CAMBRIDGE -- The exhibition ''Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler: America Starts Here" tells the tale of two plucky young artists who traveled all over America making open-hearted and incisive conceptual art pieces that challenged the very definition of public art. It's also a love story that ends tragically with Ericson's 1995 death from brain cancer at 39.
The show, at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, poses the surprising notion that good artists make good neighbors. At least these artists did.
It wasn't just that they cleaned up after themselves -- which they did so well that many of their projects have disappeared. Ericson and Ziegler's work was intrinsic to its social context. Often, it couldn't exist without the cooperation and active participation of the community in which it appeared. They followed the lead of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose work involves cajoling communities into signing on to dramatic and temporary interventions in the landscape. But Christo and Jeanne-Claude make art about beauty. Ericson and Ziegler's art was about the collective identity of a community, whether that community is a neighborhood, a museum, or a nation.
The artists, who were married, were cultural landscape artists. They practiced the tenets of environmental philosopher J.B. Jackson, who saw meaning encoded in the landscape. Ericson and Ziegler poetically decoded layers of history, economics, and power relationships to question the stories we tell about who we are.
Pulling off the enchanting ''America Starts Here," organized in tandem with the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, was problematic. Curators Bill Arning and Ian Berry knew the difficulties going in: How do you bring public art, much of which no longer exists, into a museum?
They handle the issue deftly, with an extensive documentary slide show in a small gallery across the hall from the List Center. The hefty catalog bubbles with chatty, thoughtful reminiscences by students, artists, and curators who knew the pair.
Slide shows and catalogs will never be the same as being in, say, Charleston, S.C., in 1991 for the making of ''Camouflaged History," here represented by a dollhouse. It's a model of an elderly minister's house on the outskirts of the city's historic district. Many of Ericson and Ziegler's projects resulted in tangible improvements to private and public property. Here, they offered the minister a free paint job. He got a fresh coat, and they got to shine a light on tourism's packaged notions of history.