Installations You Can’t Miss at the Boston Public Art Triennial

Boston’s urban fabric is being reshaped through the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, with the theme The Exchange, a citywide initiative placing socially engaged, immersive artworks across public institutions and spaces.

Running from May to October 2025, the Triennial highlights 15 commissioned artists who interpreted themes of memory, land, migration, and imagination through public installations. Across museums, courtyards, facades, and neighbourhoods, the city becomes a gallery where community, nature, and culture meet.

Here are four must-see projects from this historic launch. These exhibitions demonstrate the Boston Public Art Triennial’s potential as not only a showcase of visionary art but as a civic project, one that expands access, deepens dialogue, and reclaims the public realm as a space of storytelling, care, and collective imagination.

Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home

Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota presents Home Less Home, her first solo exhibition in New England. Known for intricate thread installations, Shiota transforms the ICA Watershed with two monumental works that evoke the themes of displacement and belonging.

Visitors first encounter Accumulation – Searching for the Destination (2014/2025), featuring vintage suitcases suspended in mid-air with red ropes. Some tremble slightly—suggesting the tension of transit and new beginnings. For Shiota, who arrived in Berlin in 1996 with just one suitcase, the object is a symbol of memory and migration.

The second piece, newly commissioned, expands on this narrative. A structure made from red and black ropes outlines the silhouette of a house, filled with suspended personal documents—immigration papers, photographs, passports—contributed by Boston residents. Domestic furniture vignettes beneath them evoke the emotional gravity of leaving and rebuilding home. Collaborating with local community groups, Shiota invites the public to submit their stories, making the artwork a participatory archive of diasporic memory.

All images by Timothy Schenck.

Nicholas Galanin: Aáni yéi xat duwasáakw (I am called Land)

Tlingít and Unangax, two distinct Indigenous groups in Alaska and the surrounding regions, artist Nicholas Galanin debuts a striking kinetic sculpture and video installation that explores the cultural, spiritual, and environmental relationships to land. The exhibition’s centerpiece is a suspended ceremonial Tlingít box drum, activated by a robotic arm that beats in sync with a human heartbeat. Accompanying this sensory experience, silent ocean wave projections wash over the gallery, enveloping viewers in a meditation on continuity, rhythm, and loss.

By merging traditional ceremonial elements with robotic mechanisms, Galanin critiques the disruption of Indigenous knowledge systems by colonial forces. He calls attention to how everything “living, engineered, and built comes from land, depends upon land, and will return to land.”

This solo exhibition complements Galanin’s monumental public installation for the Triennial, I Think a Monument Goes Like This, addressing the erasure of Indigenous histories in public space.

All images by Mel Taing ‘16.

Yu-Wen Wu: Reigning Beauty

In a vivid tribute to nature’s fragility, Taiwanese-American artist Yu-Wen Wu animates the façade of the Gardner Museum with a fabric scrim titled Reigning Beauty. A cascade of digitally collaged flowers—violets, nasturtiums, hydrangeas—bursts from stormy skies, offering a poetic tension between beauty and environmental precarity.

Wu, an artist whose practice spans drawing, installation, and community engagement, took photographs of the Gardner’s greenhouse blooms to compose the work. Floating among them is a scholar’s rock, evoking Chinese garden traditions where rocks represent entire landscapes in miniature. This thoughtful combination of flora and stone gestures toward impermanence, resilience, and the role of human care in sustaining beauty.

As part of the Artist-in-Residence program, Wu’s work extends beyond the gallery and into public consciousness, offering a place of pause in the urban environment. The piece continues the museum’s long tradition of transforming its façade into a civic canvas.

Gabriel Sosa: I Want More Celebrations

Boston-based Cuban-American artist Gabriel Sosa, known for his text-based works and legal linguistic interventions, turns the city into a printing press with I Want More Celebrations. In partnership with Ñ Press and Maverick Landing Community Services, this youth-led public art project brings zines, posters, and billboards into the streets—bright, declarative, and unapologetically joyful.

The work emerged from a workshop where local youth read Zoe Leonard’s iconic poem I want a president and responded by composing their own collective manifesto. Their text calls for joy, safety, food access, and companionship, with blank spaces left for passersby to fill in their own visions. This deeply democratic gesture transforms print into an interactive medium and public space into a platform for collective dreaming.

Through language, Sosa collapses the boundaries between protest, poetry, and visual art. I Want More Celebrations is not a singular installation but a distributed, living work—a chorus of voices across the city’s walls and corners.

All images by Mel Taing