Street artist Dennis Boylet hasn’t had an easy winter. Since mid-December, he’s slept every night at a Boston shelter and spent days walking the streets, often with nowhere to hunker down and ply his craft as a painter.
Even so, “Sidewalk Dennis” has had a place to paint, pray and enjoy two meals in a group every Wednesday at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in the upscale Back Bay neighborhood. That means he also has somewhere to share personal successes, as he did at 9:00 on a brisk February morning.
“Yesterday was a good day for me,” Boylet says in a prayer circle comprised of unhoused artists, pastors, and friends seated around a cloth-draped piano bench with a lit candle in the center. A massive blue tarp covers the floor beneath them in preparation for all the paints and pallets that he and others would be slinging in the hours to come.
“My painting got sold,” Boylet explains. The buyer had said “she’ll say a prayer for me every time she looks at it. How much sweeter can it get than that?”
This weekly ritual of faith, food, fellowship, and creativity is known as common art. For 21 years, the gathering has drawn homeless and housed artists of varying skill levels, as well as volunteers who help everything go smoothly. Most of the 80 who fill the room at peak times either have no home or have been homeless in the past. They are part of a ministry built on the premise that art-making helps restore a sense of dignity, and everyone can do it.