Boston
In today’s contemporary art landscape, with fairs, biennials, and triennials popping up (and shutting down) incessantly, the launch of a new event risks hefty skepticism and a fatigued public. Without a clear purpose or curatorial vision, these happenings can feel at best like a waste of time and at worst a waste of resources and (often) public funds. Despite these potential pitfalls, the inaugural edition of the Boston Public Art Triennial opened this spring, with 18 installations across the city and a robust schedule of programs. Ten years in the making, “The Exchange” (on view through October 31, 2025) offers a case study in impactful temporary public art that thoughtfully serves local communities while also warranting the attention of a broader audience.
Curated by Pedro Alonzo and Tess Lukey, “The Exchange” takes on the challenging task of bringing contemporary art to a city not often associated with the genre. While Boston has world-class museums, few specialize in or show contemporary art in depth, and there is a dearth of commercial galleries specializing in contemporary works. “The Exchange” aims to change that while engaging directly with the city’s emblematic position in American history and the complex legacy of colonization.
Some works in “The Exchange” tackle this head on, most conspicuously New Red Order’s Material Monument to Thomas Morton (Playing Indian) (2025), which stands just outside Faneuil Hall, a colonial-era marketplace and meeting hall where people like Samuel Adams made historic speeches encouraging independence from Great Britain. Unsurprisingly for a “public secret society” whose core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys are known for their provocative and humorous installations, New Red Order inserted their totemic statue of a controversial early colonist, Puritan critic, and social reformer into the most visible and charged of the triennial sites—a popular tourist destination also beloved by Bostonians who cherish the city’s historical relevance.
Their larger-than-life, cartoonish depiction of Morton (c. 1579–1647, who was banished for espousing Indigenous self-governance (among other transgressions), features a mélange of Indigenous, colonial, and pop culture symbols adorning his body and spilling from his Puritanical hat, including seafood emblematic of New England, anarchy patches, beads, and feathers. Seated atop a wooden pole, the figure, with all its excess, is placed on display for public judgment yet refuses to be shamed, continuing to revel and resist. Faced with such an example of defiance, placed in this location, it’s hard not to wonder about just what is being judged here.
At the Museum of Fine Arts, Alan Michelson confronts misrepresentations of Indigeneity with two bronze-and-platinum-gilt sculptures placed on pedestals flanking the museum’s entrance. Featuring contemporary Indigenous figures, The Knowledge Keepers (2024) reminds viewers of the continued existence of Native people. The figures, Aquinnah Wampanoag member Julia Marden and Nipmuc descendent Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr., face Appeal to the Great Spirit (1912) by Cyrus Dallin, a permanent sculpture on the museum’s front lawn of Native man on a horse, a stereotype that contributed to the early 20th-century notion of Indigenous peoples as dying communities.
Nearby at MassArt Art Museum, Nicholas Galanin’s exhibition “Aáni yéi xat duwasáakw (I am called Land)” (on view through November 30, 2025) fills the cavernous space with an oversize ceremonial Tlingít box drum. Suspended from the ceiling, the drum is beaten by a robotic arm to the rhythm of a human heart, while the mechanical components whir like water, providing a soundscape for the silent projections of the ocean that fill the room. The steady repetition of the drum becomes meditative, with the visitor’s body rhythms adjusting to meet its pace—a physical manifestation of the work’s mission to showcase the interconnectedness of people, nature, and culture. A womb-like painting on the drum suggests rebirth, another reminder of the continued existence and future of Indigenous communities. Galanin combines these ideas with a critique of permanence in I think it goes like this (pick yourself up) (2025), a bronze sculpture cast from chopped-up imitation totems, which is installed in Evans Way Park.
A short drive from MassArt, on a pier in the Charlestown Navy Yard, Beatriz Cortez offers another future-thinking interpretation of history, land, and humanity with Nomad 2 (2025). Taking the form of a giant whale vertebra made out of steel, the vessel appears to have washed up on the concrete pier like a relic of Boston’s brutal whaling history. Cortez was inspired to make the work after a trip to the Arctic Circle, where she visited a massive boneyard of whale skeletons, evidence of a once global industry that depended on the fluids and body parts of these creatures to light cities, oil machines, and shape fashion. Visitors can enter Cortez’s sculpture, which contains a spaceship-like interior with colorful lights and buttons that play audio and video recordings of whales, the vertebra once again standing ready for human use—perhaps to colonize another planet.
The Charlestown Navy Yard also hosts Evelyn Rydz’s Convergence: Porous Figures (2025), a site-specific installation of mirrored slats arranged in a circle like a storm drain, which sits atop a living garden in the form of two rivers. Containing bioswales to maintain stormwater, the piece regenerates the native plants in the garden and protects the lawn against flooding. This artful approach to landscape design and water management is a reminder of the power that humans have to protect the environment through proper care and infrastructure.
Any public art event must strike a fine balance between bringing art into a space for the benefit of the people already there and bringing art into a space to attract new visitors. Both intentions are valid, but a program’s mission—whether it’s leaning one way or the other—should be clear. While “The Exchange” mostly finds a balance with its installations, the site of Stephen Hamilton’s textile works Under the Spider’s Web and Oruko Pe: The Names are Complete (both 2025) felt too private for a public program. Located in a break area inside a Roxbury Community College building for health and science studies, the installation seems intended to bring art into a space for the benefit of the people already there—the hardworking students and faculty using the mock hospital rooms and labs nearby. As a visitor, it was hard not to feel like an intruder. Hamilton’s works, which merge African and Western weaving traditions to reclaim heritage, comment on the historical erasure and revival of pre-colonial African culture—conversations much needed in the triennial—but the location is perhaps less than welcoming for a broad audience.
Other pairings of work and site are more conducive to attracting new visitors and bringing them to a space they might not otherwise visit. Laura Lima’s Indistinct Form (Forma Indistinta) (2025), which consists of brooms, woven hats, and ceramic vessels installed within the trails of the Boston Nature Center, is located in the Mattapan neighborhood, a 30-minute drive from most of the triennial sites. Like a game of “I spy,” the installation disappears into the natural landscape, inviting visitors to look closely as they walk through the preserve. Over time, some materials will decompose or be repurposed by animals, uniting humans and the city’s wildlife through shared, albeit different, interactions with Lima’s work. Here, the triennial successfully encourages people to visit not just the city center, but also its more distant areas to appreciate art and urban nature.
The Boston Public Art Triennial did a commendable job with “The Exchange.” The curatorial vision—in particular the treatment of Boston’s Indigenous past, present, and future—is bold and refreshingly direct, avoiding the overly highbrow or esoteric. This inaugural edition of an inherently ambitious project, which is also designed to serve as an incubator for artists and communities, signals an undoubtedly promising future.
