Latest news with #BostonPublicArtTriennial
Boston Globe
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Alison Croney Moses, a Boston artist dedicated to bringing Black motherhood to light, wins de Cordova Museum's $50,000 Rappaport Prize
Alison Croney Moses, who works mostly in wood, carefully manipulates a scale model of her Triennial project earlier this year. Lane Turner/Globe Staff Advertisement Moses was already having a banner year. Her piece called 'This Moment for Joy,' an angular splay of undulating planks of red oak commissioned by the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, is perched prominently on an expanse of lawn at the Charlestown Navy Yard right now, in eyeshot of the U.S.S. Constitution Museum. In August, she'll be one of the artists featured in the Outward appearances of success, though, can be misleading. Moses, who balances her art career with the active lives of her two young children, has struggled to find space and time to pursue her work. The prize, she said, is like a pressure valve being released. 'Honestly, I really was in tears,' she said. 'It's hard to tell from the outside, because I know it looks like I'm doing very well, but financially, being an artist in Boston is difficult. It's really, really difficult. This gives me space to breathe.' Advertisement The timing of the prize could hardly have come at a better time. Moses, whose work is largely sculpture, and mosly in wood, has only been able to devote herself full-time to making art in the last two years; before that, she had a 10-year career working in non-proifts, leaving art to brief slivers of time in the evening and on weekends, when work and parenting weren't in the way. Alison Croney Moses, left, and Izaiah Rhodes, her assistant, working on her Triennial commission in her Boston studio this year. TONY LUONG/NYT The prize places no restrictions on how the money can be used, and does not require artists to produce a piece or body of work. On a follow-up call with the Rappaport family, the local philanthropists who fund the prize, Moses made clear both her gratitude and how important a no-strings-attached gift can be for any artist. 'Any time I've had access to unrestricted funding, it's given me the opportunity to get deeper into my practice, 'she said. 'Literally, right before that Zoom call, I was looking at job postings, really thinking: Do I need a full-time job again? Something like this tells me: You are an artist. You should be doing this. And that's huge.' One thing the prize can no longer provide, unfortunately, is the winner being given a solo exhibition at the de Cordova, which it did for many years. The museum has been closed since 2023 for an overhaul of its HVAC system (the last was Advertisement An exhibition of some of Alison Croney Moses's work at the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston. Mel Taing Thematically, she's devoted: 'This Moment for Joy,' a minimalist cocoon that ripples and curls into a protective embrace, is a monument to the warmth of the Black women in her life who inspire and support her; using elegant wood forms, Moses means to honor Black motherhood and interrogate a society that has made it perilous and undervalued for generations. The prize, she said, is opening her mind to expansive treatments on the theme. A project she's been mulling involving sound and video – both firsts for her, and a real risk to attempt with bills to pay – now seems possible. 'Right now, I work deadline to deadline,' she said. 'I don't ever feel like I'm really able to dream and experiment. Now, I can.' Alison Croney Moses's 'This Moment for Joy,' a project of the Boston Public Art Triennial, remains at the Charlestown Navy Yard, 1 - 5th St. , through Oct. 31. The Foster Prize exhibition opens August 28 at the Institute for Contemporary Art Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive. Murray Whyte can be reached at
Straits Times
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Explore the idea of home with 160km of red cord in artist Chiharu Shiota's Boston show
Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota's new exhibition, Home Less Home, at ICA Watershed is her largest museum show in the United States. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Explore the idea of home with 160km of red cord in artist Chiharu Shiota's Boston show BOSTON – Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has drawn a simple shape in thin air and at monumental scale: a rectangle with a pitched roof, instantly recognisable as the universal symbol of home. This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord – some 21,000 lengths of it, streaming down 7m from the ceiling of the ICA Watershed, a massive exhibition space at an active shipyard in east Boston. A rectangular forest of blood-red cords hangs nearly to the floor of this former factory space. Inside, the cords shift to lengths of black that form a dark silhouette of a house. Visible within this mirage-like structure are antique furnishings – a four-poster bed, rocking chair, dinette set, sewing table and chair – with a spectacular flock of paper of some 6,000 sheets fluttering above the domestic tableau. Shiota's new commission, titled Home Less Home, opened on May 22 under the banner of the inaugural citywide Boston Public Art Triennial and will remain till Sept 1. Artist Chiharu Shiota's Home Less Home exhibition at ICA Watershed. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES 'The house shape looks like a shadow because home does not exist,' Shiota said in a recent interview at the Watershed as she reached among the cords to affix the final pieces of paper with a stapler. 'Home is like something in your heart, inside,' added the soft-spoken artist, 53, who grew up in Osaka, Japan, and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997. Her immigrant story, both personal and age-old, echoes those of many residents living in east Boston near the shipyard, once the second-largest point of immigration in the United States, after Ellis Island. Earlier this spring, the ICA distributed a flier asking the local community to consider Shiota's open-ended questions of 'what home means, what it feels like to leave home and what it takes to rebuild it'. The Home Less Home exhibition includes the personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents of members of the local community in Boston. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Their personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents were reproduced on the sheets of white paper animating her installation. For almost three decades, the artist has created haunting, visceral environments using vast webs and fields of her signature cords – she calls them 'threads' – entwined with accumulations of well-worn objects, such as shoes or beds, that evoke both human presence and absence. At the Venice Biennale in Italy in 2015, Shiota transformed the Japanese Pavilion with an atmospheric matrix of red thread embedded with thousands of collected keys raining down into wooden row boats – objects poetically summoning ideas of entry, exit, passage and afterlife. A mid-career retrospective that opened at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2019, The Soul Trembles, has toured places such as Busan, South Korea; Shanghai and Shenzhen, China ; Jakarta, Indonesia; Brisbane, Australia; and most recently Paris – with an accompanying monograph published this spring by Skira. The show travels next to Italy and Canada. Mori Art Museum director Mami Kataoka, who organised the retrospective, said via e-mail that she has been astonished by visitor numbers worldwide that have far exceeded each institution's expectations. 'Beyond cultural differences, this response underscores the universality of the themes in Chiharu's work,' Ms Kataoka wrote, including 'our shared fear about an uncertain future and our common quest to understand the meaning of life and what may lie beyond it'. Artist Chiharu Shiota often uses networks of wool thread, a medium she feels better conjures the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Shiota left her home in Japan with just one suitcase to study abroad, eventually finding her way to Berlin. She trained as an abstract painter, but early on shifted to 'painting in the air' – as she called it – using networks of wool thread, a medium she felt better conjured the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. 'Many times, I'm using red string, the colour of blood,' she said, symbolic of 'family, nation, religion and survival'. In Berlin, a city she found weighted with history and inspiring to her artwork, Shiota met her husband and raised their daughter, who is now 18. 'Now, I have the feeling I have two home countries,' said the artist, who often collects discarded suitcases and other commonplace items at Berlin flea markets for her installations. Pieces of vintage leather luggage are part of the exhibition, Home Less Home. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES For the exhibition at the ICA Watershed, Shiota's largest museum show in the US, she has also adapted her 2014 piece, Accumulation – Searching For The Destination, near the entrance as part of her reflection on home. Thirty pieces of vintage leather luggage dangling inside another shower of red threads lead viewers into the show. Some of the suitcases have an internal motor, making them bob as if adrift at sea. 