BOSTON, MASS.- Landscape architect and designer Ken Smith unveiled his Fenway Deity installation today at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as part of the Museum’s landscape programming that seeks out underutilized and overlooked venues on the campus and infuses them with garden-inspired public art.

Fenway Deity, a large Pop Art-style inflatable medallion with a psychedelic spiral pattern and gold chain, is hanging on the Museum’s historic facade and original entrance facing the Boston Fens. The deity riffs on the Museum’s large wheel window on the opposite building façade, forming a transect line through the Museum and on to the Fens.

Playing with the idea of combining high and low art by using vinyl and inexpensive materials juxtaposed against a Museum known for its important historic art collection, Fenway Deity and its whimsical nature will be on view through Sept. 28.

On a spiritual level, Fenway Deity responds to the Museum’s 2012 relocation of its entrance to Evans Way when Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano’s contemporary wing was added. Smith feels it will serve as a new conduit for the Museum’s creative energy to protect the Fens from negative spirits and promote environmental renewal, health, and happiness along the Fenway and beyond.

Fenway Deity is the next installation in Smith’s Garden Deities series, exploring the symbolic iconography of deities as protectors of physical and spiritual realms. Looking at their relationship to gardens and environmental space, the series is inspired by travels in Asia and visits to numerous Buddhist Temples. His first installation in 2001 was fabricated from synthetic turf, brass grommets, and plastic mirrored domes and consisted of a large central deity of general power to protect all gardens and a series of smaller demi-deities.

“What I really like about the Gardner collection is the eclectic mix of East and West in the selection of art,” Smith said. “It’s that mixing of ideas from East and West that is at the heart of what the deity is about. The deity is an Eastern idea that we are using in a kind of Western way.”

The Gardner Museum’s Charles Waldheim, Ruettgers Curator of Landscape, said of the new work: “Ken Smith’s Fenway Deity promises to reanimate the discussion of the Museum’s relationship to the public realm of the Back Bay Fens by installing a work of conceptual public art on the Gardner Museum’s historic façade.”

Smith has designed similar exterior installations, notably his well-received and extensively publicized Triennial Wallflowers façade commissioned by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, 2006-2007. He is one of a new generation of landscape architects at home in the worlds of art, architecture, and urbanism. He is committed to creating landscapes, especially parks and other public spaces, as a way of improving the quality of urban life. His projects are of varying scales and types: temporary installations, private residential gardens, public spaces, parks, and commercial projects. With a particular emphasis on projects that explore the symbolic content and expressive power of landscape as an art form, Smith’s work specializes in the investigation of new expressions in landscape design.

“Fenway Deity is a provocative act on the original front of the museum, and it’s not a shy gesture,” Smith said. “Its role is to spark debate, make people think, and talk about the museum and its relationship to the city.”