For the second year running the Upper Falls Greenway became an outdoor sculpture garden thanks to the N²Innovation District. In June sculptures went up all along the Greenway and in the next few days they’ll all be coming down.
One sculpture unfortunately attracted a bit too much of the wrong kind of attention this summer. The Money Tree by Fredrica Smith featured very real looking $20 and $100 bills hanging from branches above the walking path.
Within days after it went up the artist noticed that some bills were missing. A few days later more bills were missing. Within two weeks the entire tree was stripped of all the money.
Says Fredrica “My first reaction was indignation. I couldn’t believe that people were vandalizing the sculpture”.
After two weeks she rehung a new batch of “money” in the tree and immediately the bills began to disappear. Says Smith “my outrage began to morph into curiosity. Who was taking these bills and why?.”
Smith says she decided to turn the Money Tree into a totally different concept. “Rather than steam in my disappointment I thought I’d create a new work based on what was happening to the Money Tree.”
She hid a camera by the tree and captured people reacting to the Money Tree. The resulting video is very funny.
Say’s Smith “When I began viewing the captured video I realized people loved the Money Tree but some people just couldn’t seem to help themselves. The sight of money wafting in the breeze was just too much for them. The more I watched, the more tickled I became.”
Fredrica says “I had assumed it was one person taking the money. Instead she learned it was many people taking a bill or two at a time, day and night.”
Here’s Fredrica’s new creation Money Tree – The Video.
Best video I’ve seen in many moons and it puts flight to the rumors that it was seniors trying to supplement their Social Security and retirement funds.
My favorite bit is the dog walking woman who walks a little circle under the Money Tree for good luck.
I find the cinematography especially moving. Frederica is not only a conceptual artist, but a visual one as well.
She can’t have seriously thought that people wouldn’t try and take undefeated, realistic looking money off a tree right?
Undefended *
Fredrica should be commended for this eye opening and timely social experiment. Otherwise seemingly normal good citizens simply enjoying a stroll are transformed into brazen scandalous vandals at the sight of this magnificent artistic masterpiece. The Money Tree is a sobering reminder of the dystopian society we have become and a harbinger of even more sinister and rampant lawlessness to come. I look forward to more insightful relevant work from Fredrica.
ZZ
@Zeppo
Thanks for your kind words about my work.
I do think the dystopian future you describe is one possible outcome. I believe though that we have the power to choose among an infinite number of futures.
The behavior I’ve captured on the Upper Falls Greenway is a function of the scarcity of money and money trees. My solution is to spread Money Trees to every corner of the city and make them as common as lawns. If there are Money Trees everywhere you look I’m confident that “picking the money” will become no more of a problem that “picking grass” is today.
May all of our futures be filled with money. May we hear complaints/boasts from our neighbors about having “raked up 15 bags of money yesterday.”. May the winds of October blowing money through our villages ignite a new controversy about those new “gas powered money blowers.”. May the virtual Village14 be filled with Money Trees full of Bit Coins dangling just out of reach.
I have high hopes for our money filled future.
The money tree was fun, although there were only two bills left by the time I walked to it yesterday morning.
My 7 year-old granddaughter and I really liked the bells (we made our own music by hitting them with a stick) but the best was the gallery of “First women”: women who were the first ones to do something, invent something or actively fight against something; she knew none of them and I only knew of a few.
Thank you to all the artists who contributed to the Greenway!
@Isabelle – Yes the exhibition was a wonderful addition to the neighborhood this summer.
I also loved the giant pods in the trees … kind of weird/creepy.
I also was completely taken in by the wonderful optical illusion of the orange decahedron high up in the tree. We were walking down the path and my wife pointed it out. She said, see that “it’s a flat 2 dimensional painting”. I said “it definitely isn’t. I can see it’s 3D. It’s all interwoven with the branches up there”. We continued down the path and as usual my wife was of course right.