'Each person, one suitcase – they're ready to go, but we don't know where,' said Shiota, who will have solo shows in New York at the Japan Society and Templon gallery later in 2025. Ms Ruth Erickson, chief curator at the ICA, said: 'Chiharu is incredible at picking these objects that feel like they have this lifetime of wear and use and memory in them, that can be a kind of surrogate for a human story.' She invited Shiota to make the site-specific installation for the cavernous Watershed space, calling her 'an artist who understands how to work at a scale that can be a real challenge'. Home Less Home comprises around 160km of cord. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Home Less Home comprises around 160km of cord . Walking the processional length of the installation, a visitor experiences it perceptually dissolving into singular threads up close, while in longer views, it coalesces into a majestic volume. Shiota has created a winding pathway through the heart of her project, and viewers can see at close range what is printed on the fluttering sheets of paper. There are photographs of airport reunions, children playing on lawns, a Venezuelan's first experience of snow in Boston. One person offered a recipe for apple dumplings. A child's drawing of a house includes the handwritten line: 'Home is all the important people who makes the life better.' A woman contributed her falsified adoption papers deeming her an orphan, with the accompanying message: 'May all Korean adoptees find their way back home.' Personal photographs of community members are part of the exhibition. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES While none of Shiota's work is overtly political, 'this idea of where one makes one's home, and what the connections are to a place, could never be more at the forefront of our minds', Ms Erickson said. 'We see a country and an administration really analysing those rights.' Against the backdrop of court cases and debates raging in the news cycle about the fate of immigrants, who often are portrayed as a faceless monolith, the testimonies in Home Less Home are acute in their individuality. Sifting through these collected stories, they touched Shiota like a chorus of voices. 'I never met this person,' she said, 'but I feel like I know this person.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Boston Globe
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
On the sunny side with artist Andy Li
At the Navy Yard, a flagpole fitted with a rotating pinwheel at its midsection will project Li's upbeat vision to the world. At the top, a 4-by-6-foot homemade flag — a Li standard — stitched with the title text in lovingly handsewn font, will wave in the sea breeze. Artist Andy Li with his hand-stitched flag for the Boston Public Art Triennial at the Charlestown Navy Yard on May 13. Jasper Sanchez Li means it as a gentle exhortation to celebrate tiny victories, however minute; and with a website — Advertisement Being seen, really, is the point, Li said. 'Small moments can lead to big successes,' he said. 'So I'm saying don't discount them. Be in the moment. You can't change what happened, but you can choose what to do next. Grasp that and appreciate it.' If it sounds like self-actualization as art, well, Li is just that kind of guy. ''Today is the day' was my mantra,' he said. 'I just kept saying it to myself: 'Today is the day I'm going to get out of bed, I'm going to make myself coffee, I'm going to get through my to-do list.' And it evolved into this project. I wanted to create almost a ceremony for people to honor those moments along with me.' Andy Li's not-quite-finished 'Today is the Day' in the 'Lot Lab' space at the Charlestown Navy Yard for the Boston Public Art Triennial earlier this week. Lane Turner/Globe Staff Li's slogan could as easily be a mantra for the Triennial itself. A broad international affair that sprawls from downtown to Mattapan, Dorchester, Cambridge, and Charlestown, it's been a decade in coming, and Li has been along for the ride. A MassArt grad, he was among a cohort of Boston-based artists chosen for the Accelerator program with Starting in 2015, Now + There peppered the urban landscape with an array of contemporary art projects in 'I want to help people to find their own moments of joy,' Li said. Out there in the open with the whole city watching, the Triennial is his best bet yet. Advertisement ANDY LI: TODAY IS THE DAY A project of the Boston Public Art Triennial. May 22-Oct. 31. Charlestown Navy Yard, One 5th Street. Murray Whyte can be reached at
Boston Globe
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Walking (and T-ing) Boston's public art Triennial
