Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway public art this summer will focus on transportation

The Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway plans to install by the end of May a series of public artworks that will not only nod to the famed linear park’s birth out of the Big Dig but will explore what its managing body describes as “the form of the automobile and the imaginative qualities of construction and movement through ideas of transportation.”

Per an April 25 release from the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, “The Auto Show” will include:

• an exaggerated Porsche 924 shaped to resemble a UFO by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm
• an outdoor photo exhibit featuring hyper-real impossible compositions of twisting and contorting vintage vehicles by Scottish computer-generated-image artist Chris Labrooy
• a field of kinetic works inspired by the patterns and symbols of transportation and street markings, exploring our relationship with the symbolism of the automobile and road, by Texas artist Julie Libersat
• an illuminated stain-glassed artwork that acknowledges and celebrates nature’s’ approach to building/making/construction and how those aspects influence applications in the human built environment by Midwest artist Karl Unnasch
• an augmented-reality installation, in partnership with Boston Cyberarts, exploring the themes of transportation and the automobile, superimposed with views of the Greenway, combining the past, future, and the present
• a live demonstration of auto pin-striping scheduled for August

And all of it will be displayed within a five-block section from High to North streets along a 1.5-mile park erected where once the Central Artery rumbled, honked, and belched its way through Boston.

The Big Dig project, of course, sunk the artery and other roadways, and reconnected Boston, along with spawning the Greenway, which has now been under the conservancy’s direction for 10 years.

Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy

“This exhibit responds to the ever-changing nature of what once was a major transportation corridor through downtown Boston, and invites the public to conceive new possibilities in reinterpreting our shared civic spaces,” Lucas Cowan, the Greenway’s public art curator, said in a statement.

“Each of the artists in this exhibit brings a unique perspective on how transportation can reimagine and transform our unique cities for the betterment, by placing these works in the contemporary landscape that is now the Greenway.”

Labrooy’s work was installed during the third week of April between North and Hanover streets in the North End (it’s pictured here). The others are following as is a new mural on the Greenway Wall in Dewey Square in early May from Dutch street and gallery artist SUPER A (Stefan Thelen). Stay tuned.