A citywide showing of major contemporary art aims to unseat Boston's bronze statue ideal

Boston Globe

23-04-2025

Kate Gilbert, executive director of the Boston Public Art Triennial, in the lobby of the Boston Public Library where one of many public artworks will be installed next month.
John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
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'It really does feel like a completely different city than 10 years ago, ' said Kate Gilbert, the Triennial's executive director. 'There's just a greater aptitude for experimentation We're over our fear of the ephemeral — of a lot of those old fears, I think.'
Specifics will be made public next month, but installations will run a gamut of form and idea, from large-scale sculpture
to video
to performances
,
by artists both local and far-flung: Boston's Alison Croney Mosesand Stephen Hamilton, Nicolas Galanin, a widely celebrated Indigenous artist from Alaska.
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For Hamilton, whose project will be installed in Roxbury, the Triennial 'is not something I could have imagined when I graduated (from MassArt) in 2009,' he said. 'But I'm also looking to the future. How can an event like this help us grow?'
He might look to the rare feat of cooperation the Triennial has achieved:
the
Artist Stephen Hamilton in his Allston studio as he prepares for the Boston Triennial.
Lane Turner/Globe Staff
'The idea, really, is to have an experiment happening out in public,' said Karin Goodfellow, the city's
Boston's reputation as an international cultural center is rooted in its past, and its public art landscape reflects that:
Now + There's projects were everything Boston's public realm was not: Ephemeral. Contemporary. Oblique. Diverse. Some works were predicated on play; others,
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The Triennial will re-up its citywide program every three years, and its aim is not modest: To be a permanent emblem of a new Boston that's waited so long for its time to come. Partnerships are key to that vision. At the Museum of Fine Arts,the museum's contribution to the Triennial effort flanks its grand entrance: A pair of shimmering chromium sculptures by the Mohawk artist
A view of "The Knowledge Keepers" looking out from the Museum of Fine Arts. Left: "Andre," by Alan Michelson, 2024. Right, "Appeal to the Great Spirit," Cyrus E. Dallin, 1909.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The museum's contribution to a new way of seeing an old city, 'The Knowledge Keepers' is heavy with symbolism of a city in the throes of change. A
Meeting with Triennial staff over time, 'it's been clear to me that they were always approaching us with this idea that (the Triennial) could be a real change agent in the way in which Bostonians think about the art that's around them in the city,' said Ian Alteveer, chair of the MFA's Contemporary Art Department, who commissioned the work. 'I'm thrilled, and I'm also learning from this process myself.'
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At the City of Boston, Goodfellow is stewarding the city's own attempt at ephemeral, experimental public culture as part of the Monuments Project, funded with
"The Embrace," by Hank Willis Thomas, on a snowy day in 2023 shortly after it was installed on Boston Common. The artwork commemorates Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and depicts four intertwined arms, representing the hug they shared after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
The program
distributed $1 million
of that grant among
.
The city also has a roster of its own projects, to be announced later this month.
Called
Though it may feel sudden, new ways of thinking about public space – who it's for, what it can say, what it can do – are the product of a long, slow evolution. Unease around monuments in particular as simplistic emblems of complex histories had been simmering for years when, in 2020, the murder of George Floyd brought sudden, urgent action.
The statue of Robert E. Lee, altered by artists and protesters, at Lee Circle in Richmond, Va., June 20, 2020, before it was taken down. The monument became a rallying point for a national takedown movement after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Carlos Bernate/NYT
In Richmond, Virginia, a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee astride a horse
Boston's history is less fractious than the segregated South; but
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Tory Bullock, who started a movement to remove "The Emancipation Group" monument of Lincoln towering over an enslaved person in 2020.
Barry Chin/Globe Staff
That same month in the North End,
on the empty stone plinth. Installed by Boston artist Cedric Douglas, he projected the images of an array of local icons as a
public honor: Elma Lewis, the iconic Roxbury arts educator; Mel King, the long-time Civil Rights activist; Jessie 'Little Doe' Baird, a Native American linguist who helped preserve and revive the Wampanoag language.
He called it
could see its potential. As part of the city's Unmonument efforts this summer, Douglas will extend the project he began in 2020; he'll be out in public asking Bostonians what should occupy the empty plinth where 'The Emancipation Project' stood. 'These are the kinds of projects that we mean to inform us going forward,' Goodfellow said.
The installation occupied the former site of the Christopher Columbus statue, which was beheaded in June.
@aramphoto
Public experiments are the lifeblood of a necessarily nimble outfit like the Triennial. For a city government and art museums, it's new terrain. But they're learning from each other in a way that could help rewire how the city itself thinks about public art.
'We can offer them some thoughts on the public realm that they haven't really engaged with, and we're learning from them, too,' Gilbert said. 'But it's about trust and collaboration more broadly, and that's what's really exciting.'
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And maybe, just maybe, this experiment waiting to happen can help show Boston not what it's always been, but what it could be, she said. 'It feels like a Pollyanna moment,' she laughs, 'but 'If we can do this at the civic level, really, what else can we achieve?'
Murray Whyte can be reached at