Walking (and T-ing) Boston's public art Triennial

Boston Globe

15-05-2025

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Only time can be the judge of that, and here, in the final days leading up to its official opening, I have only best guesses (a backhoe in constant use this week at the Charlestown Navy Yard, one of the Triennial's key sites, underscored the frantic last minute preparations). While we're waiting, I'm giving my imagination a workout to fashion a walking (and occasionally T-assisted) tour of some of what I think will be the most powerful pieces soon to pop up in neighborhoods near and far.
A peek at New Red Order's work in progress, being installed at Faneuil Hall for the Boston Public Art Triennial.
Luna Posadas Nava
The Triennial, an international affair, makes a point of embracing artists actually
from
here, and you'll find a triumvirate of Boston-based artists — Andy Li, Evelyn Rydz, and Alison Croney Moses — at the Charlestown Navy Yard (another, Stephen Andrews, is in Roxbury; and Lowell-based Gabriel Sosa is in East Boston).
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But to start in the middle of things, New Red Order, a 'public secret society' of Indigenous American collaborators will set up at Faneuil Hall with
'Material Monument to Thomas Morton
(Playing Indian),' a satirical monument to the recalcitrant Puritan-era colonist's
NRO's core trio of Adam Khalil (Ojibwe), Zack Khalil (Ojibwe), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) have made waves in the contemporary art world in recent years with their sharp parodies of colonial history and Indigenous appropriation. Faneuil Hall, a site rich with a slate of ugly colonial history – Peter Faneuil himself owed no small portion of his vast riches to enslavement – makes it a natural target for their acidic social critique.
It's a short stroll from there to City Hall Plaza, where Adela Goldbard's project is New Red Order's spiritual companion. Called 'Invadieron por mar, respondemos con fuego. Un presagio. [They Invaded by Sea, We Respond with Fire. An Omen.]‚' it's a large-scale replica of a colonial tallship fashioned by Native American weavers from local invasive reeds (get it?). Part of the point of the Triennial is to affirm in the minds of Bostonians that public art need not be permanent, going against the grain of our bronze, great-man-on-horseback affinities. Goldbard's piece is not subtle in its embrace of it: At the end of its run, it will be set aflame and left to smolder and be swept away – in part an act of revenge, surely, but also a stark emblem that nothing is forever.
Mexican artist Adela Goldbard harvesting reeds in New England earlier this year for her "An Allegory of (De)Coloniality, in Two Movements,' her project for the Boston Public Art Triennial at City Hall Plaza.
Robert Gallegos
The theme of the Triennial is 'Exchange' – evocative enough to suggest, broad enough to not dictate, both good things. A stroll south to Downtown Crossing helps make clear just how how broad it can be. Here, you'll find Patrick Martinez's neon signs positioned amid the district's baleful cluster of empty storefronts, the most outward symbol of downtown Boston's post-pandemic struggle to revive itself.
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I doubt Martinez's works will help with that, but they do make a relevant point:
Community Service, Patrick Martinez, Boston Public Art Triennial, 2025.
Yubo Dong of Of Studio
It would make logistic sense to turn southwest here and swing past the Public Garden en route to the main branch of the Boston Public Library, where Swoon, a much-beloved street artist turned museum installation darling, has transformed an outsize planter in the building's lobby into a terrarium for 'In the Well: The Stories We Tell About Addiction,' a ramshackle cabin inhabited by a pair of puppets (it's already there, if you're keen to get started).
But I'd be pulled across the water to East Boston, where the ICA's Watershed is presenting Chiharu Shiota's exhibition 'Homeless Home.' Shiota's work is a monument to absence – trunks and suitcases and random pieces of furniture, entangled in red rope and dangling, symbols of lives up in the air. A lament for the untold millions forced into migration, cut adrift by various disasters and left with nowhere to call home, its rootlessness speaks to the chaos of our current moment.
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Swoon's installation 'In the Well: The Stories We Tell About Addiction,' at the Boston Public Library Copley Square.
David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
Just down the street, Sosa's project works hard to find solid ground: Ñ Press, a storefront community print studio in partnership with Maverick Landing Community Services. Ñ Press roots itself in the city's Spanish-speaking community with a subtle growth mindset. Sosa, whose text-based work
The Triennial concentrates a good handful of its pieces in the city core. But its mission to serve neighborhoods far-flung from downtown is in its DNA, an imprint on its soul from its formative years as the public art organization
Alan Michelson's "The Knowledge Keepers" was installed at the main entrance of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
A cluster of pieces in the Fenway signal museum participation in the Triennial, a key to its visibility. Alan Michelson's 'The Knowledge Keepers,' a pair of chromium sculptures flanking the front steps of the Museum of Fine Arts, Nicholas Galanin's 'I think it goes like this (pick yourself up),' an eight-foot-tall part-Lingit Native American, part-Transformers bronze figure in the process of assembling itself is at the MassArt Museum, and Yu-Wen Wu's 'Reigning Beauty,' a photo-collage of falling flowers is fitted to the facade of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
But hop the T at Ruggles and head out toward Mattapan (this will also, alas, require a bus from Forest Hills; or backtrack on the Green Line to Park Street, where the Red Line offers a more direct route), where Lan Tuazon and Laura Lima honor the Triennial's formative history with a pair of projects rooted in that community.
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Laura Lima's 2021 work 'Communal Nest #1." The artist will be creating a number of such structures/shelters for the Boston Public Art Triennial at the Boston Nature Center and Wildlife Sanctuary in Mattapan.
Laura Lima Studio/Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles
Lima's 'An Indistinct Form (A Forma Indistinta),' at the Boston Nature Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, is a collaboration with the center's scientists to create 'sculptures for animals,' a poetic gesture with the practical purpose of building habitat lost to the urban wild — a metaphor, if you like, extended from the displacement narratives of Sosa and Shiota.
Tuazon, meanwhile, has made 'Matters of Consequence,' an ever-evolving sculpture that doubles as a public space for the community to shape and grow over time; in many ways, its evolution, yet to be seen, is in fact the art. Evolution, it seems, is the watchword of the Triennial — or anything left in public to unfold over time. It's nothing without you.
The Boston Public Art Triennial marks its official opening May 22
. For a list of sites, projects, and opening times, visit
.
Through Oct. 31
.
Murray Whyte can be reached at