Mags Harries & Lajos Héder C
Title: The Bronx River Golden Ball
Medium: Gilded fiberglass ball, dancers, musicians, canoes, mirrors and stickers
Location: Ten-Mile route along the Bronx River, NY, (1999-2000)
Public art is a lot more than placing objects in public; it can reach every aspect of the environment and realize the poetic possibilities of the place. We make art that shapes communities, creates rituals, and makes public places resonate with history, memory, and possibilities. For each commission our project evolves in response to the place, the landscape, the climate, the buildings, the streets, the people, and the stories. Our conceptual proposals grow out of these on-site activities. Most of our projects involve extensive interaction with the host communities. The temporary performance of The Bronx River Golden Ball worked to unite 27 diverse communities together through the river. The works we create are intrinsically bound to the place and community in which they exist. They are not static, but work to instigate questions, exploration, and a sense of community.
Mags Harries & Lajos Héder formed Harries/Héder Collaborative in Cambridge, MA in 1990 and have worked together on all major public commissions since then. Mags brings to the collaboration her training in sculpture, teaching and 20 years of work in public art and Lajos, in addition to working as an artist, is experienced in community projects, urban design, site planning, architecture and construction. They regularly collaborate with other designers, landscape architects, engineers and fabricators to realize our large-scale, complex projects.
Mags Harries' public art projects have received national recognition and have won many awards. They are also popular and accessible. She observes the small things that, like DNA, reveal all that is important to know about a place. She looks for the charged image, the jolt of electricity that often lies dormant, but can be released to energize a public place and the community. Some of her older projects, such as Asaroton '76 cross walk at Boston 's Haymarket and Glove Cycle at the Porter Square, Cambridge MA, subway station, have become landmarks for communities.
Mags frequently designs her work with landscape materials as in Three Gardens at the Decordova Museum and much of her work responds to environmental issues as in her 1990 installation River Runes at ArtPark. She uses large-scale public structures as elements of sculptural composition, as in Man from City Hall. She has an increasing interest in water and city scale elements of infrastructure, pathways and connections. Mags teaches sculpture and public art at the Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts and gives lectures and workshops around the country on public art. She has exhibited her work in numerous one person and group shows and installations in museums and institutions around the country.
Lajos Héder is an environmental artist with a background in architecture and urban design. He has spent his career designing and building public places for active community use. He believes that art derives from the specific place where it happens and from common interests in life, death, sunlight, water, sex, food, friendship, stories, etc., not so much from other art. Lajos' strengths are the understanding of urban scale and activity, visualizing architectural spaces from drawings and fitting the art works into the process of design and construction. Besides his public artwork he has designed many downtown pedestrian plans and 6 completed artists' live/work communities. He was also the designer of prize-winning entries for two international competitions in his native Budapest, Hungary: the new National Theater in 1989 and Expo '96 in 1990.
Harries-Heder
