We create publications and public text installations in Pittsfield.
Tree Straps
In October 2023, fifty-nine Pittsfield third-graders visited The Clark Art Institute to tour the galleries and grounds and write poems about what they encountered. A line of poetry from each student’s poem was then embroidered upon a tree strap and wrapped around the trees surrounding The Clark and along the path they walked that day. We celebrated with a reception at The Clark for the students and their families.
Tree Tags
Seventy tree tags engraved with student poetry were installed upon the trees running the length of North Street in Pittsfield in the spring of 2023. We celebrated 5th-grade students graduating from Crosby Educational Academy with a luncheon at Hotel on North and a tree tag tour with their families. [Photos by Kenzie Fields]
Hats & Gloves
At the Riverside Sitting Park, at the corner of Dewey and Columbus Avenues, 250 hats, gloves, and mittens embroidered with Fireside student poetry live inside a pink house spanning the length of the guard rail, built in the winter of 2022. The winter gear is restocked weekly in January and available free to the community.
Kellogg Park
In the fall of 2021, at the new pocket park in the Morningside neighborhood of Pittsfield, lines of poetry by second graders in our Fireside program at Morningside Community School were engraved upon the walls. Since then, every Spring, we host a Party in Kellogg Park, a free pizza party & arts celebration, to honor the student poetry & songs written that year at Morningside Community School!
Inscapes
In the summer of 2021, we partnered with the MCLA Institute for the Arts and Humanities on a public poetry-writing project that asked Berkshire residents to write a poem about places significant to them. Select poems were featured in a short film with music by Ben Jaffe, which aired at the Pittsfield Common. Others were installed on billboards throughout Berkshire County. In the fall, MCLA students wrote their own inscapes to appear on posters around campus.
Sidewalks
In October 2020, we painted lines of our Fireside students’ poetry on eight sidewalks in downtown Pittsfield, adjacent to eight new parklets installed by the City of Pittsfield as part of the Shared Streets and Spaces Initiative.
Billboards
Committed to recognizing Pittsfield Public School students as part of the remarkable literary history of Pittsfield, we published student work on five billboards throughout the city in July 2020. Each bright yellow billboard presented three lines of writing: one each by a historic Berkshire author, a virtual resident, and an elementary school student.
Essential Businesses
As we shifted our July 2020 residency online, we worked with essential businesses to connect Pittsfield citizens with our virtual writers-in-residence from around the nation.
Mastheads x The Berkshire Eagle Folds
Our broadsheet folds were inserted into the local newspaper on summer Sundays from 2017-2019. Each issue reached 30,000 local doorsteps. We designed each issue, layering commissioned visual art with original text from our writers-in-residence, scholars, and public school students. Click on the cover images below to read each fold.
The Mastheads Reader
Three robust publications edited and designed by our team to accompany our humanities programming in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Read full texts by clicking on the cover image!
