Arts News

First, there were pop-up toys like Jack-in-the-box. Next came the pop-up shops that temporarily occupy vacant commercial spaces, usually selling crafts and seasonal goods around Christmastime. And, now there are pop-up museums. Locally, the Design Museum Boston is the city’s only pop-up museum and its first museum dedicated exclusively to design.

On a Tuesday night in December, when much of New England was hunkered down against the cold, hundreds of people stood on the sidewalk in front of the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, to view the light projections of artist and social activist Jenny Holzer. For the site-specific work, which the museum commissioned in celebration of the 10th anniversary of its Leonard and Merle Nelson Social Justice Fund, Holzer chose selections from the poetry of Nobel Prize-winning, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska.

Somerville, MA - On an otherwise ordinary warm spring night, about 40 people gathered for free spaghetti, socializing and learning at Sprout, a community learning space at 339R Summer Street near Davis Square. Sprout seeks to actively engage the public with an interactive and broad form of science education. Continuing with its monthly spaghetti dinner, on Wednesday evening the space hosted four performance artists who presented their versions of “Performance in a Public Space.”

Somerville and Cambridge, MA - Davis Square thronged with crowds excited to see the dozens of marching bands from around the world performing at this weekend's Honk! Festival. Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society kicked off the music and arts festival Saturday afternoon at 7 Hills Park, taking band attendance in loud, rowdy fashion, and sending them marching to all corners of Davis to perform throughout the day. Sunday, bands paraded from Davis square down Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square for encore performances at Oktoberfest. Photo, audio, and video coverage follows.