Inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial Strives To Bring City More ‘Wow’ Moments

More “wow” moments. One of many goals for the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial opened May 22, 2025.

“’Wow’ are those moments that you don’t expect,” Kate Gilbert, Executive Director of Boston Public Art Triennial, told Forbes.com. “The city is gorgeous and has a lot of very important, classical, revolutionary (era) buildings and history, and it’s a little stuck in a certain period of time. We don’t have those moments to turn a corner and say, ‘What is that?’ We want to see more of that.”

Throughout the triennial’s duration, turning corners in Boston will bring moments of wow, wonder, curiosity, delight, puzzlement, and amusement thanks to 16 new contemporary art commissions distributed widely across town.

In addition to the new Triennial commissions, Boston museums and institutions—including the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MassArt Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and MIT List Visual Arts Center—will present temporary and permanent projects throughout outdoor spaces and publicly accessible sites, for a total of 20 new commissions and 21 sites for public art experiences through October 31, 2025.

A Triennial For Boston

When planning this first Boston Public Art Triennial, organizers looked to similar events across the country, including Counterpublic in St. Louis and Prospect in New Orleans. Whereas those ‘ennials attempted to situate their host cities amid larger global geographies, Boston’s triennial focuses inward.

“The whole world comes to Boston,” Artistic Director Pedro Alonzo told Forbes.com. “We have leading scholars from around the planet who are visiting regularly. This is a very cosmopolitan city. You walk around the streets, you hear multiple languages continuously. It’s not a city that needs tourism. We have plenty of it. It’s a city that, for as small as it is, has an outsized impact globally.”

Harvard, M.I.T., the Red Sox, John Adams, J.F.K., Tom Brady. Matt Damon.

This triennial isn’t trying to sell L.A. or London on Boston. If it’s trying to sell anyone, it’s trying to sell Boston.

“It has to resonate with the city and the people who live, work, and call this home. We need to be proud of our city,” Gilbert explained. “In this first one, we need everyone to be on our side. Yes, we’ve got all the institutions. It’s the connective fibers that are important, so people don’t feel alienated by those institutions. What’s happening at a neighborhood level, at the artistic community level, that’s what we’re trying to knit together.”

The triennial achieves this by dispersing commissions beyond downtown and heavily touristed areas. Artworks can be found in Charlestown, Dorchester, Mattapan, and East Boston. Not places visited by the duck boat tours. Even long-time Boston residents don’t visit all these places regularly.

Stephen Hamilton’s (b. 1987) fantastic weavings at Roxbury Community College are a perfect example. Roxbury C.C. doesn’t have a school spirit bookstore selling logoed merch like Boston College.

“I’m from Roxbury. This is a Roxbury institution,” Hamilton told media touring the triennial on May 21. “I wanted to create work that would be in a place that’s accessible for the communities that this piece represents and who I want to engage with the programming around.”

Hamilton’s installations serve as an ode to the textile traditions of West and West Central Africa. He spent nine months in Nigeria learning weaving.

“The point of the piece is to highlight the beautiful craft histories of those regions and also to highlight the cultural and historical relationship those traditions have with the diaspora,” Hamilton said. “It’s important this work is in a Black community where people of African descent congregate.”

He hopes to present weaving, dying, and sewing workshops at the college and the Royall House and Slave Quarters during the triennial. That’s another way the triennial is bringing the city together, through partnerships with 75 local organizations hosting regular programming over the next six months.

“To all the artists, thank you for helping us tell the story of Boston how we choose to tell it,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said at a ceremonial opening for the triennial on May 22. “This is a moment where voices outside our city are trying to describe who we are, who we represent, and the values that we stand for. But Boston is not a city where others get to tell our story Boston.”

On the day the triennial opened, the Trump administration announced its intention to bar Harvard University from admitting international students.

With the entire city in play, artists and locations could be specifically tailored to each other. Like Brazilian artist Laura Lima’s (b. 1971) art for animals at a Mass Audubon location in Mattapan.

