Museum awards first 'PEM Prize'

Aug. 2—SALEM — Peabody Essex Museum has used the first-ever awarding of a new annual prize to bring back music COVID-19 took away.

"Partitura," a complex street music-based installation merging performances from around the world, will reopen at Peabody Essex Sunday and will run through Feb. 6. The installation, created by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa, first opened at Peabody Essex last March but was shut down after four days due to the emerging pandemic.

The museum has brought Garaicoa back through the PEM Prize, a sizable annual cash award given to art that "emphasizes collaboration and sparks new creative endeavors." The prize, worth $25,000, will enable "a series of events and civic engagement initiatives with the museum to coincide with the reopening of Partitura," according to an announcement from PEM. The events will all be free.

"The PEM Prize, it really originates with this idea that artists change the way we see the world and the way we can imagine our relationships to one another," said Trevor Smith, PEM's associate director of Multisensory Experience. "Over the last year and a half, as we've gone through this exceptional period under COVID, we've become more aware of how important our interactions with artists are, how they've changed the way we work at PEM."

Street music is a common experience around Salem; in fact, it's often heard by the fountain in East India Square, right outside of Peabody Essex's walls. This installation, meanwhile, allows guests to experience street music from all over the world, with videos of each musician playing on stands arranged like an orchestra. The installation is completed by three large video screens faced by all the stands.

Partitura has popped up around the world over the last several years and recently opened in Tuscany, Garaicoa said. PEM's first interaction with it came when it was on display in Madrid in 2019.

A year and a half into the pandemic, Partitura has taken on new meaning, Garaicoa said.

Music is "the ultimate language," he said, one that "has nothing to do with nationality or identity. Identity and nationality are only the final garnish, the final coat to the musician."

Now, street music speaks to a return to life and normalcy, and a rebuilding of community, Garaicoa said.

"The city is attempting to come to life, attempting to resuscitate what they had before, how they interact," Garaicoa said. "This piece is talking about this community that we had before, that we want to enter again."

The museum said the PEM Prize will go each year "to artists from any field whose work explores the catalytic relationship between creativity and civic engagement."

"Reinvigorating and reimagining the communities in which we live, these artists are leaders, connecting us to the possibilities that exist for a more inclusive and understanding world," Peabody Essex's announcement read. "The PEM Prize will go to individuals or groups who aim to deepen our global cultural connections, ignite our imaginations, and inspire us to action."

As such, Garaicoa was a natural first recipient, Smith said.

"It acknowledges the importance of living artists and provides an actual meaningful prize — in a financial sense — to them," Smith said. "But beyond that, there's an artist who values the relationship a museum has with its public, who wants to engage in projects that use creativity to transform how we understand our communities, or the potential of our communities."

For more on the PEM Prize and details on upcoming events, visit pem.org/the-pem-prize.

To respond to this story or suggest another, contact Dustin Luca at 978-338-2523 or DLuca@salemnews.com. Follow him at facebook.com/dustinluca or on Twitter @DustinLucaSN.