Advertisement Only time can be the judge of that, and here, in the final days leading up to its official opening, I have only best guesses (a backhoe in constant use this week at the Charlestown Navy Yard, one of the Triennial's key sites, underscored the frantic last minute preparations). While we're waiting, I'm giving my imagination a workout to fashion a walking (and occasionally T-assisted) tour of some of what I think will be the most powerful pieces soon to pop up in neighborhoods near and far. A peek at New Red Order's work in progress, being installed at Faneuil Hall for the Boston Public Art Triennial. Luna Posadas Nava The Triennial, an international affair, makes a point of embracing artists actually from here, and you'll find a triumvirate of Boston-based artists — Andy Li, Evelyn Rydz, and Alison Croney Moses — at the Charlestown Navy Yard (another, Stephen Andrews, is in Roxbury; and Lowell-based Gabriel Sosa is in East Boston). Advertisement But to start in the middle of things, New Red Order, a 'public secret society' of Indigenous American collaborators will set up at Faneuil Hall with 'Material Monument to Thomas Morton (Playing Indian),' a satirical monument to the recalcitrant Puritan-era colonist's NRO's core trio of Adam Khalil (Ojibwe), Zack Khalil (Ojibwe), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) have made waves in the contemporary art world in recent years with their sharp parodies of colonial history and Indigenous appropriation. Faneuil Hall, a site rich with a slate of ugly colonial history – Peter Faneuil himself owed no small portion of his vast riches to enslavement – makes it a natural target for their acidic social critique. It's a short stroll from there to City Hall Plaza, where Adela Goldbard's project is New Red Order's spiritual companion. Called 'Invadieron por mar, respondemos con fuego. Un presagio. [They Invaded by Sea, We Respond with Fire. An Omen.]‚' it's a large-scale replica of a colonial tallship fashioned by Native American weavers from local invasive reeds (get it?). Part of the point of the Triennial is to affirm in the minds of Bostonians that public art need not be permanent, going against the grain of our bronze, great-man-on-horseback affinities. Goldbard's piece is not subtle in its embrace of it: At the end of its run, it will be set aflame and left to smolder and be swept away – in part an act of revenge, surely, but also a stark emblem that nothing is forever. Mexican artist Adela Goldbard harvesting reeds in New England earlier this year for her "An Allegory of (De)Coloniality, in Two Movements,' her project for the Boston Public Art Triennial at City Hall Plaza. Robert Gallegos The theme of the Triennial is 'Exchange' – evocative enough to suggest, broad enough to not dictate, both good things. A stroll south to Downtown Crossing helps make clear just how how broad it can be. Here, you'll find Patrick Martinez's neon signs positioned amid the district's baleful cluster of empty storefronts, the most outward symbol of downtown Boston's post-pandemic struggle to revive itself. Advertisement I doubt Martinez's works will help with that, but they do make a relevant point: Community Service, Patrick Martinez, Boston Public Art Triennial, 2025. Yubo Dong of Of Studio It would make logistic sense to turn southwest here and swing past the Public Garden en route to the main branch of the Boston Public Library, where Swoon, a much-beloved street artist turned museum installation darling, has transformed an outsize planter in the building's lobby into a terrarium for 'In the Well: The Stories We Tell About Addiction,' a ramshackle cabin inhabited by a pair of puppets (it's already there, if you're keen to get started). But I'd be pulled across the water to East Boston, where the ICA's Watershed is presenting Chiharu Shiota's exhibition 'Homeless Home.' Shiota's work is a monument to absence – trunks and suitcases and random pieces of furniture, entangled in red rope and dangling, symbols of lives up in the air. A lament for the untold millions forced into migration, cut adrift by various disasters and left with nowhere to call home, its rootlessness speaks to the chaos of our current moment. Advertisement Swoon's installation 'In the Well: The Stories We Tell About Addiction,' at the Boston Public Library Copley Square. