An art class taught on two wheels
Bike tour spots sites many miss
Urban bicycling and art appreciation might not immediately seem like compatible enterprises: Museum guards and gallery owners typically frown on indoor biking, while out on the street the main concern for city cyclists is survival, not surrealism.
But Andrew Prescott, founder and ''chief wheel officer" of Urban AdvenTours, a bicycle touring company, thinks otherwise: Bikes, he says, are the best way to take in the city's artistic side.
''What I really want people to understand is that it's a small city. You can get around the whole city, in a day, on a bike," he says. ''You can't really do it any other way."
Last weekend, the company, which offers guided photography, sightseeing, and picnic tours of Boston and Cambridge, gave a dozen cyclists a chance to test out a new route that takes in a cross-section of art and architecture, from the façade of the Boston Public Library and a floating pyramid in South Boston to the jumble of the Stata Center at MIT. Starting from Boston Bicycles on Beacon Street just outside Kenmore Square, the tour's first stop was the Boston Women's Memorial on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, where the riders paused to listen to co-guide Lino Ribeiro, 25, a new-media artist and student at the Art Institute of Boston, offer his take on the art and its place in history.
''One key theme that I tried to work with was selecting figurative sculptures that strayed from the traditional subjects," said Ribeiro, after the group had remounted and moved down the Mall. ''So rather than statesmen and war heroes, select [artworks] that represent progressive thought in which the artist had a completely different approach."
From there, the tour wound through the Back Bay to the Christian Science Center (where Prescott pointed out the I.M. Pei architecture and urged music lovers in the pack to check out the legendary club Wally's, a few blocks away), down through the South End and Chinatown. Here, the moderate pace of the tour slowed to a near-crawl in the midst of weekend foot and car traffic, but after a few stop-and-go blocks, the pack got back up to speed as it passed by South Station and headed toward South Boston. Partway across the Summer Street Bridge, the group stopped to take in a strange new addition to the urban landscape: Don Eyles's ''Pyramis Redux," a 10-foot-high, 16-foot-wide gray ''stone" pyramid floating on the surface of the Fort Point Channel. The ''stones," Ribeiro explained, are actually polystyrene bricks mounted on a raft moored to the channel bottom, which allows the structure to drift and twist slightly with the tide.
Following a stop in which Prescott pointed out the environmentally friendly US headquarters of
''It's cool so far," said 20-year David Rubenstein, a student at
Even the more veteran cyclists in the group found the tour to be an eye-opener, like 48-year-old Chris Barbour of the Fenway.
''I've been riding in the city for 20 years, and seen some things that I've never really thought about," he said. ''The Women's Memorial, the artistic idea behind it. I always ride by it."
Crossing back into downtown Boston, the tour followed the waterfront to the North End, made its way up crowded Hanover Street and its newly restored connection to Haymarket, then over to Cambridge via the Longfellow Bridge for a jaw-dropping -- even for those who had already seen it -- lap around MIT's Stata Center. After covering a little more than a dozen miles in 2 1/2 hours, the final scenic stop was the midpoint of the Boston University Bridge between Allston and Cambridgeport, where Prescott pointed out the various modes of transportation above and below (boat, bike, train, plane, car, and pedestrian) and the downtown skyline, a view that many on the tour had seen, but few had really stopped to look at.
''A lot of times when you're riding by yourself, you don't ever get off your bike, because you have a goal, you're going to a destination," said 25-year-old Nicole Falk of Newton. ''So it's cool to stop in the middle of bridges and just take in the landscape a little bit."
The Art & Architecture Tour costs $50, or $40 if you bring your own bike. For more information, go to www.urbanadventours.com. Will Kilburn can be reached at wkilburn@globe.com. 
