Get to Know Your Local: Public Arts & Culture (February 2026)
Want to know how ideas get turned into murals, festivals, and even a river race? I sat down with Watertown’s Public Arts and Culture Planner, Liz Helfer, to get a look into what's coming up for projects, but also to shed a little light on the process behind public art: where concepts start, how partners align, and why the best projects involve conversation between neighbors and experts.
Released February 4th, 2026
(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (Full transcript below)
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City of Watertown Public Arts and Culture Webpage
Watertown Cultural District Website
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This program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
Transcript
Matt: 0:07
Hi there, welcome to the Little Local Conversations Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode I sit down for a conversation to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. And I had a short conversation with Liz Helfer, the Public Arts and Culture Planner for the city of Watertown, to hear about some stuff coming up, but also to get a little bit more background into some of the public art, how it comes about, what there is, and how you could get involved. So here's my conversation with Liz.
Matt: 0:34
I'm sitting here today with Liz Helfer, who is the Public Arts and Culture Planner for the city of Watertown. And we're just going to do a little episode here about getting to know your local public art a little more, what goes into that, what there is, how you can get involved, all those things. So, first of all, do you want to talk a little bit about what we have in the city already, what we have for public art, what's the public art scene here that people might not know about?
Liz: 0:58
Well, I hope most people know about it. But we do have a really lovely collection of public art in the city that includes historic monuments, that includes contemporary sculpture, that includes a whole bunch of murals, a bunch of different styles, including mosaic. We also have things that are privately owned in the city that we also catalog and keep track of.
Matt: 1:17
We also have a lot of public art events and gatherings too, right?
Liz: 1:20
Yes. So I guess I was thinking about permanence there, but we do have a lot of temporary, what we might call temporary public art, things that happen over a brief period of time, maybe for a month, maybe a week, maybe one evening. Some of them are more event-based, and some of them are like the Expert Pairings project about knotweed that was on the community path this past summer, where you might have seen an installation about native plant species. And so those things are temporary, but also very impactful.
Matt: 1:43
Yeah. So maybe we can talk about coming up in the spring here to give us a way to get into some of these topics. So what do we have coming up to look forward to and talk about how it comes about?
Liz: 1:53
We have a lot of public art happening this spring. I will talk about the variety of things that include permanent work as well as semi-permanent work and some event-based stuff. So we have four new sculptures going in for the community sculpture walk. Those are on two-year loan from the artists. That does mean that four of the sculptures that are currently along the community path will be leaving us. It makes us sad, but also happy to see new art.
Matt: 2:14
And that sculpture walk, again, for people who aren't aware, it's behind the library and city hall, behind that field there, behind Saltonstall. I think it goes longer than people realize. It goes all the way down to the river if you keep on following it.
Liz: 2:25
Yes, it does. You have to cross Main Street at a certain point by the Halfway Cafe and keep on going. And so there's a couple of sculptures in that section, which are also very lovely. So we're really excited to have those four new sculptures coming in. We also have one of our other Expert Pairings projects will be coming along with Herring Festival this year, which is hosted by the Charles River Watershed Association. So they're one of our project partners for the Expert Pairings project, which is an environmental art-based project headed up by the Public Arts and Culture Committee. And they're working with muralist Sophy Tuttle to create a mural about the Watertown Dam and the impacts of its removal and on the fish species there. Very fitting for Herring Fest, which is going to be on May 17th. The day after Porchfest. So we can talk about Porchfest, which is going to be on May 16th. We're all very excited to have it come back for year three. Even bigger and better than ever. We have such a dedicated committee. Should be a lot of fun. We'll see if we get 150 bands again.
Matt: 3:17
I think you'll have no problem getting interest.
Liz: 3:19
And then a couple other events I'll mention and we can talk about how some of these things come about. We have Eco Fest is back around for year two. That's from our sustainability team in the Department of Community Development and Planning. And earlier in the day, just before Eco Fest, it's going to be the first Watertown Community Paddle, which is our very first paddle sport race on the Charles River, which we're really excited about.
Matt: 3:39
Yeah, so we got stuff to look forward to. So how do some of these ideas come about? Because I think some people they just see these come up and they're like, where did Porchfest come from? Where did Eco Fest come from? All these things. What's your process for making these happen?
Liz: 3:53
Yeah. Well, people send me a lot of ideas. This is how things start. I don't just randomly grab out of the blue and say, ha, look at this really cool idea off of Instagram or whatever. For Porchfest, for example, I had six different people over the course of about a year and a half say to me, hey, Watertown should have a Porchfest. And eventually I said, hey, you people should sit in the same room. And let's talk about it. And so facilitated that very first kickoff meeting, which was in fall of 2023, I believe. Sounds like October 2023 or something like that. So by February 2024, we had the whole plan in place and we were rocking for May 2024. So we, in about six months, managed to pull off what ended up being a really huge event, a big success, and we're just thrilled to keep going with it.
