BOSTON COMMON
Janet Zweig
What Do We Have in Common?, 2021
Illuminating what we share.
Public art trailblazer Janet Zweig invited all to converse about commonalities and public ownership with “What Do We Have in Common?,” which was on view in historic Boston Common from Sept 22 - Oct 24, 2021.
The installation began with a wooden cabinet near the Parkman Bandstand. 200 blue, illuminated markers waited within it, each carved with poignant questions such as “Who owns this park?” Over 30 days, Guides (some of who were bilingual) took these illuminated markers from the cabinet and placed them around the cabinet in order to spark thought-provoking conversations and reflections with the public on our shared responsibilities to each other and the public spaces we visit.
The artwork asked us to reflect on what we have in common with each other and the resources we share, like public parks. The title, a pun on the word “commons,” refers to things we own together or that no one owns: air, history, culture, the Internet, and the Boston Common itself.
Commissioned by the Friends of the Public Garden to honor their 50th Anniversary and curated by Now + There, now known as Boston Public Art Triennial. Share your thoughts and reactions at #InCommonBOS.
LOCATION
Boston Common
BOSTON COMMON
Janet Zweig
Creating in Boston for the first time.
Janet Zweig is a leader of the public art form, having worked in the public realm since the 1990s. Her major projects include a kinetic installation on a pier along Sacramento River, a performance space in a prairie on a Kansas City downtown green roof, a generative sentence wall in downtown Columbus, a light installation and memorial in Pittsburgh, a 1200' frieze at the Prince Street subway in New York and a system-wide interactive project for 11 Light Rail train stations in Minneapolis, incorporating the work of over a hundred Minnesotans. While she has created public sculpture, interactive works, and performance, “What Do We Have in Common?” seamlessly brings all three elements together for the first time. The project highlights the tremendous ecological treasure at Boston’s center through its amplification of the care that must go into it.
Janet is based in Brooklyn, NY and her sculpture and books have been exhibited widely in such places as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Exit Art, PS1 Museum, the Walker Art Center, and Cooper Union. Awards include the Rome Prize Fellowship, NEA fellowships, and residencies at PS1 Museum and the MacDowell Colony. She currently has a year-long residency with the New York City Mayor's Office of Sustainability and teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University.
Janet lived in Boston and Cambridge in the 1980s. This project was her first Boston-based public commission.