Great Boston Kite Festival: City Hall Installation

Client

Committee for the Better Use of Air

Description

Featuring 600 kites curated from the personal collection of designer Charles Eames, this exhibit was installed in Boston’s City Hall in the weeks leading up to the first Great Boston Kite Festival. Sand had interned for Charles Eames as a college student less than a decade earlier and it’s possible he pulled some (kite) strings to facilitate the contribution. The brightly-colored kites were hung throughout the Brutalist corners of Boston’s new—and controversial—City Hall: “‘All the public spaces will be riddled with kites,’ said Fenton Hollander, 33, a Cambridge architect and member of the Committee for the Better Use of Air, Inc., which is sponsoring the festival with the City Parks Dept.”¹

Special thanks to artist Darrah Bowden for her research, enabling us to identify many of the GBKF-related images in the collection and expand on their descriptions.