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The story of those baby heads on the MFA lawn

The story of those baby heads on the MFA lawn

Diane Kilgore

Two monumental baby-head sculptures adorn Boston's linked landscape as they rest on the Fenway entrance lawn of the Museum of Fine Arts. Presiding over the Fenway section of Fredrick Law Olmsted's metaphorical emerald necklace, the baby heads' ephemeral, innocent countenances encourage full-spectrum consideration of potential role-reversal relationships between parent and child, teacher and student, servant and master. Their overwhelming presence symbolically links our humanity, defying gender, language, and religion while transcending time.

Fascinated by his four grandchildren, Antonio Lopez Garcia of Madrid cast the allegorical baby-head bronzes, Day and Night, into artistically dense, composite statements of monumental ideal. The complimentary figures capture a resemblance to those he loved so completely in their fleeting baby days. In a book written by Cheryl Brutvan to enhance a 2008 MFA retrospective of the works of Garcia, the former Head of the Contemporary Art Department said of the baby heads, " the relationship between sculpture and viewer becomes inverted, as the latter goes from being dominate to being dominated."

Identity lost: How modern politics are tearing America apart
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Identity lost: How modern politics are tearing America apart

Joe Kotler

I'm so sick and tired of hearing Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders talk about how hard they're fighting. Everything in the political world today is all about fighting… fighting, fighting, fighting. There are no winners in a political fight, there is only collateral damage, i.e., you and me. At the very first Democratic debate of this political season, the last question asked by the moderator was, "Who do you see as your greatest enemy?" Clinton's answer was not Iran, not Russia, but the Republicans. The Republicans! Her own fellow Americans are her greatest enemy. That's just not politics, that's civil war. Why can't we be Americans first? Rather than Democrats and Republicans first? Why can't we work together and work for compromise rather than fighting to win something that we cannot possibly put our collective fingers on? Don't we all want the same things? Don't we want to make a better life for ourselves in the future as well as for our children's futures? Why can't we lay down our weapons of vernacularism, and pick up the tools of compromise? Do we always have to get 100 percent of everything we want every single time we want it?

Isn't there enough fighting around the world already? We have Islamic extremists groups growing like weeds all over the world, recruiting people from over 80 countries worldwide and instead of focusing our energies on a method of ensuring our survival, we're fighting each other like children over what color crayon to color with next. Does it really matter which bathroom someone uses when there are jihadists with machine guns ready to kill them on their way to the "correct" bathroom? It's like saying, "So-and-so was murdered on their way to the bathroom in a terrorist attack, but at least they knew which bathroom they could use." Where has the value of human life gone?

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