Biennials and triennials are proliferating across the globe, often launched by local governments as tools for tourism and city branding. But these art events risk weakening ties with the very communities and territories they claim to elevate—the foundations from which meaningful development should arise—when outsiders are at the helm. The inaugural edition of the Boston Public Art Triennial, by contrast, is grounded first and foremost in two essential elements: a deep understanding of the local community and a sensitivity to the city’s social and natural ecologies.

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.

Where many curatorial statements drift into academic opacity—more convoluted than the exhibitions they purport to articulate—Alonzo has opted for clarity, centering the Boston Public Art Triennial on a direct, accessible theme that also functions as its curatorial engine: art as a tool and catalyst for exchange and conversation. “So the premise of the show is the exchange of ideas and how we influence each other,” he says as he walks us through a series of public installations. Working within this dialectical framework, the Triennial embraces art’s transformative potential, aspiring to create genuine, lasting impact within the communities it engages.

Alonzo points out that artists don’t simply sit in isolation and conjure ideas from thin air—they’re deeply shaped by the world around them, by the urgent realities unfolding across the planet. In a city like Boston, home to extraordinary concentrations of talent—from medical research institutions to NGOs and organizations dedicated to social betterment, supporting the unhoused and the vulnerable—the potential for meaningful engagement is immense. “I realized this is a city operating on a global scale, with far-reaching impact. The question became: how can we connect artists to that energy, to those networks, and allow their work to respond, resonate and contribute to amplify or make more accessible or more impactful this knowledge and talent?”

Cognizant of the city’s density of excellence across disciplines, Alonzo conceived the Triennial first and foremost as a platform for cross-pollination—tapping into these nodes of local expertise and encouraging encounters between artists and specialists to foster dialogue around the urgent issues shaping both Boston and the world. In this way, rather than imposing curatorial themes from above, the Triennial lets them emerge organically from Boston’s lived realities and global entanglements, coalescing around four interwoven areas of inquiry: indigeneity, climate and biodiversity, health and recovery, and shared humanity.

According to Alonzo, Boston can be a siloed environment, where individuals often work inwardly, focused on their own disciplines—generating knowledge and sharing it primarily within their professional spheres. The challenge was to create connections and projects that could act as vessels—moving fluidly across disciplinary boundaries and transcending the limits of their original contexts. He believes artists have the power to humanize data and research, transforming them into tools that reconnect with society and serve the public good. “Experts often bombard us with data—but the delivery can be dry, overwhelming, even mind-numbing, and this rarely resonates on a human level. That’s where artists come in, crafting compelling visual narratives, which can create entry points that not only help people understand the issues but also humanize them, making the data feel real, urgent, and emotionally accessible.”

What to see at the Boston Public Art Triennial

Due to inclement weather, the 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. Not far from Galanin’s installation, atop the pillars at the entrance to the MFA Boston’s square—visibly marked by the corporate patronage of Bank of America—artist Alan Michelson has installed two statues of contemporary Indigenous cultural stewards: Aquinnah Wampanoag member Julia Marden and Nipmuc descendant Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr. Standing as guardians, The Knowledge Keepers welcome visitors as quiet yet powerful reminders of another American history—one rooted in long-erased, long-neglected forms of knowledge now beginning to be acknowledged as essential to the American identity. Cast in bronze and gilded in gleaming platinum, the sculptures also speak to the extractive violence of colonial and capitalist expansion, invoking how mining and resource exploitation have desecrated sacred lands and disrupted ancestral ecological balances.

