Engaging the public

To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom. is Now + There’s second collaboration with guest curator Pedro Alonzo who brought Oscar Tuazon’s Growth Rings to Central Wharf Park from 2019 to 2020.

Pedro Alonzo is a Boston-based independent curator. He is currently an Adjunct Curator at Dallas Contemporary. Since 2006 he has specialized in producing exhibitions that transcend the boundaries of museum walls and spill out into the urban landscape, addressing audiences beyond the traditional museum public. At the ICA Boston, he curated Shepard Fairey’s 20-year survey, Supply, and Demand. For the MCA San Diego, he organized the group exhibition Viva la Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape, which featured site-specific works inside the museum and throughout downtown San Diego. In 2015 Alonzo began to develop exhibitions designed to engage the public, starting with a citywide exhibition in Philadelphia, Open Source: Engaging Audiences in Public Space, followed by working with JR to place a gigantic image of a Mexican child named Kikito, overlooking the US/México border wall in Tecate. Since 2016 Alonzo has worked with The Trustees, Massachusetts’s largest conservation and preservation non-profit, to launch and curate the organization’s first Art and the Landscape initiative, resulting in site-specific commissions created by the artists: Sam Durant (2016), Jeppe Hein (2016), Alicja Kwade (2018), and Doug Aitken (2019). He is currently working on Amnesia Atómica, an ongoing project by Pedro Reyes, commissioned by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientist, centered to revive and reintroduce the issue of nuclear threat into the public narrative.

Building with friends

Special thanks to BRM Production Management for helping N+T, Dávila, and Alonzo bring this project to life!

Embracing the site

Designed by Reed Hilderbrand, a Cambridge-based landscape architecture practice, Central Wharf Park is an urban micro-forest composed of 24 mature oak trees and sits between the New England Aquarium and the Rose Kennedy Greenway at 250 Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Boston. The park has ramped entry points as well as step-up curb entries and is paved with cobblestones.

To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom. aimed to explore new dimensions of our shared public experience and public creative power in shaping the built environment. Along with the presentation of artworks, Now + There continues to lead and engage in public conversations, verbal and written, exploring the centuries-long history of the events, policies, and attitudes that have created the Boston we see today.