Harnessing the Potential of Brevity and Temporary Installations

Situated in America’s first public park, the bronze sculpture honors the life and legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. It celebrates their ties to the City of Boston while promoting a public conversation on racial and social justice. The Plaza itself also commemorates the 69 local civil rights leaders active between 1950-1970, all of whom reflect the diversity of the local community today. 

In spite of the widespread public support of The Embrace, the City of Boston has been challenged with the task of sustaining and deepening the conversations the sculpture elicits. While it has supported the construction of other recent memorials through the Boston Arts Commission, construction of additional monuments would require substantial investments and time commitments, as well as great deliberation between key stakeholders and the community at large due to their permanency. 

This has resulted in the City’s landing on an innovative solution: to support artists in creating temporary artworks and events that are socially responsive and experimental. 

With the support of Mellon’s Monuments Project Presidential Initiative, the Boston Arts Commission will now sponsor Vectors, a program designed to proliferate the installation of temporary artworks across the City. In addition to hosting community events to bring the community together, Vectors will announce open calls and invite select artists to submit designs with curatorial partners such as the Pao Arts Center, the North American Indian Center of Boston, Now and There, the Museum of the National Center for African American Artists, and Emerson Contemporary. 

The first set of artworks are expected to be temporarily installed between May and November of 2024. Subsequently, the outcomes of the city-wide program will reveal the true capabilities of temporary artworks and events, and how they can work in tandem with existing permanent monuments to further existing conversations and foster new ones.  

In a project description, Boston Arts Commission wrote: “People need memorials and monuments for different phases of grief and gratitude and to host democratic conversations and reflect civic values. Short-term, new media, and other types of projects are more agile and fluid than long-term installations. There’s intensity in brevity, in being an event rather than a permanent object, and that intensity facilitates dialogue and meaning.” 

As the nation prepares for its 250th anniversary in 2026, the City of Boston is expanding efforts to celebrate upcoming historical anniversaries and investing in resources to ensure that events are inclusive and reflective of its community today. Now, Boston Arts Commission and Vectors is uniquely positioned for the sestercentennial, as the City's aesthetic risk-taking through community-driven, temporary installations will allow it to reimagine how monuments are created to better reflect the diverse, changing nation we live in today.