“The experience of art in a traditional gallery tends to be somewhat restricted,” she said. “We want to remove as many barriers as possible to experiencing art, and this is something we can do easily and bring art to people – literally where they are, on the sidewalk, walking alongside them.”
Craig said the first work, “Out of Nowhere” by Melissa Schack, debuted in January. The gallery then partnered with the Boston LGBTQIA + Artist Alliance to showcase the work of five local transgender artists for a “Trans Experimental” show from mid-February to mid-April.
“It was kind of an experiment – quite an experiment – to see what was going to happen. And then we just had an open call,” said Craig, who co-founded the gallery of contemporary art in 2011.
Videos must be silent for less than 10 minutes, as projectors cannot play audio. Craig said the exhibition was “overwhelmed with entries,” with more than 100 coming from all over the world. Often times, the work of several artists will be exhibited during a particular period.
“There aren’t a lot of places to show the demo video outside of select film festivals here and there,” she said. “There was this need that we didn’t know existed until we could fill it.”
Craig said works should be “visually compelling first,” full of color and lively movement. Videos range from animations to performance art recordings to color-changing streams.
for viewers, “They have to be stopped in a way that grabs their attention and makes them stop and look,” Craig said.
One of the most recent videos featured was Sophie Hodara’s “Telescope Tondos,” which was on display until Christmas. Last winter, Hodara was staying at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn and spent hours looking through her telescope at an unobstructed view of the city.
She decides to mount her iPhone on the telescope and take a series of live photos to “capture the arc of the day” – a basketball running into a hoop, construction workers hammering away, the Statue of Liberty at red dusk – and they are then strung together.
One of the project’s goals, she said, is to document the view that the construction will soon obscure. Another goal was to find a way to connect with the city even when it was confined indoors.
“I felt isolated,” said Hodara, a teaching assistant professor of design at Northeastern University. “This piece expresses and captures the isolation I felt.”
Although the videos have to be silent, some artists, such as Claudia Ruiz Gustafsson, have incorporated text into their videos. Gustafson’s video, “I,” which premiered in May, was inspired by the ancient poem “Thunder, the Perfect Mind,” which is believed to have been written from the perspective of a female deity. The video includes some passages from the poem as subtitles.
The video, filmed on the beach, shows Gustafsson looking out over the horizon. Letting sand fall from between her fingers. Embracing a bird’s wing. At some points, the video flashes back to its negative.
‘I love to go back in time and bring back ideas from the past and add a contemporary twist,’ said Gustafson, who is based in Framingham. “My goal was just to honor our femininity, the power within us – just to create a visual poem, essentially, to answer that old poem.”
Fountain Street Gallery plans to keep the “Sidewalk Video Gallery” indefinitely, said Craig, who was heartened by the way the project has made the gallery’s work more accessible to the public.
Whether or not people actually enter the exhibition, “we will be able to provide them with something unusual and interesting to look at as they go by,” she said.
Dana Gerber can be reached at dana.gerber@globe.com