MISSION

The mission of Medicine Wheel Productions is to enable individuals to access the hidden world through art. The organization invites people to gain awareness of themselves in their communities by participating in the creation of enduring, site specific public art projects in which they explore and share issues unique to their individual and collective experiences.

VISSION

Michael Dowling's Vision Statement

In 1992, I was invited by the Boston Center for the Arts to create an installation in observance of "A Day Without Art" (later to become World AIDS Day). I brought a truckload of stones into the vast brick-floored space of the BCA Cyclorama Building and invited the public to come in and move a stone in remembrance of someone affected by AIDS. At one point during the day I noticed two women struggling with a heavy stone. When I offered to help, one of them replied, "No. My nephew, her son, just died of AIDS. This is our weight."

I knew I was onto something. As an artist, I had provided a context, a vision, a metaphor, evoking the pain of the AIDS epidemic, and invited people to come with me to create something together. The essential element that completed the work turned out to be the experience of the people who participated in it.

That first event at the BCA evolved into "Medicine Wheel", an annual 24-hour vigil within a major sculptural art installation. People from every walk of life and every social class in the Boston area return year after year, for solace, to bring offerings, and to stand on common ground to commemorate the tragedy of this epidemic, or any loss, in their own communities and worldwide.

All my work since that time has been a response to a demonstrated need in a community that also excites my own creative passions. One of the larger projects, No Man's Land, centers on the reclamation of an abandoned lot in my own neighborhood, and has evolved into a year-round youth program that, through the art process, addresses racial tensions, poverty, and addiction. Smaller projects have focused on things like the specific needs of a church community in transition, or a memorial to a beloved community leader.

My process in all these projects is this: I create a dream, and I invite people to help me give it form. These dreams are not idealizations. The art acknowledges pain, loss and conflict, and also joy, beauty, and hope. It invites people to participate directly in an experience that bears witness to their real life experiences, gives them a format to walk in each other's shoes, and suggests the possibility of redemption.

I like to work with natural materials, especially stone, slate, copper, handmade paper, silver gilding and water. Taking my cues from the site where I am working, I create a compelling physical environment that inspires awe and opens people's hearts. Then I invite them to participate in a ritual that engages them emotionally and makes them feel part of something larger. Their experiences become part of the work of art.

At last year's Medicine Wheel, participants carried water during the 24-hour vigil, until the whole floor was covered with thousands of filled buckets. Just as the doors were about to close, a woman came in. She went into the installation, saw the pails, and said, "All those souls." She filled two more buckets and placed them with the others. She told me that her two sons had died of AIDS 15 years ago, and that she had come to the first Medicine Wheel. "I come every year," she said. "It brings it right back like it was yesterday."