Art Beat takes a look at the artists in New Bedford's 2022 Seaport Art Walk

New Bedford’s annual Seaport Art Walk was founded by sculptor Jessica Bregoli in 2013 as the city’s first venture into large format outdoor public art installation. Every summer, sculpture and murals are positioned throughout the waterfront and the adjacent Seaport Cultural District.

Guided and curated by Bregoli (herself an exhibiting artist), the Seaport Art Walk is facilitated by New Bedford Creative, housed at the New Bedford Economic Development Council, in collaboration with the City of New Bedford’s Parks, Recreation and Beaches, DATMA, the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth and a host of others.

In past years, the annual exhibitions have revolved around a wide range of subjects including “Historic Women of the South Coast," “Freedom and Equality: the Bicentennial of Frederick Douglass" and “Whirlwind of Art.”

This year’s subject is “Open Spaces.” Bregoli invited artists to create work that considered the concept of open space, physically or metaphorically, such as wilderness, the ocean, mediation, nature or the idea of simply opening up to healing and love.

Bregoli and five other artists created five works of art that are installed along the path of the Art Walk, running from the corner of Route 18 and Elm Street, south to Homer’s Wharf.

One of the responding artists was Jacob Ginga, who exhibits a small two-panel mural, which is effectively a sequel to the mural he did on the very same panels in the very same spot, as part of 2021’s theme: “Tides and Time.”

Then, Ginga painted portraits of two friends, lifelong shellfishermen, who ran a small oyster farm, mentors that he considered irreplaceable father figures. They died in January of 2021. Those paintings, entitled “The Bell Brothers,” were an attempt to process his grief.

For “Open Spaces',' Ginga has painted “Another Year, An Osprey’s Story.” On one panel, a raptor stands proud, his eyes alert and his head encircled by a radiant solar halo; on the other panel, a bird of prey dives toward ocean waves, his talons extended, ready to take a fish. For Ginga, it feels right to reimagine his lost shellfishermen friends as osprey, reincarnated hunters of the unfathomable open space.

Muralist Collin Wetzel’s large-scale painting is on the retaining wall below the upper level parking area of the ferry terminal. Even with the cracked, chipping and uneven surface of the wall, and with a multitude of weeds sprouting from the pavement below, Wetzel’s “A Discovery of the Native Algae, Seaweed and Kelp," painted with a limited palette of midrange blue, olive green, ecru and magenta, is a vibrant celebration of certain beloved open spaces: the shoreline, marshes and beaches of the SouthCoast.

Bregoli collaborated with artist Jessica England to create a mixed media sculpture entitled “Reconnecting.” Situated at the corner of Elm Street and Route 18, at a busy intersection, it is an intriguing triad of female figures. Dead center, upon a patch of rich brown earth, is a monochromatic off-white woman sitting in the lotus position. She wears something akin to a Catholic nun’s habit, recalling classical imagery of the Virgin Mary even as she meditates.

Behind her are two much larger figures, wrapped in tree branches as if harking back to any number of pagan mythologies. It is as if a pair of ancient earth mothers, with disregard for the formalities of the church, the synagogue or the mosque, reach for the lotus pose woman and invite her to rejoin them.

Situated at the corner of Union Street and Route 18 is “Glittering Patterns,” a kinetic sculpture of steel and aluminum by Keith Francis, who gratefully acknowledges the engineering and welding assistance provided by allMetals of Little Compton, Rhode Island.

Photographs of Francis's work do not do it any real justice. Engineered in such a fashion that dozens upon dozens of small, slightly angled aluminum plates spin as the wind hits them, the beauty of the work is in its motion and the way light bounces off it. A stone’s throw from the harbor, the glitter pattern is reminiscent of the sea itself. It is an optical marvel.

The fifth work (in no certain order) is Erin Meade’s “”Mirrored Iridescence.” Much like Francis’s sculpture, the play of light off of shimmering surfaces is the key to its success. Meade utilizes hundreds of old CDs set amidst a small tree in front of the ferry terminal parking lot.

At 7 a.m. on a dazzling bright day, the sun was the composer, directing prismatic color in every which way. As purple and green and orange and pink and blue were distorted and reflected and magnified, it was electrifying.

“Open Spaces” is on display at the Seaport Art Walk, on the New Bedford waterfront (Route 18) throughout the summer.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: New Bedford's 2022 Seaport Art Walk featured in Art Beat column