“Laura Lima’s project would not have worked in the Boston Commons or in the Public Garden,” Alonzo said. “We wanted urban wildlife, and the Boston Nature Center is the perfect place to do that. She wanted a forest. She wanted animals. So we did it there, whereas Stephen Hamilton wanted something in his community.”

For out of towners, Boston Commons–site of Hank Willis Thomas’ The Embrace sculpture, an ode to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King–and the adjacent Public Garden–America’s first public botanical gardens–do belong on a “must see” list. They’re just not part of the triennial. A stay at super-luxe The Newbury Hotel will put you on their doorstep, as well as Beacon Hill and the state capital, bustling Newbury Street, serene Commonwealth Ave. The Bull & Finch Pub, inspiration for “Cheers,” is three blocks away.

Exchange

The Boston Public Art Triennial’s theme is “exchange.” Artists from around the world were strategically paired with local experts, from climate scientists to historians, public health workers to civic organizers.

“What makes this city truly singular is that expansive talent pool,” Alonzo explained. “Artists are interested in this scholarship, this work, and often are looking for that as a form of influence, as a form of collaboration, as a reference. Why not give them direct access and create those links when possible?”

The scholars and scientists and engineers have as much to learn from the artists.

“Boston is a city that is full of experts, but I also think that the hyper specialization of the disciplines here makes it very siloed and difficult for new things to emerge. It’s a city where people like to investigate, research, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, research, investigate, and maybe, is action taking action even necessary,” Alonzo continued. “There’s a lot of fear of failure. This is a great way of breaking down silos and reminding experts about the importance of creativity and how research without creativity is useless.”

Alonzo sees the work of artists and researchers as more similar than different.

“The scientific method and artistic practice are almost the same thing. It’s basically trial and error, but one has a very defined, utilitarian goal, the other one is more experimental, open ended,” he explained.

No installation combines these worlds more profoundly than Nicholas Galanin’s Aáni yéi xat duwasáakw (I am called Land) inside the MassArt Art Museum. In a warehouse-sized gallery, Galanin (b. 1978; Tlingit/Unangax̂) has suspended an oversized Tlingít box drum. The drum is activated by a robotic arm mimicking a heartbeat. A mother’s heartbeat. A baby in utero has been painted on the side of the drum in classic Pacific Northwest formline.

Fight Bronze With Bronze

Indigeneity serves as one of the triennial’s main themes. Directing this effort was triennial curator Tess Lukey, member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah.

Behind the MassArt Art Museum in front of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Galanin has a deconstructed/reconstructing bronze Pacific Northwest kootéeyaa–totem pole–sculpture. Three blocks from MAAM, Alan Michelson’s (b. 1953; Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River) The Knowledge Keepers takes one of the most high-profile positions among triennial artworks: high on the concrete pedestals framing the entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Represented are two contemporary local Indigenous cultural stewards, Aquinnah Wampanoag member Julia Marden and Nipmuc artist Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr. Contrast them with Cyrus Dallin’s statue of a non-specific Plains Indian figure on horseback on the lawn.

Michaelson grew up in Boston and went to grade school at Boston Latin riding the trolly past Dallin’s sculpture daily.

“It reigned over the front of the museum for more than a century and it’s beaming out this tragic story, which I guess was the story, or that’s the way that they conceived of Native future in 1909,” Michelson told assembled media on the MFA’s front steps between his new sculptures on May 21. “When I was invited to do something on these two pedestals, I thought that is really not an expression of where things are with Native people. Maybe it never was. If they had asked the Lakota or any of the Plains tribes that he’s representing in a stereotypical way how would they want to be represented, I don’t think that would have been what they would have chosen.”

The museum has been wrestling with how to contextualize Dallin’s insulting depiction since awareness of those subjects came to a wider consciousness.

Michelson takes it on by “fighting bronze with bronze” in his words, “with contemporary figures who were inspiring, and who were all about their communities, and all about the continuance of traditions, not the death, or that extinction paradigm, very much in their in their agency, in their beauty.”