A similar, though more humorous, critique of colonial stereotypes takes shape in one of Boston’s most popular and touristic—yet also most historically fraught—sites: Quincy Market. Once a slave market, today it is a stage for patriotic performance, devoted to celebrating and thanking the so-called founders of the United States, often through the sanitized mythology of Thanksgiving. Here, the collective New Red Order has installed a larger-than-life, deliberately exuberant caricature of Thomas Morton, a rebellious Puritan defector whose long-suppressed story reminds us that alternative trajectories in the making of America were not only possible, but once real. Deserting the rigid dogma of the Pilgrims, Morton founded the far more liberal Merrymount Colony, which, despite its infamous indulgences and excesses, embraced a more open model of coexistence and exchange with Indigenous communities. In this intentionally eccentric monument, familiar symbols drawn from Boston pop culture, civic statuary and sports mascots are merged with the Tlingit sculptural tradition of “shame poles”—totemic forms erected to mark failure, debt or disgrace. The sculpture cleverly uses this mashup of stereotypes to trigger self-reflection, staging an inverted Boston Tea Party in which a red man links the corruption of the British state to its collusion with the East India Company—an effort to protect profits at all costs, lest Parliament lose its wealth.

During our conversation with Alonzo, people of all ages are pointing at the sculpture, commenting, discussing, snapping pictures—its magnetic pull on the general audience is undeniable. Rich in visual references that simultaneously riff on the fabricated mythos of Thanksgiving, Indigenous craft and knowledge systems, and their commercialized distortions, the statue evokes something between Disneyland and Luna Park—“something that Walt Disney could have made on an acid trip,” he says. And that is precisely why it works: familiar enough to engage, uncanny enough to provoke. As its absurdist and intentionally destabilizing roleplay unfolds, this countermonument challenges agency, memory and authorship in historical narration, confronting the aesthetic, cultural and ideological scaffolding that has long upheld distorted monuments and settler-colonial fantasies masquerading as national history.

For Alonzo, curating for public spaces always begins with the audience in mind, but maintaining a balance is essential: the goal is to engage and draw the public in, not necessarily by pleasing or entertaining them but by using those very elements as entry points to provoke deeper critical reflection.

Challenging societal taboos and entrenched patterns of denial is also central to Patrick Martinez’s contribution to the Boston Public Art Triennial. Known for his signature neon works, which are often inspired by his native L.A. and incorporate his own phrases or quotes from iconic figures, Martinez, following Alonzo’s suggestion, has taken a different approach in Boston. Here, he collaborated with youth experiencing homelessness, working in partnership with the local organization Breaktime to listen, record and give visual form to their real words and lived experiences, illuminating uncomfortable truths that are too often ignored. “It was all at once overwhelming: deeply impactful, emotionally draining, beautiful and heartbreaking. These stories carried so much weight,” Alonzo says. “Then Patrick, with his incredibly generous presence, just stood there, listened intently, took notes, asked thoughtful questions, and engaged in real conversation. From those exchanges, he created twelve powerful neon signs.”

The difficulty of finding a site willing to display these works has become a testament to the disruption they provoke. At present, only two of Martinez’s neon signs are installed, visible in the windows of Breaktime’s own properties. “We’ve only been able to hang two because people don’t want to talk about homelessness,” Alonzo explains with obvious disappointment. Despite initial enthusiasm from various landlords to host a contemporary art installation, interest quickly vanished once Cost of Living (2025) revealed itself as a direct confrontation with economic precarity and systemic neglect. For Alonzo, however, that resistance only reinforces the project’s urgency. Securing a home for the remaining signs is not merely a logistical matter but also integral to the work itself and the civic experiment it continues to activate.

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This experiment also lays bare the underlying power dynamics of central Boston, where nearly everything is owned or leased by large corporations, and small businesses are steadily vanishing. Similar challenges Alonzo encountered while working on other sites have turned the Triennial into a potent instrument for exposing the often-invisible structures of control embedded in public space. Notably, although the Triennial is organized with support from the city of Boston, it originated as a private initiative—an evolution of Now + There, founded in 2015 by patron Kate Gilbert—with the majority of its funding coming from private donors.

