Sarah Hutt's loft lives up to its warehouse beginnings

Outside of Sarah Hutt's apartment on the corner of East Berkeley and Washington streets in the South End, young grocery workers are dodging the rain, holding flattened produce boxes over their heads, and the retail space on the ground floor of her building has been vacant for two years. The neighborhood isn't glitzy, though that's in flux: From the four tall windows on the north-facing wall of her 1,300-square-foot loft, Hutt can see luxury condominiums that were recently built two blocks away. The view is somewhat obstructed by buildings on her own block that will soon become condos, too.

"Little by little, things change," says Hutt, Boston's director of public art.

She's lived here since 1988, when she and a group of other artists bought the vacant warehouse from the city and had it designated as live/work space. It was the first city-owned building to be converted as such, Hutt says.

To do so, she says, the group had to define themselves. "We had to say, this is what an artist is, and this is what our needs are," says Hutt. She lists the priorities: "Wide doors, high ceilings, good lighting, and strong floors."

When Hutt moved in, her apartment had these things, but not much else. Walls and pipes were exposed. The hardwood floor was covered with linoleum, and the electricity was spotty. "You buy a house with no insides, and then what?" she asks. Early in her residency, a misfit sprinklerhead burst. The ensuing flood claimed most of Hutt's art and supplies. "It was horrible," she says. "But it helped me get rid of a lot of stuff."

In the past 16 years, new materials and snapshots and journals and sketches and pots of wax and paintbrushes and piles of vintage ladies' gloves have accumulated. A stack of drawers holds string, steel wool, and popsicle sticks. One drawer is labeled "epiphanies." About three-quarters of the space in Hutt's apartment is given up to storage and work.

"Sometimes it's a little rough because everything's right here," Hutt says. "It's hard to delineate work space and living space."

She's trying, she says. Friends recently helped build a bedroom loft area, and Hutt has plans for new cabinets (more storage), and a new stove to replace the 20-inch-wide one that's in the kitchen now.

In the living space, a couple of orange vinyl and chrome chairs that were Hutt's mother's are pushed under a pale wooden dining table. Fifty-seven clay sculptures hang on the wall behind the table. They are examples of self-portraits she's been making daily since 1995.

Hutt says the portraits help "make sure I make art every day," a device she needs: In addition to her job at City Hall -- she has charge of all permanent and temporary public art in Boston, directs maintenance of statues and monuments, and heads the Boston Open Studios Coalition -- she cultivates a community garden plot down the street and produces art for exhibitions.

The daily portraits also distance her from an installation she'd been traveling with for seven years. Titled "My Mother's Legacy," the work consists of 1,000 wooden bowls, culled from thrift stores or received as gifts, each wood-burned on the bottom with a line about Hutt's mom, whom she lost to breast cancer when Hutt was 13. "My mother used Oil of Olay," reads one; "My mother said don't trust a man that can't dance," reads another.

Hutt even stores her dreams. "I try to wake up at 5 in the morning and spend a few hours in the studio before work," she says. Among other things, she records and files her dreams in a card catalog. "I used to try and type them out on [an old manual typewriter]," she explains, "but that was too hard. So now I do it with the electric."

Once, Hutt dreamed about being at a party with a bunch of elephants. She woke up and started sketching them, and now, elephant drawings are pasted throughout the loft. There's a wax elephant behind the kitchen sink, but Hutt wonders, "with the convention coming, should I make donkeys?"