An island unto herself

The boat arrives just before 11 in the morning, but there's a problem.

It is still March, too early for park rangers to have lowered the docking ramp for the beachcombers who visit Lovell s Island, a remote spot in Boston Harbor. Artist Anna Schuleit and her posse, including her boyfriend and a pair of Harvard students serving as her assistants, begin to discuss how they might climb onto the island.

"I don't think we should go," says Carole Anne Meehan, the Institute of Contemporary Art curator overseeing Schuleit's site-specific commission. She's being responsible. The artist has other ideas.

Wearing army fatigues and hauling a bulging backpack, Schuleit, her blond hair packed under a wool hat, steps onto a floating platform next to the boat. The dock that connects to the sandy beach hovers nearby, separated by a 3-foot gap over the cold Atlantic. Schuleit looks at the barnacle-encrusted wooden timbers supporting the dock and takes a slow, stretching step onto one. From there, she shimmies up the support, then over a fence onto the dock. She's on the island.

"Anna's pretty driven," says Marisa Williamson, one of the Harvard students, after she, too, makes it onto Lovell s.

This is an important trip. The ICA has commissioned Schuleit, 32, winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," to create a piece on the island. Last summer, in preparation, Schuleit lived on Lovells in a yurt, a large round tent.

Schuleit first proposed "Inter'tidal," a project that called for installing hundreds of feet of mirrors just offshore. The museum leaders loved the idea, but said it would cost too much and be too complicated to do this summer.

So Schuleit developed "Sightlines," a plan to etch a series of oversize artworks on a special kind of glass that is both reflective and translucent, then mount the pieces on the island's overgrown gun platforms. Like many of the harbor islands, Lovells once served as a strategic military site. Meehan liked the idea of "Sightlines," but Schuleit still had questions about how it might look, as well as concerns about an installation placed in a spot that bakes in the summer heat.

As she disembarks, she still isn't ready to let go of "Inter'tidal." During the trip, Schuleit talks hopefully of getting the ICA to help her realize the installation in a couple of years. She says she wishes she could get a more definitive answer on its status.

As Schuleit walks ahead on the beach, Meehan explains the ICA's take on "Inter'tidal." Museum director Jill Medvedow does, indeed, love the idea, she says, but it will be expensive -- costing $500,000 to $1 million -- and the complicated process of engineering and permitting could take years. As a reference point, Meehan mentions "The Gates," the 23 miles of saffron-colored arches installed in Central Park by Christo and Jean-Claude in 2005. That project was first proposed 25 years earlier, she says.

Meehan also notes the emphasis placed on opening the new ICA on the waterfront last year. "It just wasn't the right time," Meehan says of "Inter'tidal." "It was all about getting the building opened."

The mirrored scenes will appear like oversized paintings of the landscape. . . Crowds will multiply. Stranded lovers will double. Bathers will watch themselves bathe.

-- from "Inter'tidal" proposal by Anna Schuleit

No can be a difficult word for an artist to hear, whether the issue is money or time. Some push forward, mobilizing supporters and recruiting sponsors. Others stomp out, angry and frustrated. That's the case in North Adams, where Mass MoCA's ongoing dispute with Swiss installation artist Christoph Büchel over a commission has led to a stalemate and an ongoing court case.

Confrontation is not Schuleit's style. In February, at her studio at Harvard University, where she was in the midst of a yearlong fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she made reference to sponsors she'd started lining up who could have helped her do "Inter'tidal." They slipped away when the ICA nixed the project. By May, over coffee in Harvard Square, Schuleit backs off even that light criticism.

"You weigh the benefits of pushing something into a tight and narrow space with the costs," she says calmly, sipping a cappuccino. "This is what we could do in this time frame, on this island, under these circumstances."

Is she upset about "Inter'tidal"?

"I am at peace," Schuleit says.

Still, she continues to advocate for her vision. At an April lecture she gives at Harvard, Schuleit references the mirror project. And afterward, while mingling in the wood-paneled Radcliffe Gymnasium, she is approached by one of her former instructors at the Rhode Island School of Design.

She asks Lucretia Giese if she has mentioned "Inter'tidal" to the people she knows at the ICA. Giese nods.

"That's good," Schuleit says, smiling, and does a soft, excited clap. "Then it can't fall to the side."

What happened to this island, this mere speck of land surrounded by water and backed by a large city to the West? How did its terrain change over time? How has human use marked its landscape?

-- from "Inter'tidal "

It's easy to understand why it's hard for Schuleit to let go. She is no parachute artist, bouncing from commission to commission. Years of research went into "Inter'tidal."

After being approached by the ICA in 2004, Schuleit visited a half dozen other islands. She felt a special connection with Lovells, a short shuttle ride from the better known George's Island. When Schuleit lived in the yurt last summer, as the island's official artist-in-residence, she had no running water and no electricity.

She walked the island with her sketchbook, watching lonely sunbathers and majestic sundowns. She strolled around the gun positions and concrete shelters, now crumbling, a mere reminder of the past. Her final proposal, a book -- bound in twine that had been soaked in sea water and baked in the summer sun -- explained the concept.