Matt: 4:40
So it's getting people in a room is a big part of it.
Liz: 4:42
Yeah, getting people who have similar ideas and just making those connections is a really big piece of the puzzle.
Matt: 4:47
Yeah. So like this community paddle, where did that come from?
Liz: 4:50
Okay. One thing people should know about me, I have an affinity for paddle sport, let's say. I grew up canoe racing. My parents were canoe racers. I grew up in this very niche recreational community. So when people kept talking about we need a connection to the river, we want to be connected to the river. And it comes up in plan after plan after plan, our comprehensive plan for the city and the public arts and culture plan for the city. We are a Watertown. Why aren't we more connected to the Charles River? Well, one of the best ways to be connected to the river is to be on the river. And so when I said to the recreation department, hey, maybe we could have a canoe race, they said, oh my gosh, yes, we would love to do a canoe race. Who do we know who could run a canoe race? I said, well, I might have some knowledge about this. So although it's not exactly in the purview of public arts and culture, we could probably make the case for culture here. I said, look, I'll make sure we can make this happen. And so we're having our first canoe race this May. We're so excited. We're partnering with Boston Paddle, which is gonna be letting racers rent boats if they don't have them themselves. And it's just gonna be a really great time.
Matt: 5:49
Yeah. It's okay to insert a little of your own interest to better the public, right?
Liz: 5:54
It's one of one of those ways where sometimes your personal hobbies, you know, offer something.
Matt: 5:58
Yeah. So then how about Expert Pairings and the Eco Fest and Herring Fest?
Liz: 6:04
They all kind of link together. Yeah. And so I will say that interdepartmentally in the city, we are getting better at working together, which is really exciting. We've had such a hiring boom, and there's so many more positions, there's so many more opportunities to collaborate where we might not have had capacity to do that before. And so as the sustainability team has grown, we've seen more opportunity to do more partnerships. So Eco Fest came about directly through the sustainability team. They said, look, we're doing all these really great green initiatives. We should do something to celebrate that and promote all the different opportunities here. Expert Pairings came about a couple years earlier through the Public Arts and Culture Committee. Sally Young in particular said, There's this amazing program I know of. We should be doing something that really celebrates this here because we have some of those same resources and some of that same drive. And so that's how the Edible Watertown project came about. And Expert Pairings is a project under that umbrella that pairs artists and scientists to talk about local ecology. So we've been doing work now for the past three and a half years, almost four years, with the Edible Watertown project, Expert Pairings being the latest iteration. In that time, we've gotten to work with the sustainability team in a bunch of ways, in particular when we ran the school garden internship and did a summer program with students through the schools in order to drive home the values of sustainability and environmental causes, but also to integrate the arts into that system because it's a really important way to engage with the natural world. So we've been making these connections all over the place. Yeah.
Matt: 7:30
Yeah. And I think, how does these come about, answering that question is partnerships. Because you can't plan 20 different things throughout the year. You need these partners and interested people.
Liz: 7:40
So just to be clear, I can plan about 30 things a year.
Matt: 7:44
Okay, sorry. I sold you short. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Liz: 7:47
Just kidding. I wish I was kidding, actually, but we managed to get there. It's about finding content experts. That's a kind of a weird phrase to use, but it really is. It's like who knows this topic so well? We can lean on them for their knowledge. And that's what we did. In particular with the Edible Watertown project, we found so many wonderful content experts to share what they know in order to make that project come to life.
Matt: 8:06
So if someone listening has an idea for a public arts initiative, what should they do?
Liz: 8:11
They should talk to me. And don't be shy. I get all sorts of emails. I get all sorts of phone calls. Oh, I totally left out one of the coolest projects that's coming up. It's a new mural project. And this came about because there was a civics event at the middle school, and the different departments were invited to come and share what they do so that the students could have an understanding of what it is we actually do day to day. So we showed up and these two kids come up like, are you Liz Helfer? And I was like, yeah, wow. Okay. Getting asked for it by name. Very exciting. Like, we have a public art idea. These are two eighth graders, two particularly driven eighth graders, mind you. And they said, we have an idea for a mural that's about being a part of the community, about saying that immigrants matter here and that it's really important that we have this really public message and what's the best way to do that? We think it's public art. I said, let's talk about it. We've followed up. We now have funding. We have two lead artists. We have a student group ready to go. We just finalized our location last week. This mural will be painted this spring under the guidance of two very experienced public artists by a group of students. And we're just absolutely thrilled. So you talk to me and I say, it's a feasible idea, you know, I can find the people who are also going to back this project, we'll make it happen.
Matt: 9:18
Yeah. And where's that mural gonna be?
Liz: 9:20
Well, I hesitate to say without the signatures on the paper, but I do have tentative approval. It'll be right on the east end.
