Boston’s Triennial Reimagines Public Art Through the City’s Social, Historical and Ecological Realities
By Elisa Carollo
June 4, 2025
In the 2025 Boston Public Art Triennial, artworks and artists are not parachuted into the city as spectacles, but rather positioned as catalysts for resonant exchanges rooted contextually in the city. Leading the initiative is artistic director Pedro Alonzo, an internationally recognized curator with extensive experience in biennials and public art, but also someone profoundly embedded in the local landscape, having lived in Boston for years and raised his children there. Cognizant of the global glut of biennials, Alonzo set out to create something thoughtful and truly impactful—something that could stand apart. His point of departure was a deceptively simple but critical set of context-specific questions: Where are we? What is happening here? “I realized the best way to do that was to understand the city and to do something meaningful for its reality,” he tells Observer.
The Boston Public Art Triennial initially opened at MassArt, one of the city’s participating institutions, with a solo exhibition and major site-specific installation by artist Nicholas Galanin, Aáni yéi xat duwasáakw (I am called Land). At its center, a robotic arm rhythmically strikes a rectangular wooden box, hand-painted with the image of a child and delicately suspended from organic ropes. Surrounding it, an immersive video envelops the viewer in a liquid world—one of creation, germination, transformation and human evolution—evoking the primordial waters from which everything begins. The rhythmical beating of the arm feels ritualistic once it synchronizes with the heartbeats. Yet embedded in this rhythm is also quiet violence—the relentless advance of technological progress confronting the endurance of ancestral tradition and the suppressed but still-extant knowledge of Indigenous cosmologies. The heartbeat becomes a ticking clock in a densely symbolic installation that unsettles and demands a reckoning with the contradictions of our civilization.
Not far away, in Evans Park, Galanin presents a bronze sculpture: the totemic figure of an Indigenous hero, now rendered in robotic form. Stooped or perhaps surrendering, the figure honors the fractured, enduring ruins of Indigenous culture and technological wisdom, distorted but not erased by the violence of colonization. Conceived as a counter-monument, it resists the epic language of triumph to instead expose the ruptures, assimilations and erasures enacted by settler-colonial fantasies—ironically cast in bronze, a medium long used to glorify conquest and subjugation.
Operating primarily in the realm of public art, many of the works in the Triennial confront dominant narratives enshrined in traditional monuments by proposing counter-monuments, which either subvert and reshape conventional aesthetics or play openly with cultural stereotypes.