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Straits Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Explore the idea of home with 160km of red cord in artist Chiharu Shiota's Boston show
Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota's new exhibition, Home Less Home, at ICA Watershed is her largest museum show in the United States. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Explore the idea of home with 160km of red cord in artist Chiharu Shiota's Boston show BOSTON – Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has drawn a simple shape in thin air and at monumental scale: a rectangle with a pitched roof, instantly recognisable as the universal symbol of home. This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord – some 21,000 lengths of it, streaming down 7m from the ceiling of the ICA Watershed, a massive exhibition space at an active shipyard in east Boston. A rectangular forest of blood-red cords hangs nearly to the floor of this former factory space. Inside, the cords shift to lengths of black that form a dark silhouette of a house. Visible within this mirage-like structure are antique furnishings – a four-poster bed, rocking chair, dinette set, sewing table and chair – with a spectacular flock of paper of some 6,000 sheets fluttering above the domestic tableau. Shiota's new commission, titled Home Less Home, opened on May 22 under the banner of the inaugural citywide Boston Public Art Triennial and will remain till Sept 1. Artist Chiharu Shiota's Home Less Home exhibition at ICA Watershed. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES 'The house shape looks like a shadow because home does not exist,' Shiota said in a recent interview at the Watershed as she reached among the cords to affix the final pieces of paper with a stapler. 'Home is like something in your heart, inside,' added the soft-spoken artist, 53, who grew up in Osaka, Japan, and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997. Her immigrant story, both personal and age-old, echoes those of many residents living in east Boston near the shipyard, once the second-largest point of immigration in the United States, after Ellis Island. Earlier this spring, the ICA distributed a flier asking the local community to consider Shiota's open-ended questions of 'what home means, what it feels like to leave home and what it takes to rebuild it'. The Home Less Home exhibition includes the personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents of members of the local community in Boston. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Their personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents were reproduced on the sheets of white paper animating her installation. For almost three decades, the artist has created haunting, visceral environments using vast webs and fields of her signature cords – she calls them 'threads' – entwined with accumulations of well-worn objects, such as shoes or beds, that evoke both human presence and absence. At the Venice Biennale in Italy in 2015, Shiota transformed the Japanese Pavilion with an atmospheric matrix of red thread embedded with thousands of collected keys raining down into wooden row boats – objects poetically summoning ideas of entry, exit, passage and afterlife. A mid-career retrospective that opened at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2019, The Soul Trembles, has toured places such as Busan, South Korea; Shanghai and Shenzhen, China ; Jakarta, Indonesia; Brisbane, Australia; and most recently Paris – with an accompanying monograph published this spring by Skira. The show travels next to Italy and Canada. Mori Art Museum director Mami Kataoka, who organised the retrospective, said via e-mail that she has been astonished by visitor numbers worldwide that have far exceeded each institution's expectations. 'Beyond cultural differences, this response underscores the universality of the themes in Chiharu's work,' Ms Kataoka wrote, including 'our shared fear about an uncertain future and our common quest to understand the meaning of life and what may lie beyond it'. Artist Chiharu Shiota often uses networks of wool thread, a medium she feels better conjures the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Shiota left her home in Japan with just one suitcase to study abroad, eventually finding her way to Berlin. She trained as an abstract painter, but early on shifted to 'painting in the air' – as she called it – using networks of wool thread, a medium she felt better conjured the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. 'Many times, I'm using red string, the colour of blood,' she said, symbolic of 'family, nation, religion and survival'. In Berlin, a city she found weighted with history and inspiring to her artwork, Shiota met her husband and raised their daughter, who is now 18. 'Now, I have the feeling I have two home countries,' said the artist, who often collects discarded suitcases and other commonplace items at Berlin flea markets for her installations. Pieces of vintage leather luggage are part of the exhibition, Home Less Home. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES For the exhibition at the ICA Watershed, Shiota's largest museum show in the US, she has also adapted her 2014 piece, Accumulation – Searching For The Destination, near the entrance as part of her reflection on home. Thirty pieces of vintage leather luggage dangling inside another shower of red threads lead viewers into the show. Some of the suitcases have an internal motor, making them bob as if adrift at sea. 'Each person, one suitcase – they're ready to go, but we don't know where,' said Shiota, who will have solo shows in New York at the Japan Society and Templon gallery later in 2025. Ms Ruth Erickson, chief curator at the ICA, said: 'Chiharu is incredible at picking these objects that feel like they have this lifetime of wear and use and memory in them, that can be a kind of surrogate for a human story.' She invited Shiota to make the site-specific installation for the cavernous Watershed space, calling her 'an artist who understands how to work at a scale that can be a real challenge'. Home Less Home comprises around 160km of cord. