By Anna Marden, News Staff
Four members of the Boston art collective Greatfruit Productions sat down on the AstroTurf at their new permanent venue, Yes.Oui.Si, and attempted to tie themselves into a human knot comfortably enough so they could maintain this position for the duration of the interview. They settled on sitting in a line against the wall, overlapping their legs and putting their arms around each other.
At 19 Vancouver St., Yes.Oui.Si now occupies the property that used to be known as Rice Bowl Gallery. A celebratory multi-genre art show with live music and spoken word poetry took place there Feb. 11 to honor the grand opening of the space as well as its debut exhibition, Cycles.
Olivia Ives-Flores, 21, a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) and the creative director at Yes.Oui.Si called the space a creativity hub, where people involved in making all varieties of art can come together.
“It’s a gathering place for creative people to share ideas,” said Miguel de Braganza, a senior multimedia production major at the Berklee College of Music and the executive director of Yes.Oui.Si.
Yes.Oui.Si is operated by the members of the Greatfruit Productions collective, a group of 15 to 20 local artists and musicians who have worked together on art shows since the spring of 2007.
Greatfruit Productions received the funding to open Yes.Oui.Si from the late Billy Ruane, a legendary booking agent from The Middle East Club and philanthropist in the music community, de Braganza said.
“He really supported the idea of a space that united music and art,” de Braganza said.
Ives-Flores said no other establishment in Boston provides a platform for young musicians, artists and other creators to come together in one location and support themselves by displaying and selling their works at a public location. All the art in the Cycles show is on sale from $6 to $2,000.
“One of the things that differentiates Yes.Oui.Si space from pop-up shows that happen in basements or one-offs [one-time, large scale underground shows] is that we can advertise this space,” de Braganza said. “We can get this space out into the greater public of Boston and invite them in here and it’s not like, you know, inviting them into our living room.”
The organizers at Yes.Oui.Si emphasised the diversity of the space, insisting that it’s not a “gallery.”
“So many things happen, and it mashes all together as one, which makes it so wonderful,” said Adrian Molina, a SMFA graduate and space coordinator at Yes.Oui.Si. “There’s a lot of local zines that get shown here and a lot of local music that gets played here, whether live or through a record or a tape.”
One permanent fixture at Yes.Oui.Si is “the bazaar,” a marketplace area at the front of the space that displays some of the more “marketable” handmade goods, like apparel, zines, CDs, records, ceramics, paper products and affordable wall art.
The Cycles show, a multi-sensory exhibit based on the idea that cycles are in everything and could be tied in to all genres of art, will run through March 11.
“We realized that cycles [are] literally in everything, everywhere. The atmosphere, the [tides], lunar cycles, Miguel’s favorite is the menstrual cycle,” Ives-Flores joked. “We just wanted to touch in on something that everybody knows and everybody can relate to.”
De Braganza said one of the goals for group shows at Yes.Oui.Si is to choose topics or themes that are really broad.
“We accept all mediums, so in this show we have oil paintings, we have drawings, we have video art, we have sculptures, we have photocopy art, we have photography, we have ceramics, we have metal sculpture,” Ives-Flores said.
Cycles includes 32 art pieces and works by 29 artists; members of the Greatfruit Productions collective had to sort through 179 submissions in order to choose those that made the final cut.
“Before this permanent operation, we did several shows,” said Ellie Wetherby, a SMFA student and Greatfruit member. “Before having this permanent space we sort of took advantage of some of the part time shows we could do. … So, this is now our chance to be able to do that continually.”
Wetherby said some Greatfruit members are in charge of running the front bazaar while others work more in the gallery. She said other duties include fundraising, marketing and website moderating. Everyone works together to make Yes.Oui.Si possible.
“People show up and then things get done and it’s a lot of fun,” said Andrew Hlynski, a SMFA student and tech specialist for Greatfruit Productions.
For the future at Yes.Oui.Si, de Braganza said he has been hearing many proposals of awesome ideas for upcoming shows, including an idea proposed by the Anarchist Black Cross group to showcase prisoner artwork.
The next show opens March 17, de Braganza said, and will be a duo show of the work of two SMFA students, Alexa Guariglia and Jaques Cazaubon.
Another aspect to Yes.Oui.Si is that it’s interactive, de Braganza said. Some of the events Greatfruit plans on hosting include yoga sessions, hands-on art workshops, music shows that involve dancing and of course, some of the art on display is interactive.
“You can touch it, you can sniff it, you can look at it,” Ives-Flores said. “You can lick it, if you want to,” Molina added. “We’re not a museum,” he said.
