Inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial Strives To Bring City More ‘Wow’ Moments
By Chadd Scott
May 25, 2025
“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.
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.