Both figures are gilded in platinum.

“I purposely wanted them to be gilded because among Eastern Woodland people, and I’m from that tradition, we have a reverence for shine, that luminosity that certain materials give,” Michelson explained. “In the old days, it was shell. It was also native copper from the Midwest, but then when silver was mined and brought by Europeans, that became a medium also.”

Like Michelson, Galanin’s sculpture in front of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is cast in bronze. The material sending a message along with the figure.

“The figure is reconstructing itself in a material that we’ll see a lot of in cities like Boston with bronze monuments,” Galanin said. “This idea of permanence and monument includes a desire to tell narratives of history, colonial narratives through something like bronze, in contrast to our kootéeyaas which would oftentimes return back to the ground where they came from. The permanence I think is important here is the knowledge, opposed to the object.”

To Western institutions, the object takes primacy. To Galanin, the people and land come first.

Galanin’s kootéeyaa has fallen apart, chopped into pieces by colonialism and capitalism and Christianity, but the figure is picking its pieces up and rebuilding itself.

Free To All

All Boston Public Art Triennial commissions and associated installations and programs are free to attend.

“That’s why public art is so important, because it is outside, it is free, and anyone can access it,” Alonzo said.

Anyone.

“As someone who grew up in a family with many, many ways in which we felt that systems and cities and places weren’t necessarily designed for us, coming from an immigrant background, facing the language barriers and cultural walls that my parents–new to this country–had experienced, art was always a way to transcend those walls and boundaries, to get beyond language, to get beyond the day to day into a sense of our shared humanity,” Wu said. “If there was ever a moment where we needed to tap into our sense of shared humanity, the ability to build community… now is that moment.”

Everyone.

“If you look at the transit system in Boston and the history of redlining–and lots of mistakes that we’ve made in our urban planning–there are neighborhoods that are not connected to the core of downtown,” Gilbert explained. “It’s harder for folks living in the neighborhoods to come downtown where there is more activity, more free opportunities, museums. It was important to make sure that works were in the neighborhoods where there isn’t a contemporary art museum or access to contemporary art.”

Free to All.

These words are carved above the entrance to the Boston Public Library by Copley Square, as good a place as any to begin exploring the Triennial.

“The piece we did in the Boston Public Library with Swoon (b. 1977), the Boston Public Library is basically the border of the homeless population, scholars, students, it is a thriving melting pot, a cross section of society,” Alonzo explained. “When you’re doing a piece that deals with the opioid crisis and addiction, and the stories that we tell about addiction, the library turned out to be the perfect place, because they’re at the front lines of engaging with that community on a regular basis. Try and use the bathroom at 9 AM when the library opens the public bathroom, there’s a line of people, some of them are going in there to clean themselves up.”

In addressing the opioid crisis, a crisis the artist has personal experience with through her mother, Swoon selected the library because that’s where the stories of addiction are being experienced in Boston–not only in books on the shelves, but by the Bostonians walking through the door.

This triennial mirrors a library. Libraries were designed as free outlets of knowledge for the public. Books and information and ideas without admission fees. Similarly, the triennial shares contemporary art with the public outside of museums, no admission fee.

Free access to arts and culture and history and knowledge is important to Wu. Partnering with local institutions and philanthropic organizations, she developed Boston Family Days, opportunities for Boston students and families to visit 13 different museums for free on the first and second Sunday of each month through December 2026.

“We are undeterred and steadfast in building a home for everyone in this community–by everyone, we mean everyone,” Wu said. “Where our stories aren’t wielded to intimidate or divide, but are invitations to come closer, look deeper, and create that connection, to see ourselves reflected in the humanity of each other.”

Wow.

More From Forbes

ForbesThe Art Of John Wilson: Fathers And Children Like You’ve Never Seen ThemBy Chadd ScottForbesHawai‘i Triennial 2025 Opens With Theme Of ‘Aloha Nō’By Chadd Scott