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Home Less Home comprises around 160km of cord . Walking the processional length of the installation, a visitor experiences it perceptually dissolving into singular threads up close, while in longer views, it coalesces into a majestic volume. Shiota has created a winding pathway through the heart of her project, and viewers can see at close range what is printed on the fluttering sheets of paper. There are photographs of airport reunions, children playing on lawns, a Venezuelan's first experience of snow in Boston. One person offered a recipe for apple dumplings. A child's drawing of a house includes the handwritten line: 'Home is all the important people who makes the life better.' A woman contributed her falsified adoption papers deeming her an orphan, with the accompanying message: 'May all Korean adoptees find their way back home.' Personal photographs of community members are part of the exhibition. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES While none of Shiota's work is overtly political, 'this idea of where one makes one's home, and what the connections are to a place, could never be more at the forefront of our minds', Ms Erickson said. 'We see a country and an administration really analysing those rights.' Against the backdrop of court cases and debates raging in the news cycle about the fate of immigrants, who often are portrayed as a faceless monolith, the testimonies in Home Less Home are acute in their individuality. Sifting through these collected stories, they touched Shiota like a chorus of voices. 'I never met this person,' she said, 'but I feel like I know this person.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Boston Globe
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
On the sunny side with artist Andy Li
At the Navy Yard, a flagpole fitted with a rotating pinwheel at its midsection will project Li's upbeat vision to the world. At the top, a 4-by-6-foot homemade flag — a Li standard — stitched with the title text in lovingly handsewn font, will wave in the sea breeze. Artist Andy Li with his hand-stitched flag for the Boston Public Art Triennial at the Charlestown Navy Yard on May 13. Jasper Sanchez Li means it as a gentle exhortation to celebrate tiny victories, however minute; and with a website — Advertisement Being seen, really, is the point, Li said. 'Small moments can lead to big successes,' he said. 'So I'm saying don't discount them. Be in the moment. You can't change what happened, but you can choose what to do next. Grasp that and appreciate it.' If it sounds like self-actualization as art, well, Li is just that kind of guy. ''Today is the day' was my mantra,' he said. 'I just kept saying it to myself: 'Today is the day I'm going to get out of bed, I'm going to make myself coffee, I'm going to get through my to-do list.' And it evolved into this project. I wanted to create almost a ceremony for people to honor those moments along with me.' Andy Li's not-quite-finished 'Today is the Day' in the 'Lot Lab' space at the Charlestown Navy Yard for the Boston Public Art Triennial earlier this week. Lane Turner/Globe Staff Li's slogan could as easily be a mantra for the Triennial itself. A broad international affair that sprawls from downtown to Mattapan, Dorchester, Cambridge, and Charlestown, it's been a decade in coming, and Li has been along for the ride. A MassArt grad, he was among a cohort of Boston-based artists chosen for the Accelerator program with Starting in 2015, Now + There peppered the urban landscape with an array of contemporary art projects in 'I want to help people to find their own moments of joy,' Li said. Out there in the open with the whole city watching, the Triennial is his best bet yet. Advertisement ANDY LI: TODAY IS THE DAY A project of the Boston Public Art Triennial. May 22-Oct. 31. Charlestown Navy Yard, One 5th Street. Murray Whyte can be reached at
Boston Globe
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Walking (and T-ing) Boston's public art Triennial
Advertisement 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). Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Corrections: April 30, 2025
An item in the Dateline feature on April 27 referred incorrectly to Wiltshire, England. Wiltshire is a county, not a village. An article on Tuesday about a missile strike that hit a migrant facility in an area of northern Yemen described incorrectly the operations of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Saada. The organization still operates there; it did not withdraw this year. An article on Tuesday about a major power outage that hit Spain and Portugal on Monday misidentified Pedro Sánchez. He is the prime minister of Spain, not the president. An article on Tuesday about distrust of the new government among the Kurdish community in Syria misstated the location of the city of Aleppo in Syria. It is in the northwest, not the northeast. An article on Saturday about the Broadway musical 'Real Women Have Curves' misstated where Tatianna Córdoba grew up. She grew up in California's Bay Area, not Los Angeles. An article on Monday about the Broadway musical 'Floyd Collins' misstated details about the premiere of the show. It premiered in 1994 in Philadelphia, two years before it made its Off Broadway debut at Playwrights Horizons. An article on Sunday about the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History coming under attack from the Trump administration for its focus on diversity misquoted Vera Ingrid Grant, the guest curator of an exhibit at the Charles H. Wright Museum. She described the exhibition as a 'panoply of art,' not a 'canopy of art.' An article on Sunday about a new citywide exhibition called the Boston Public Art Triennial, relying on outdated information, misstated the title of Nicholas Galanin's sculpture at the Boston Public Art Triennial. It is 'I think it goes like this (pick yourself up),' not 'I Think a Monument Goes Like This.' An obituary on Sunday about the keyboardist and studio operator David Briggs misstated the year that Mr. Briggs joined Elvis Presley's band TCB. It was 1969, the year the band was formed, not 1966. An obituary on Tuesday about the basketball Hall of Famer Dick Barnett misstated the number of points Walt Frazier scored for the victorious New York Knicks in Game 7 of the 1970 N.B.A. finals against the Los Angeles Lakers. It was 36, not 37. Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Boston Bets Big on Public Art With a New Triennial
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.'
