The Vita Project

Arlington, MA

2019

The Vita Project is a temporary public artwork that playfully explores cross-cultural vitality as a form of physical fitness. Through interactive sculpture, performative prompts and reassertion of indigenous Algonquin language, the artist invites the unsuspecting passerby to participate by cawing like a bird or drawing with toes pointed towards the sky. The project adapts the remaining signs of an historic Vita Course - a series of Swiss exercise stations, also known as “par course,” dating from 1968 and installed in parks throughout the United States - and invents new signs and activities that draw attention to the participant’s relationship to unceded Native territories.

The Vita Project was co-presented by Arlington Public Art with collaborators Sarah Carrier, landscape designer and Cecily Miller, curator, and supported in part by a Local Cultural Council grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Thanks to the Town of Arlington, MA and Friends of Menotomy Rocks Park which in Algonquin means “swiftly moving water.”