Childlike wonders for the taking

Tomorrow morning, if you ride the bus to work, you may find a surprise in your bus shelter: a child-size sculpture crafted from garments made of muslin and beeswax, suspended on a steel frame. A tag attached invites you to take it home and give it a name.

You could call it an art giveaway. Sculptor Mary Giehl prefers to think of it as guerrilla art. Twelve sculptures will be placed in six bus shelters in Boston; Giehl and her coconspirators at Chase Gallery, which presents the project, won't identify the bus stops where the sculptures will be.

In 2004, the Syracuse-based artist placed three of her childlike sculptures in bus shelters around her city every week for 19 weeks. They all found homes.

"I was a nurse for 22 years in the pediatric ICU at [SUNY Upstate Medical] University Hospital," says Giehl. "This is about all the children I took care of."

The sculptures' new owners were asked to send postcards to Giehl with their work's new name. Some arrived with more information than that. One read, "I live with 3 cats also. The same person (who adopted them) adopted me. I am happy. My new name: Jamaal Michael Johnson."

Janice LaVeck found her piece, "Star," in a Syracuse storefront at an event Giehl staged as the culmination of the bus-stop project there. "I love her," LaVeck exclaims over the phone from Syracuse. "She's like a little person in our house."

In a similar event, Chase Gallery invites anyone who takes one of the sculptures home to come to the exhibition opening, on Aug. 1, to meet the artist. More of Giehl's works will be on view as part of "Age of Innocence," a group show. Four more of the childlike sculptures -- each unique, and part of the "Inner Light of Children" series -- will be for sale, at $200 each. Proceeds will go to The Home for Little Wanderers.

Even at $200, the sculptures are a steal. "They would be worth far more than that," says gallery director Jane S. Young, adding that she hadn't determined what their price would be if the commercial gallery were selling them under ordinary circumstances. "We wanted it to be something people would be comfortable giving."

This is the kind of project usually presented by a nonprofit, but when a description of it passed over the transom, Young and co director Stephanie Walker couldn't resist.

"Sometimes there are things you just have to do," says Walker.

In Syracuse, Giehl did the project on her own, without a go-ahead from the city's transportation department. Here, Young and Walker have been in touch with the MBTA, which has signed off on the giveaway.

Giehl thought to give the works away surreptitiously after she'd made more than 100 of them for an exhibition, and was storing them in her basement.

"It was after 9/11, and I said, 'I'm going to give them away.' What will our society do now that the government has set up this distrust?" she says. "It was a test for me to see if we were still trustworthy."

Like a lost child, the sculptures call out to be taken care of. At the same time, stumbling over a work of art, offered as a gift, has an element of kismet to it. At the closing event Giehl staged in Syracuse, only one person who had taken a work home from a bus stop showed up.

Walker thinks she knows why. "People become so enamored with the work," she suggests, "meeting the artist would ruin their fairy - tale."