines at the College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor Maine.

You Are Here - is an ongoing project of ground murals that give the passerby a sense of place within a watershed and ecosystem. This provides a unique ecological vantage point that is greater than the local geopolitical boundaries of cities and towns.

ART AS ACTIVISM

A show of Somerville activist artists and politically charged art curated by Anna in January 2002. It was shown at the Brickbottom Gallery in Somerville.

RECLAMATION ARTS

Anna has been a member of The Reclamation Artists (RA) for the past three years. Reclamation artists is a 13 year old collective of Boston area artists that create temporary art sites in maligned or forgotten sites to bring attention and support for these natural sites in urban areas. Sometimes the sites are collaboratively created and other time the artworks are created individually around a central theme.

TOUCHABLE STORIES

Touchable Stories introduces working class communities in Greater Boston to contemporary art while simultaneously using a unique art form known as interactive installation/performance as the platform to dynamically frame neighborhood issues and concerns. Using a ground-breaking approach to art-making, storytelling and oral history, each exhibit is based on audio-recorded interviews with hundreds of community residents, past and present.

iKatun / NEOCOMMEDIA

As the creative consultant for Paradise -- based on the third book of Dante's Divine Comedy -- Anna was involved in producing and creating this immersive installation viewed at the South End open studios at the Lamont Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts, and at Gallery M3 in Fort Point, Boston. iKatun has also curated a related exhibit, info@blah, on view during the Biannual Boston Cyberarts Festival spring 2003.