"I was looking at maps of Lovells," she wrote in her proposal, "when I realized that these gun batteries most strongly defined the hidden axes of the island: their directional positions, pointing to unseen targets, pull one's eyes off and beyond the map. Wondering where the guns could reach. Where they aimed. I wish to reverse this directional pull."

The mirrors would be mounted close to shore, reflecting the water, sky, visitors, and decaying military structures, a symbolic way of neutralizing them. The artist would row out each morning, washing and wiping them down as the sun rose over the water. As expensive as the project could be, it somehow seemed within reach.

After all, Schuleit had already accomplished so much. In 2000, she wired speakers throughout the abandoned Northampton State Hospital and piped in a recording of Bach's "Magnificat," a project that earned her raves in the Washington Post.

In 2003, Schuleit created an even more ambitious work at another shuttered hospital, the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston. For "Bloom," Schuleit turned the facility into a vast, meandering Impressionist canvas by carpeting the floors with 28,000 tulips, heathers, and African violets.

Why flowers? Schuleit researched the number of patients at the facility over the years and calculated how many flowers they would have received -- if people sent flowers to the institutionalized.

The projects garnered attention for Schuleit and, last year, were cited in the MacArthur Foundation's decision to award the German-born artist a $500,000 fellowship, or genius grant.

Ken Duckworth, then the deputy commissioner for clinical and professional services at the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, remembers when Schuleit approached him with the idea for "Bloom."

"She had this vision, but no money, no permission, no budget," he remembers. "I didn't know her at all but as soon as I met her, I said, 'This is the real thing.' And told her, 'I'll help you in any way I can.' I still didn't think she could do it. And she was completely unstoppable. I never saw anybody like her."

Schuleit has done the Charlie Rose show, lectured at Harvard, and spoken with reporters across the country. But she can still appear ill at ease during interviews. Sitting a few weeks ago at a picnic bench on Lovell s, she submits to a few questions. By now, the museum has told her that "Sightlines" can't be done. Again, the issues are cost, permitting, and deadlines.

Her new idea is far less ambitious: A yurt will be installed to replicate her summer home. The ICA will fill it with her beach sketches, models for "Inter'tidal," and written proposals for it and "Sightlines."

As her crew works to ready the yurt, she is asked about her artistic motivation. Schuleit closes up.

"I was born into a family of artists and feel this is my skill," she says tersely.

As the interview progresses to more personal questions, Schuleit looks down and runs a hand roughly through her hair. Silence follows.

Finally, after an awkward pause, she explains that she's not comfortable talking about herself. She also doesn't want her family members interviewed, nor her boyfriend, the award-winning magazine writer Wyatt Mason.

"I enjoy privacy," Schuleit says, "and the more you probe, the more reluctant I get about opening up."

A few days later, in an e-mail exchange, she shares a few biographical basics. She was born in Mainz, Germany. Her father, who died when she was 18, was a designer in Switzerland. Her mother is an artist who runs an art center in Frankfurt. She has three sisters, one an artist, another an animator, and a third who is a mime. Her lone brother is an architect.

In an interview, Schuleit won't explain her apparent attraction to desolate, forgotten spaces -- closed mental health facilities, an abandoned military site -- and her interest in reclaiming them. But Duckworth says the artist's connection to such places could be rooted in her family history; her late father had a form of bipolar disorder. Also, last year, during a public talk at the New York Public Library, Schuleit referenced her own struggles as a teenager with depression.

In her Harvard talk, Schuleit discusses the organic process that leads to her ideas, her belief in the "power of daydreams," and how her ideas have to grow out of a relationship with a site.

"Daydreams are elusive if you're in a rush," she tells the audience. "They bend and submit if you spent time with them."

Viewers will arrive by ferry and stroll around the island by themselves or with friends, coming across each of the mirrored sites leisurely, half-unexpected.

-- from "Inter'tidal "

The artist is gone. The yurt remains.

Schuleit's final piece, called "Waterside," is just a short walk from the dock. It is a strange installation, an assemblage that captures a process, a still-unrealized dream. That sense of loss -- and hope of recovery -- hangs over the domed tent.

There is a breeze on the beach. Inside, the air is stale, though cooler when you kneel to scoop up a handful of the white sand on the floor. This is what Schuleit saw and heard during her summer: green, scrubby plants just outside the yurt's windows, crickets, birds, and an occasional plane overhead, a boat's engine accelerating as it passes.

Eleven jagged images of sunbathers, sketched by Schuleit last summer, have been scanned onto acrylic sheets and hung around the yurt. The figures seem to languish, not luxuriate in the sun -- eyes closed, unsmiling.

The ICA calls "Waterside" an installation, but Schuleit bristles at that term. It's a "work in progress," she says. Because so much inside the yurt is about what didn't happen, not what did.

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com. For more on the arts, go to boston.com/ae/ theater_arts/exhibitionist.