Another work similarly reveals the power of narratives and counter-narratives to confront and redeem personal and familial trauma, often shaped by broader societal discomfort. Artist Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, draws from her upbringing on the outskirts of Boston to excavate her own experience growing up in a family affected by drug addiction, finding in the city’s writers and researchers not only the language to process it but also pathways toward healing and reconciliation. In the Well: The Stories We Tell About Addiction (2025) is a powerful work that, in many ways, anchors the Boston Triennial’s approach. Here, Swoon turns to the medium of fairy tales—the very stories that once offered her comfort in childhood—to humanize addiction and build alternative narratives around it. The work is informed by conversations with Boston-based medical researchers Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk, whose groundbreaking writings on the intrinsic link between trauma and addiction shaped not only the conceptual foundation of the piece and Swoon’s own personal understanding of recovery.

Located in Boston’s iconic Central Library, the installation appears to grow organically yet precariously from the atrium, occupying what Alonzo describes as a rare civic space where Boston’s social classes intersect, where difference dissolves into a collective body brought together through shared engagement with story, whether myth, fiction or science. In that sense, the library becomes a metaphorical commons, and the installation, a living organism rooted in the ground of shared stories and knowledge that unites people across societal divides. By adopting the fairy tale form—traditionally a pedagogical tool for introducing children to the world while reflecting adult flaws—Swoon gives her story a level of universality. In this narrative, the mother figure is cast as a witch, addicted to a toxic substance brewed in the toads’ well. Through this enchanted lens of imagination, Swoon challenges dominant perceptions of drug addiction: it is not about moral failure or lack of love, but rather a symptom of societal neglect and the collapse of systems meant to support healing and recovery.

Then, when one lifts their eyes and notices how this fragile structure sways beneath the weight of a massive U.S. flag hanging above, the installation transforms into a disquieting portrait of countless untold micro-histories across the country—stories that remain largely absent from the national identity that the flag is supposed to represent.

In challenging the narrative and conceptual framework of the conventional biennial, the Boston Public Art Triennial also opened space for artists engaging with a broader notion of ecosystem that extends beyond the usual focus on human communities that biennials and public art projects are typically centered on. Perhaps the most striking example is the work of Brazilian artist Laura Lima. Known for working with “living materials,” Lima set out in Boston to create sculptures not for humans, but for animals. Radically subverting the anthropocentric paradigm that has shaped art since the Renaissance (and even earlier, in Ancient Greece), she initiated a dialogue with species-specific experts to design sculptures attuned to the behaviors, seasonal movements and needs of local fauna. “To make art for animals, it just automatically elevates them to another level and allows the art to turn into a tool to enhance their lives,” Alonzo says. Left outdoors, the works in In Indistinct Form (Forma Indistinta) evolve organically through interaction with animals, weather and the natural life cycle, caught in a continuum of generation, adaptation, evolution, survival and transformation. Working closely and simultaneously with wildlife specialists at Instituto Vida Livre in Rio de Janeiro and the Mass Audubon Boston Nature Center, Lima’s project became an unexpected but vital conduit for knowledge exchange between two ecosystems connected by migratory bird paths.

Julian Charrière also sought to connect Boston with global environmental concerns, relinquishing conventional notions of authorship in favor of a project grounded in presence and witness. His contribution to the Triennial consists of a continuous 24-hour livestream from the Amazon rainforest, allowing its force and life to unfold in real time before viewers. As the title suggests, Calls for Action is a work of environmental witness, designed to raise awareness and foster a sense of proximity between Boston and these remote and fragile yet globally essential ecosystems. Emerging from a collaborative effort with Art into Acres, Re:wild, the Brazilian Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples and regional conservation organizations, the project speaks directly to Boston’s large Brazilian population, building a bridge between the city and critical ecological concerns. Even more poignantly, as Alonzo reveals, Charrière chose to donate his artist’s fee entirely to land-reclamation initiatives led by Indigenous groups.

Meanwhile, L.A.-based artist Beatriz Cortez landed in the more industrial setting of Charlestown Navy Yard with a monumental structure that hovers somewhere between a whale’s carcass, a dystopian spaceship wreck and a melting iceberg. Conceived in response to Boston’s whaling history and inspired by the artist’s recent trip to the Arctic, the installation invites the viewer on an intimate journey of deep, empathic identification with the trauma of displacement and the survival of these animals. The voyage becomes a testament to the endurance of whales, entangled in the broader narratives of modernity, industrialization and the escalating urgency of global warming.