Matt: 9:27
Okay. Just want people to be able to keep an eye out for it if they're looking later.
Liz: 9:31
Oh, yes. It will be highly visible.
Matt: 9:32
Okay, gotcha. Yeah. And then what was it called? Open for Business? Is that?
Liz: 9:36
Oh, yes. So that's, wow, we do have a lot of projects happening.
Matt: 9:40
Yes.
Liz: 9:40
We actually have two new artworks going in, hopefully a third, we're tentative acceptance on that one, that are through our Open for Business project. So this came about because of the construction on Mount Auburn Street. And when the community design division within the Department of Community Development Planning got together and said, what can we do to support business here? We're worried about the economic development side of things. We don't want businesses to flounder in any way because of the construction. And well, what do we need to do to make that happen? We need to drive foot traffic in some way because it's going to get harder to park for different periods of time. Okay, public art again is a wonderful placemaking solution. So we talked to local businesses, got some permissions to use different spaces. Then we put out a call for art that is funded through economic development. And so now we're working with Coolidge Hardware. And you might be familiar, Masary Studios, who is the group that does Solstice, is going to be doing one of the installations. They'll be doing it on the side of Coolidge Hardware. We're absolutely thrilled about that partnership. And then we have a light artist, Elaine Buckholtz, who teaches at MassArt, will be doing an installation at Sullivan Park. And we actually did a little precursor to this in the fall because she teaches an undergraduate course, investigations in light. And she was like, we're looking for opportunities for students to do public style installations. And they used to go all sorts of places that were super far away from Mass Art. I said, come to Watertown. We'll pop something in a park. We'll do a pop-up show. Easy peasy. They came, they did a really cool two-week pop-up installation. Great experience for the students, great experience for us. It confirmed how much we want to keep working with them. We're hoping for more collaboration in the future with the sculpture department at MassArt. Now we have Elaine coming back to do a really cool installation this spring.
Matt: 11:11
So there's a lot of stuff to keep looking forward to.
Liz: 11:12
Oh my gosh.
Matt: 11:13
So where should people try to keep up to date with all this?
Liz: 11:17
We have a wonderful public arts and culture newsletter that goes out. It's called the PAC Bulletin. It comes out through the Cultural District, the Watertown Cultural District. It is a wonderful listing of everything coming up for the coming month. It comes out the first week of every month. You can subscribe to it online through the cultural district website or through the city website. So if you want to get your event listed, just send it to me. I'll make sure it gets in there as much as I can. If we miss a deadline, we'll get in the next one. We just want to share what's going on. You can also join the cultural district and list your events there. If you've got cultural events happening, that's free to do. Just FYI. Very cool spot. Nice central hub of things. You can also go to the public arts and culture web pages on the city website where there's a lot of permanent resources listed.
Matt: 11:58
Awesome. Any other last call to actions?
Liz: 12:01
There's so much happening. I would say do what is good for you. Like there's so many different types of art to engage with. You know, we have the arts center here, Mosesian Center for the Arts is just wonderful, and they're doing more and more. And what all of our public arts entities are doing. There's three public arts related committees, let's say. And I'm just pleased to work with all of them. So keep an eye out. Do the things you want to do, but it's good to engage with art, especially in these times. It makes you feel better.
Matt: 12:26
Agreed. Cool. Well, thanks for sitting down for this little chat.
Liz: 12:29
Absolutely. Thanks, Matt.
Matt: 12:31
So that's it for my conversation with Liz. I'll put some links in the show notes so you can link through to some of those things. If you want to hear more podcast episodes, head on over to LittleLocalConversations.com. There you can find all the episodes, find upcoming events, and sign up for my weekly newsletter. All over at LittleLocalConversations.com. All right, and I want to give a few shout-outs here to wrap things up. First one goes to podcast sponsor, Arsenal Financial. They're a financial planning business here in Watertown that's owned by Doug Orifice, very committed community member from being involved with Watertown Business Coalition, the Cultural District. He was the first guest on this podcast. So his business helps busy families, small businesses, and people close to retirement. So if you need help in any of those areas, reach out to Doug and his team at arsenalfinancial.com. I also want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council, who have given me a grant this year to help support the podcast. So I want to give them the appropriate credit, which is, this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about them at watertownculturalcouncil.org and massculturalcouncil.org. And a couple more shout outs to promotional partners. First one goes to the Watertown Business Coalition, which is a nonprofit organization here in Watertown, and I'm actually currently a board member. And their motto is Community is Our Business. Find out more about them at WatertownBusinessCoalition.com. They have some great events coming up as well. And lastly, Watertown News, which is a Watertown focused online newspaper. It's a great place to keep up to date with everything going on in the city. Check that out at WatertownMANews.com. So that's it. Until next time, take care.
