''Glove Cycle'' is a 1984

public art Public art is art in any Media (arts), media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and phy ...

installation by Mags Harries, located throughout the

Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (abbreviated MBTA and known colloquially as "the T") is the public agency responsible for operating most public transportation services in Greater Boston, Massachusetts. The MBTA transit network in ...

Porter subway and

commuter rail Commuter rail or suburban rail is a Passenger train, passenger rail service that primarily operates within a metropolitan area, connecting Commuting, commuters to a Central business district, central city from adjacent suburbs or commuter town ...

station in Porter Square,

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

. The artwork consists of 54 separate bronze pieces and was created with a budget of

US$ The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and International use of the U.S. dollar, several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introdu ...

30,000.

Sculpture

''Glove Cycle'' is a sculptural installation of 54 separate bronze sculptures of gloves located throughout Porter station.Glove Cycle
. Mags Harries & Lajos Héder. Retrieved May 22, 2012. Individual gloves are located on a

turnstile A turnstile (also called a gateline, baffle gate, automated gate, turn gate in some regions) is a form of gate which allows one person to pass at a time. A turnstile can be configured to enforce One-way traffic#One-way traffic of people, one-way ...

and between the up and down

escalator An escalator is a moving staircase which carries people between floors of a building or structure. It consists of a Electric motor, motor-driven chain of individually linked steps on a track which cycle on a pair of tracks which keep the st ...

s. Small piles of gloves are located at the bottom of the escalators and on the inbound platform, while other gloves are embedded in the floor of both platforms as well as the mezzanine.Arts on the Line:Porter Square MBTA Station
. Cambridge Arts Council. 2002. Accessed October 12, 2010 The gloves are arranged, some in small vignettes, to have different stories and emotions connected to them. Richard Wolkomir of ''

Smithsonian Magazine ''Smithsonian'' is a magazine covering science, history, art, popular culture and innovation. The first issue was published in 1970. History The history of ''Smithsonian'' began when Edward K. Thompson, the retired editor of ''Life'' magazine ...

'' explains that the first gloves one approaches in the station are "a big glove giving birth to a little glove", and that "Some gloves have two thumbs, or only three fingers. One large glove extends a finger toward a smaller glove, like a caricature of

Michelangelo Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6March 147518February 1564), known mononymously as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspir ...

's Jehovah transmitting life to Adam on the Sistine ceiling."Wolkomir, Richard
Sculpture in the subways? Is there a better place for it?
''

''. April 01, 1987. Retrieved June 2, 2012. Robert O. Boorstin from ''

The Harvard Crimson ''The Harvard Crimson'' is the student newspaper at Harvard University, an Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The newspaper was founded in 1873, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduate students. His ...

'' adds that there are gloves "in piles, gripping rails, pushing imaginary buttons—as a constant image that the passenger follows from one point of the station to another".Boorstin, Robert O
Take the Red Line ... Please. Artists on the Line at the Carpenter Center through March 9
''

''. February 26, 1979. Retrieved June 2, 2012. Mags Harries explains that the gloves she crafted "are anthropomorphic objects with many character possibilities and by their multiplication, take on a life form that might be analogous to the people movement in the subway." Robert O. Boorstin claims that this philosophy and explanation are "somewhat extravagant."

History

''Glove Cycle'' was created as a part of the MBTA and the Cambridge Arts Council's "

Arts on the Line Arts on the Line was a program devised to bring art into the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) subway stations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Arts on the Line was the first program of its kind in the United States and became th ...

" program. This first of its kind program was devised to bring art into the MBTA's planned Northwest Extension of the Red Line

subway station A metro station or subway station is a train station for a rapid transit system, which as a whole is usually called a "metro" or "subway". A station provides a means for passengers to purchase Train ticket, tickets, board trains, and Emerg ...

s in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and became a model for similar drives for public art across the country. This installation was one of 20 artworks created for this program, out of over 400 proposals submitted by artists for artworks spread out across five different newly created subway stations. The first 20 artworks, including this one, were completed with a total cost of $695,000

USD The United States dollar (symbol: $; currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introduced the U.S. dollar at par with the Spanish silver dollar, divided it int ...

, or one-half of one percent of the total construction cost of the Red Line Northwest Extension.Red Line Northwest Extension Pamphlet page 5
The Davis Square Tiles Project. Accessed October 10, 2010 The cost of this particular sculpture was $30,000. Gloves was not the first theme that Harries considered for her subterranean artwork. Initially her concept revolved around bronze tree roots appearing to come through the walls and into the stations. This idea was turned down by the architects of Porter Station for bringing attention to the fact that the station is deep underground. Harries stated, "The whole philosophy of subway stations, it turns out, is to make them seem as un-underground as possible," something the tree roots idea would be the exact opposite of. The next theme she considered was to create a flock of sheep-shaped turnstiles. This concept fell to the wayside as the snow from a blizzard in Boston began to melt. Harries began to find lost gloves emerging from the snow. She said that, "They were wet, compacted, squashed—really beautiful!" These lost items gave her the inspiration for her new sculptural theme, gloves. Three of the gloves were stolen during the sculpture's first decade by vandals who broke them out of walls.

References

External links

Mags Harries website
{{Public art in Cambridge, Massachusetts 1984 sculptures Arts on the Line Bronze sculptures in Massachusetts Cambridge, Massachusetts Outdoor sculptures in Massachusetts