As a fundamental resource for reshaping our paradigm of how we relate to the wider ecosystem, Indigenous artists and ancestral knowledge play a central role in this Triennial, offering pathways toward more sustainable, reciprocal relationships with the environment. While many might expect a Triennial in a tech-forward city like Boston to focus on emerging technologies, Alonzo chose instead to foreground ancestral technologies—alternative systems of development that, though historically marginalized, continue to offer critical lessons for a civilization increasingly aware of its own collapse. “When I started to look into the notion of technology, I began to see that artists were engaging with something more interesting than technological advancement and innovation: ancient forms of knowledge, deeper levels of understanding, vital things that we’ve forgotten or disregarded.”

Cannupa Hanska Luger has long explored the idea of “future ancestral technologies” in an approach rooted in the mechanics of science fiction as a form of “future dreaming rooted in continuum,” which allows for the imagining, prototyping and enactment of experiences that help Indigenous cultures not merely survive but thrive into the future.

In Boston, working within this framework, Hanska Luger contributes to the Triennial’s counter-narrative with Transmutation (2025), which fuses Indigenous futurism, speculative fiction and land-based restoration into the realm of public art, seeking to activate collective empathy and awareness. Two towering portals, each crowned with monumental buffalo skulls, frame a suspended mesh fabric adorned with thousands of ribbons, individually knotted and inscribed by community members. Through this act, the artist stages a communal ritual of mourning for the near-eradication of wild buffalo populations, while simultaneously honoring the resilience and knowledge of Indigenous communities. Past, present and future converge in this intricate weave of kinship, loss and renewal—held and activated through collective participation.

Even in the more spectacular, large-scale institutional presentations within the city’s major venues—such as Chiharu Shiota’s immersive installation at the ICA Watershed—the Triennial remains firmly rooted in the lived realities of Boston’s communities. In Home Less Home, the renowned Japanese artist interlaces her signature red threads and black ropes with paper documents—passports, letters, immigration forms and messages—that evoke the layered narratives of migration and displacement, but also of connection, memory and the shifting sense of home that defines a multicultural city like Boston. Similarly, in Accumulation – Searching for the Destination, dozens of vintage suitcases dangle from red strings and ropes, occasionally trembling or swaying like quiet omens, marking the anticipation, uncertainty and hope that accompany every journey toward a new beginning.

A poetic, text-based intervention by artist Gabriel Sosa installed at Tufts University echoes this call for resonance and connection. In a world marked by global uncertainty, the task, he reminds us, is to confront what remains real: pain, joy, trauma and hope. Created in collaboration with Maverick Landing Community Services, a local organization supporting families, community health and youth leadership, the project unfolds across the city as billboards, wheatpasted posters and handouts. Sosa subverts the bright, declarative aesthetics of commercial printing, transforming them into quiet meditations on the collective emotions, aspirations and tensions gathered through his sustained engagement with the diverse communities he met, listened to and exchanged with throughout the process.

The call for real encounters and genuine exchanges of experience and knowledge lies at the very heart of this Boston Public Art Triennial. Conceived as a living laboratory for testing the potential of shared space, the Triennial reminds us that it doesn’t take a grand monument or spectacular installation to make a lasting impression. Often, it emerges from the poetry and drama of the streets, the language of fairytales and the intimacy of honest conversation. It lives in the fluid exchange of interdisciplinary knowledge, in collaborations grounded in trust and proximity, and in the small but resonant acts that ripple through a city’s social and ecological fabric. Ultimately, it is through these grounded, reciprocal gestures that a biennial or triennial leaves its most enduring mark—one not merely inscribed in the landscape, but carried forward in the communities it touches.

The Boston Public Art Triennial runs through October 31, 2025.