Through the efforts of the Boston Public Art Triennial, the City of Boston’s civic life and built environment have been enhanced and strengthened. Bravo!
For over 200 years, Boston has been considered a literary and musical city. Unlike New York, Chicago, Seattle, or Miami, Beantown has placed visual art — and thus public art — at a much lower civic cultural level. Here, public art has generally been relegated to minor-league status and impact. In fact, during nearly three-quarters of the 20th century, public art was not even acknowledged in Boston. The venerable Museum of Fine Arts ignored contemporary art until the ’70s. Founded in 1936 as a poorer sister institution to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) made the dubious decision more than 90 years ago not to collect contemporary art at all. In the first decade of the 21st century, this was finally, and somewhat reluctantly, changed.
Certainly, over the years, there have been hit and miss attempts at public art in Boston — most selections were historical individual bronze statues, all honoring white males. Abstraction was not even on the docket. About 50 years ago, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) commissioned the Arts on the Line program to supply public art to subway stations. Previously, commissioning artwork was a hit-or-miss proposition. UrbanArts, administered by the Cambridge Arts Council, proved to be more creative when selecting for art inside and outside the “T” platforms in the late ’70s and ’80s. Twenty permanent artworks for stations were created by 1985. Many prominent locally based artists initially took part in this program — the results were mixed. Outstanding works were installed by artists Mags Harries, David Phillips, Paul Matisse, and Dimitri Hadzi. Many other artists who were commissioned proved an old axiom: most studio artists are not cut out for making public art. Still, the project was an overall major success.
Initially administered by the very talented and passionate Pam Worden, UrbanArts’ mission was based on the belief that the cultural vitality of communities depended on incorporating the arts in the public realm, and to do this successfully artists and citizens needed to be engaged. Successive administrations of UrbanArts ranged from near invisibility to the suspiciously shady. With 21st-century flair, the final UrbanArts called on artist/curator Kate Gilbert to become director in 2014. Under Kate’s energetic and creative leadership, UrbanArts soon reemerged as a new organization, called Now + There. The organization’s revised mission was to be curatorial: to foster temporary artwork that was sensitive to context and place.
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On the other hand, some of the wonderful Triennial pieces included This Moment for Joy by Boston artist Alison Croney Moses, a graceful undulating wall of wooden slats on a gradient curve representing the loving warm embrace and inspiration of important Black women in the artist’s life. Set at the Charlestown Navy Yard, Moses’s piece demonstrates how a minimalist approach to skillful woodcraft could create public art that evokes the warmth of a sanctuary in form and scale. Also at the Charlestown Navy Yard, Evelyn Rydz served up a splendid environmental installation, Convergence: Porous Futures. Created from an elegant grid of mirrors set on low posts — modeled on abstracted storm drain — the piece sat above winding lines of stones cut into the lawn, which depicts the confluence of the nearby Mystic and Charles Rivers. Like most of Rydz’s art, this work focuses on water infrastructure and its environmental impact in the context of increasing weather extremes.
