The Greenway ARTbeat Series updates

It’s time for a pulse check on The Greenway ARTbeat series that is enhancing and expanding public art and programming throughout the entirety of park!

SONG/LAND/SEA: WAI Water Warning & Binakol Blessing, 2024 by interdisciplinary artist Lani Asunción is now on display along the Wharf District Park section of The Greenway. The activation is a public art installation and performance series that responds to the unequal impacts of climate change and global warming on Boston’s own coastline. 

WAI Water Clock is a 7-foot-tall sculpture featuring a suspended cement vessel, brass bell, sailors’ rope, and an etched brass bowl. This design echoes water clocks, a time-keeping technology used by humans for thousands of years to measure time based on the flow and filling of water within a specific-sized vessel.

Engraved with the word wai, the bell forms a visual and sonic water drop—a symbol of lamentation for the futures at stake and of Boston’s coastline returning to the sea. Directly below the bell lies a handcrafted brass bowl, etched with a map of Boston’s coastline surrounded by a message in binary code reminding us of these cycles of return: all that is solid melts into air.

Photos courtesy of the Greenway Conservancy.

Going to Ground is a site-specific project by artist LaRissa Rogers that responds to and engages with the history of Zipporah Potter Atkins is set to be installed on The Greenway at Cross and Hanover Streets in Boston’s North End next week. Fabricated with steel and earthen soil blocks, Going to Ground will offer an echo of Potter Atkins’ home that resonates with Boston’s contemporary realities. Based on an artistic rendering created from historical records, the sculpture stands at two-thirds the size of the original house.

Photos courtesy of the Greenway Conservancy.