Boston’s Public Art Triennial Embraces the Commons

Once the heart of Boston’s maritime economy, Long Wharf Pier served as a major gateway for the transatlantic slave trade. Today, just a few hundred metres west of that historic pier stands Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which houses shops and restaurants: a digestible version of American capitalism, saturated with foot traffic and historical amnesia. Nestled in its outdoor plaza is New Red Order’s large-scale installation Material Monument to Thomas Morton (Playing Indian) (2025) – one of the most quietly radical interventions in the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, ‘The Exchange’, curated by Pedro Alonzo and Tess Lukey.

Morton – a colonial dissenter, Puritan defector and leader of the ill-fated Merrymount Colony (a scandalous settlement that promoted integration with Indigenous communities and orgiastic festivities) – has long been celebrated as a proto-decolonial thinker. The sculpture itself – part effigy, part counter-memorial – is a puckish figure. Morton stands frozen mid-stride, holding a twisted musket with a flower poking from the barrel, playfully indicting the very foundations of colonial commemoration.

That concern with Indigenous self-determination finds a powerful echo in two works by Nicholas Galanin. Aáni yéi xat duwasáakw (I am called Land) (2025), installed at the MassArt Art Museum, is a towering kinetic sculpture. Suspended from the ceiling is a large-scale Tlingít hand drum, activated by a robotic arm that beats in time with a human heartbeat. As the work fills the space with sound, silent video projections of ocean waves ripple across the gallery walls. Nearby, in Evans Way Park, Galanin’s I think it goes like this (pick yourself up) (2025) reimagines a traditional Tlingít totem pole in bronze, collapsed and folded over itself like a toppled ruin or discarded inheritance. Both sculptures meditate on rupture, endurance and Indigenous survival.

Ekene Ijeoma’s project Black Forest (2022–ongoing) offers a meditative counterpoint. The work entails the planting of 40,000 trees across US cities as a living memorial to Black lives lost – a quiet, durational act of grief, ecology and public memory. In Boston, the trees appear across neighbourhoods with deep ties to Black history: Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. At Dr. Loesch Family Park in Dorchester, Ijeoma has installed Stone Circle Bench (2025), a circular formation of 40 stones made of ‘brown rock’, also known as Roxbury puddingstone – the literal bedrock of Roxbury. The stones are cut against the grain for smoothness and mounted on aluminium posts, clustered to offer comfortable seating for reflection.

Boston-based Gabriel Sosa’s contributions include I want more celebrations (2025), a text-based installation riffing on Zoe Leonard’s iconic 1992 poem ‘I want a president’. While the homage, made with Maverick Landing youth, feels somewhat rote, his adjacent project Ñ Press (2025) is far more compelling. Framed as a social sculpture, Ñ Press distributes a community-run, bilingual newspaper via hot pink aluminium kiosks across the city. It’s public art as civic infrastructure: slow, local and radically accessible.

‘The Exchange’ asks us to meet art where we are, which is to say: together, outside, in public. What public art offers, especially now, is not just a reprieve from the gallery, but a return to the commons. In the early days of the pandemic, when frieze published an entire dossier devoted to public art (of which I was the editor), there was a renewed sense of urgency around gathering outside and imagining other modes of seeing and being. Today feels similar: as doomscrolling and cultural pettifogging metastasize, public art once again invites us to look up and out – to engage with the world as it is, and as it could be. The triennial, in this sense, doesn’t present a resolved vision. Instead, it stages a series of proposals – temporary, polyvocal, but, ultimately, generous.

Boston Public Art Triennial, ‘The Exchange’, is on view at various venues until 31 October

^{Main image: New Red Order, Material Monument to Thomas Morton (Playing Indian), 2025, installation view. Courtesy: Boston Public Art Triennial; photograph: Caitlin Cunningham}