Experience the Power of Public Art this Fall

Rachel Perry, Mural installation of Kleenex, Tea, Chocolate, Covid Test, Cold Compress, Hairbrush and Two Crackers, 2026. Photo by Cat Lent.

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If you have been in Boston over the past few months, you have likely heard about or seen the large herd of elephants ambling down Commonwealth Avenue. After attracting thousands of community members and visitors, these life-sized, hand-carved elephants are being adopted to support wildlife conservation, Indigenous artisan communities, and public art preservation. Locally, the New England Aquarium’s North Atlantic right whale conservation efforts are a beneficiary. Pawoo!

At Cube, we have always been interested in Boston artists' ability to impact social change, as well as the community’s interest in supporting those efforts. In the spirit of the elephant, we are visiting Rachel Perry on Tufts' (Jumbos!) Medford campus this fall. Perry describes her new mural, Kleenex, Tea, Chocolate, Covid Test, Cold Compress, Hairbrush and Two Crackers (2026), as marching along the parking lot wall.

“Cardboard boxes are often reused: for protest signs, for packing and moving our earthly possessions, for creating shelter for the unhoused,” Rachel notes. “For years I have been unfolding and saving boxes—those I bring inside and others that arrive by delivery services. I’ve used them as inspiration and material in my work, making sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, and even videos out of them, always thinking about converting something rapidly used up into a meditation on the slowness of art making. The work is an antidote to the flattened experience of digital life. The box’s strangeness has always been there, hidden; here you can fold it in your mind.”

While at Tufts, we’ll head into the engineering building to visit Kate Conlon and Boyang Hou's Xylotheque’s Nocturne. Inspired by European cabinets of curiosities and the fifteenth-century Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bo and Kate composed a still life using laser-cut wood inlay. With an emphasis on stillness, the work serves as a backdrop for productive mind-wandering—a place to rest your eyes while thinking of something else.

This fall, we will also learn more about the Wagner Arts Fellowship with artist Yu-Wen Wu and Senior Program Officer and Curator Abigail Satinsky. The Wagner Arts Fellowship supports Boston visual artists and their potential to inspire social change through a $75,000 unrestricted grant. Yu-Wen Wu’s public art accolades include serving as the 2024 Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, receiving a 2024 Trellis Art Fund grant, and creating the exterior banner at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as part of the Boston Triennial. She has received prominent public art commissions, including Lantern Stories by the Greenway Conservancy and The Poetry of Reason at Tufts University, and was recently selected to create an outdoor commission on the Boston Esplanade.

Before ending our fall season, we are heading to the MFA, Boston, where the 18th Century Art of the Americas galleries have been reimagined to coincide with America at 250. We’ll visit with Ethan Lasser, Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Conservation, and contemporary artist Hartman Deetz, a Mashpee Wampanoag artist and activist. Inspired by his diverse family tree, Hartman selected works from the MFA’s collection—many crafted by Native women—and created an altar using his own traditional medicines and special items from loved ones to explore the question: What makes a house a home?

"For me, there are two distinct things that make me feel like I am home—planting a garden and setting up an altar to make offerings to ancestors, ask for guidance, and say prayers to those who have passed on before me," says Hartman.

Opportunities to create tours that highlight how artists engage with us outside the studio through public programming have been a throughline for nine seasons of Cube. Whether you are interested in art as a vehicle for public good or just want to experience the New England fall, we hope you will join us on one of our fall tours!