In downtown Boston, whimsical pop-up public art delights and disquiets

It was snowing in Boston and the trains were delayed. Commuters shuffled along the slushy sidewalks by Millennium Tower, heads down. But one thing was able to stop them in their tracks: a 60-foot long whale made of skeletal steel beams. Snow settled picturesquely on its metal ribcage.

Michael Nichols stooped to brush snow off the speakers that sat beneath the whale’s belly. They emitted a low gurgling sound, though it was hard to hear over the growl of some nearby construction.

Nichols is the president of the Downtown Boston Business Improvement District, which commissioned the sculpture as part of a public art initiative called Winteractive. Its buzziest piece, a pair of giant inflatable clown heads, made the rounds on social media after they materialized in mid-January, wedged between two buildings near Downtown Crossing.

But the pair of clowns — “Endgame (Nagg & Nell),” by the Canadian artist Max Streicher — is just one of sixteen public art installations Downtown Boston BIC installed in a bid to increase wintertime foot traffic. The whale, a sculpture called “Echoes – A Voice From Uncharted Waters” by the British artist Mathias Gmachl, was the first to appear in the neighborhood, in mid-December.

Nichols led the way down a quieter street to a sculpture by the American artist Mark Jenkins.

“This is Bromfield Street, a street that has struggled a little bit more, post-COVID, Nichols said.

He paused beneath a fire escape and looked up. A figure dressed all in black, with a hoodie pulled over his head, hung upside down, defying gravity as he traversed the underside of the fire escape. He was poised a bit like a cat burglar, easy to miss against the dark building beside him.

Mike McCart, of Boston, stopped to take a photo. The sculpture reminded him of a painting by M.C. Escher.

“It's very similar to the picture, where you have these ascending and descending staircases, and people are walking up and down and you can't really tell what's up and what's down,” McCart said. “So this guy's actually walking on the underside of a staircase. I guess down a staircase, I don't know. A little ‘Spider Man’ effect.”

The hooded figure is one of several hyper-realistic human figures, in unrealistic locations, that now pepper the neighborhood. After stopping to adjust a sign explaining the exhibit, Nichols led the way to another Jenkins sculpture hanging some 30 feet in the air over the entrance to winter street: a woman on a swing, suspended from a wire strung between two buildings.

Darrell Ann Gane-McCalla, of Roxbury, was not impressed.

“I mean, it's just weird,” she said, squinting up at the eerie figure silhouetted against the heavy white sky. “It's concerning, because it looks like a person about to jump!”

She was not the first to have that reaction – the city had already removed another Jenkins sculpture in response to emergency calls from concerned citizens.

But McCalla, an artist who goes by Miranda (W)rites, had another beef with the installation.

“If it speaks to me, if it moves me, I love public art,” she said. “But there's a problem that a lot of art is not public art. It's art in public that the public has no say in.”

McCalla said there weren’t enough opportunities for Boston artists to get big commissions like this one. She thought a local would be able to speak to the history of the city in a way outsiders couldn’t.

“There are a lot of artists who live here, who are rooted here, who know the lived history of growing up here,” McCalla said.

The snow was slowly turning into rain. As he headed down Winter Street, Nichols said that nearly all the art his organization had presented over the past 12 years was by local artists. This time, they worked with three groups from Québec – EXMURO Arts Publics of Québec City, LeMonde Studio of Montréal, and Quartier des Spectacles International (QDSI) of Montréal – who brought in work from around the world.

“I think we should not, though, as a city, exclusively focus on local artists,” Nichols said. “This is a cosmopolitan city, it’s a major American city. It's a wonderful opportunity to connect the art and artists and their messages of the world to inform and entertain our local audiences.”

One of the final installations was going up on the sidewalk outside of Macy’s. Workers were erecting four bicycles that lit up and played music when you pedaled them.

Cheri Cresta, of Revere, stopped to watch. One of the workers invited her to hop on.

“You gotta pedal quick!” he said. As Cresta cranked faster, the bike started to play an orchestral arrangement of “Shipping Up To Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys. Impulsively, Cresta grabbed the beanie off her head and flung it into the air.

Afterward, she was giddy.

“It was amazing,” she said, out of breath. “That was cool, too, because the faster you go, the more the music plays.”

When the bikes are fully installed, they’ll project images onto the sidewalk when you pedal them. Hearing this, Cresta said she would definitely come back.