Speaking up, speaking out about suicide – Samaritans hope to reach teens at House of Blues
By John M. Guilfoil – Globe Staff / February 20, 2010

The recent suicide of South Hadley teenager Phoebe Prince brought the issue of bullying to the forefront of the state’s collective conscience, but one local group hopes to call attention to the underlying issue of teen depression and teen suicide with an event tonight at the House of Blues.

“Make Noise to Save a Life’’ hopes to raise $20,000 for the Samaritans, a suicide-prevention organization. The premise for the concert, with DJ Joe Bermudez, is to encourage participants to dress in brightly colored, loud clothing and make some noise on the dance floor to put the spotlight on depression and suicide, which Samaritans considers a silent affliction, particularly among teenagers.

Organizers hope the 6 p.m. event at the Lansdowne Street club will attract 1,500 young people.

“Our goal is to end the silence and bring the subject of psychiatric illness and suicide out from the darkness and into the light,’’ said Debbie DiMasi, whose brother, military veteran Jeff Kinlin, took his own life at age 47 in 2006. DiMasi, of Boston, arranged the event with her daughter, Ashley Marchal, 20, a junior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Warhol Polaroids, plain and simple
By Mark Feeney – Globe Staff / February 20, 2010

CAMBRIDGE – “Photographs From the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program’’ has a title that’s bigger than the actual show. There are just 22 images, nearly all of them Polaroids taken by Warhol. There are also two black-and-white photographs of him at work – though not in the studio. In one we get Andy being made up, in the other Andy acting in a TV commercial. It’s something so obvious that we tend to overlook that Andy’s greatest creation, like Oscar Wilde’s, was his own life: the persona as masterpiece. He was the ultimate performance artist.

The show’s not only small but out of the way. Although it’s presented under the aegis of MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, it’s displayed elsewhere on campus, in the Dean’s Gallery at the Sloan School of Management. Warhol, that least-illusioned of artists, would probably have approved of the functionality of the setting. Offices lead off of the gallery, and the space even has a few work cubicles in it.

The art isn’t a distraction, though. The images are small. Most are 4.25 inches by 3.38 inches. Their presence is small, too. They’re Polaroids, after all. They’re unimposing, uninflected, casual, disposable, very much now. They also have that slightly unreal Polaroid palette. It feels rather natural, actually, in a closed-off office environment. The lipstick worn by the art dealer Pat Hearn in one of the portraits is a shade of red only a hematologist could love.

[PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE ANDY WARHOL PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY PROGRAM - At: Dean’s Gallery, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 50 Memorial Dr., Room 466, Cambridge, through April 23. 617-253-4680, listart.mit.edu ]

BPL celebrates Black History
By Amanda Cedrone/Huntington News – February 18, 2010

The Boston Public Library continues celebrating Black History Month with an offering of performances, exhibits and other events open to the public before March.

“Celebrating Black History Month is a longstanding tradition at the Boston Public Library,” said Gina Perille, communications manager for the Boston Public Library. “We do this through events, exhibitions, publications and through highlighting elements of our special collections.”

Both citizens of Boston and the Boston Public Library collected information and pieces for the exhibit for more than 160 years, Perille said. Other parts of the Black History Month exhibits, like the “Black Is” book list, are newer. The booklist was published online in 1993 and lists novels concerning blacks each year, it can be found at Bpl.org/research/adultbooklists/blackis.htm.

The events change from year to year; this month the events include a class to learn the art of African head wrapping, a poem festival, a week long film festival series celebrating the history of Black Americans and African and Caribbean dance lessons.

“Celebrating and preserving elements of our nation’s history are part of the daily fabric of the Boston Public Library,” Perille said. “The Boston Public Library is truly ‘Free to All,’ as is carved above the doors at the Central Library in Copley Square. We genuinely offer programs for all ages and all lifelong learners.”

The anti-slavery collection within the Boston Public Library is a large collection of correspondence and other first-hand documents related to the anti-slavery movement and something of which members of the library are extremely proud, Perille said.

Students band together to save Band – Musical sculptures to play once more at Kendall Station
By Ziwei Hao – TECH STAFF REPORTER – February 19, 2010

Pythagoras, Kepler, Galileo may have finally found their saviors — in MIT students. Recently, students formed a group to restore the three musical sculptures in the Kendall T station, which have been in disrepair since at least 2007.

Though the timeline is still up in air, members of the Kendall Band Preservation Society estimate that repairs will begin within a month.

The Kendall Band was created by local artist Paul Matisse and installed in 1987. It is composed of Pythagoras, a set of long tubular bells; Kepler, a large metal ring; and Kepler, a rumbling sheet of metal. In 2007, The Boston Globe reported that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority did not have the money to repair the sculptures. They have remained broken or barely functioning.

Seth G. Parker, a principal at Levitan & Associates, a local energy consulting firm got the idea late last year that MIT could help. Parker contacted Clarise E. Snyder, who heads the Concerts Office in Music and Theater Arts, to ask if MIT students were interested in fixing the Kendall Band.

Snyder passed on the message. “I was intrigued by the idea and said that it seemed like a very good fit for MIT music and engineering students,” Snyder said. She first contacted Matisse, who was “delighted at the prospect of having MIT students repair the sculpture,” she said.