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff Just down the street, Sosa's project works hard to find solid ground: Ñ Press, a storefront community print studio in partnership with Maverick Landing Community Services. Ñ Press roots itself in the city's Spanish-speaking community with a subtle growth mindset. Sosa, whose text-based work The Triennial concentrates a good handful of its pieces in the city core. But its mission to serve neighborhoods far-flung from downtown is in its DNA, an imprint on its soul from its formative years as the public art organization Alan Michelson's "The Knowledge Keepers" was installed at the main entrance of the Museum of Fine Arts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston A cluster of pieces in the Fenway signal museum participation in the Triennial, a key to its visibility. Alan Michelson's 'The Knowledge Keepers,' a pair of chromium sculptures flanking the front steps of the Museum of Fine Arts, Nicholas Galanin's 'I think it goes like this (pick yourself up),' an eight-foot-tall part-Lingit Native American, part-Transformers bronze figure in the process of assembling itself is at the MassArt Museum, and Yu-Wen Wu's 'Reigning Beauty,' a photo-collage of falling flowers is fitted to the facade of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. But hop the T at Ruggles and head out toward Mattapan (this will also, alas, require a bus from Forest Hills; or backtrack on the Green Line to Park Street, where the Red Line offers a more direct route), where Lan Tuazon and Laura Lima honor the Triennial's formative history with a pair of projects rooted in that community. Advertisement Laura Lima's 2021 work 'Communal Nest #1." The artist will be creating a number of such structures/shelters for the Boston Public Art Triennial at the Boston Nature Center and Wildlife Sanctuary in Mattapan. Laura Lima Studio/Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles Lima's 'An Indistinct Form (A Forma Indistinta),' at the Boston Nature Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, is a collaboration with the center's scientists to create 'sculptures for animals,' a poetic gesture with the practical purpose of building habitat lost to the urban wild — a metaphor, if you like, extended from the displacement narratives of Sosa and Shiota. Tuazon, meanwhile, has made 'Matters of Consequence,' an ever-evolving sculpture that doubles as a public space for the community to shape and grow over time; in many ways, its evolution, yet to be seen, is in fact the art. Evolution, it seems, is the watchword of the Triennial — or anything left in public to unfold over time. It's nothing without you. The Boston Public Art Triennial marks its official opening May 22 . For a list of sites, projects, and opening times, visit . Through Oct. 31 . Murray Whyte can be reached at
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Corrections: April 30, 2025
An item in the Dateline feature on April 27 referred incorrectly to Wiltshire, England. Wiltshire is a county, not a village. An article on Tuesday about a missile strike that hit a migrant facility in an area of northern Yemen described incorrectly the operations of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Saada. The organization still operates there; it did not withdraw this year. An article on Tuesday about a major power outage that hit Spain and Portugal on Monday misidentified Pedro Sánchez. He is the prime minister of Spain, not the president. An article on Tuesday about distrust of the new government among the Kurdish community in Syria misstated the location of the city of Aleppo in Syria. It is in the northwest, not the northeast. An article on Saturday about the Broadway musical 'Real Women Have Curves' misstated where Tatianna Córdoba grew up. She grew up in California's Bay Area, not Los Angeles. An article on Monday about the Broadway musical 'Floyd Collins' misstated details about the premiere of the show. It premiered in 1994 in Philadelphia, two years before it made its Off Broadway debut at Playwrights Horizons. An article on Sunday about the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History coming under attack from the Trump administration for its focus on diversity misquoted Vera Ingrid Grant, the guest curator of an exhibit at the Charles H. Wright Museum. She described the exhibition as a 'panoply of art,' not a 'canopy of art.' An article on Sunday about a new citywide exhibition called the Boston Public Art Triennial, relying on outdated information, misstated the title of Nicholas Galanin's sculpture at the Boston Public Art Triennial. It is 'I think it goes like this (pick yourself up),' not 'I Think a Monument Goes Like This.' An obituary on Sunday about the keyboardist and studio operator David Briggs misstated the year that Mr. Briggs joined Elvis Presley's band TCB. It was 1969, the year the band was formed, not 1966. An obituary on Tuesday about the basketball Hall of Famer Dick Barnett misstated the number of points Walt Frazier scored for the victorious New York Knicks in Game 7 of the 1970 N.B.A. finals against the Los Angeles Lakers. It was 36, not 37. Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
