Boston’s Public Art Triennial Embraces the Commons
By Terence Trouillot
July 1, 2025
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.