This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
Boston holds an important place in the public imagination for many things: claims to fame include its entrenched Colonial-era stories, like Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the Boston Tea Party, and its array of world-class academic and research institutions. But the city has not been known for contemporary art in the way thriving art-world hubs like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami are.
A new event, the Boston Public Art Triennial, looks to put the city on the contemporary art map and “signal who we are as Bostonians in a different way,” said its executive director, Kate Gilbert. On May 22, the opening day of its first iteration, 20 commissioned works will be shown at outdoor and publicly accessible sites across East Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, Downtown Boston and Charlestown, and at five partnering museums.
The Triennial is a reboot of Now + There, a nonprofit founded by Gilbert a decade ago that produced dozens of public art projects in more than 20 Boston neighborhoods over the years. But those one-off commissions never had the critical mass to attract a substantial audience, leading Gilbert to create a citywide exhibition that would happen every three years.
“We wanted to concentrate it in a not-to-be-missed, festival-type experience,” Gilbert said. “We really want to see a more open and equitable city through people having extraordinary art experiences.” The Triennial cost $8 million to produce and will be on view through Oct. 31.
“Boston’s a city of experts,” said Pedro Alonzo, the artistic director of this year’s exhibition, titled “The Exchange.” “The idea of the Triennial is to give artists access to this amazing pool of talent we have to develop projects that hopefully the public can get behind.”
Alonzo and the curator Tess Lukey selected artists including Cannupa Hanska Luger, Swoon, Ekene Ijeoma and Stephen Hamilton who collaborated with local experts on works about Indigenous identity, health and recovery, climate and our shared humanity.
Patrick Martinez, an artist known for his neon signs who lives and works in Los Angeles, partnered with Breaktime, an organization helping young people experiencing homelessness. He worked with youths to come up with phrases such as “People Over Property” and “One Paycheck Away From Being Homeless” to turn into vibrant neon pieces. They will be installed on abandoned storefronts in the Downtown Crossing district, where Breaktime has its headquarters.
In collaboration with the conservation nonprofit Mass Audubon, the Brazilian artist Laura Lima is making sculptures to surround and hang from trees, which urban wildlife can interact with at the Boston Nature Center & Wildlife Sanctuary in Mattapan. She’s “thinking about how we behave on the planet and our relationships with other species,” Alonzo said.
The artist Julian Charrière, who lives and works in Berlin, is also engaging with the environment. Working with climate scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he will present a live video feed from the Amazon jungle on a large screen on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston. A speaker in the forest will be linked to a phone booth adjacent to the screen so that people can speak directly to nature. (Boston has a significant Brazilian population.)
The curators are making clusters in their treasure hunt across the city. On a trip to East Boston, viewers can visit a storefront where the artist Gabriel Sosa will be producing zines and posters with his community press and then head to the ICA Watershed, a seasonal space run by the city’s Institute of Contemporary Art, with an immersive installation by Chiharu Shiota.
In the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood, Yu-Wen Wu’s monumental image of transient flowers will grace the facade of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum near Alan Michelson’s sculptures of two contemporary Indigenous figures, who appear to be addressing the public from plinths outside the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. At Evans Way Park, a triangle between the museums, Nicholas Galanin, a Lingit and Unangax artist who lives and works in Alaska, will present the sculpture “I Think a Monument Goes Like This.”
Based on a knockoff of an Indigenous totem pole produced for tourists that the artist chopped like firewood and cast in bronze, the stooped figurative piece appears in the process of reassembling itself from pieces on the ground as an act of self-determination. “This work references the idea of picking yourself up in a world that has discarded you and having to navigate that,” Galanin said.
The piece received $100,000 in funding from the “Un-monument” initiative led by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture to create temporary projects that expand the range of who and what is commemorated in public space. The multiyear program, funded by a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, awarded money for research and development to more than 30 projects last year, according to Karin Goodfellow, who oversees the initiative in the Mayor’s Office and considers the Triennial a curatorial partner.
“We’ve been doing this work somewhat quietly, as a city,” but are now getting to a place where those efforts can be shared, Goodfellow said. An augmented reality project by Roberto Mighty that seeks to revive lost African American stories tied to Copp’s Hill Burying Grounds in Boston’s North End will be started by “Un-monument” in tandem with the Triennial in May.
“It’s been a multiyear journey to make sure we can tell the fuller story of who we have been and who we are today,” said Mayor Michelle Wu, whose office has supported the Triennial with an additional $500,000. The goal of “The Exchange,” she said, “is to create an experience that cuts across barriers in the city — geographic, generational, cultural — to really draw everyone in.”
Leading the charge for contemporary art in the city for the last 27 years has been Jill Medvedow, who stepped down last month as director of the ICA Boston. “I recognize, having both done public art here and built two buildings now, that building visibility, building critical mass, building audiences takes time,” she said.
“Whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” she added, “both in terms of what the artists and the Triennial produce separately and together, it’s a great wait-and-see moment.”
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