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The MFA will commission artists to create works responding to a controversial statue of a Native American man that sits at the museum's main entrance.

Most events are fleeting and temporary, but not so are the places where they occur and leave their traces, if only in memory. As a child in the sixties touring Boston’s historical sites, that which left the deepest impression was neither a statue nor a church, but a circle of cobblestones, maybe a dozen feet in diameter, set on a traffic island at a busy downtown intersection.

The Guest Critic is charged with suggesting a topic or theme that can be explored and debated for this special section of the Rail. On the occasion of the re-staging of Jenny Holzer’s 1989, architecturally encompassing piece at the Guggenheim, I have chosen the theme of site-specific Art. To my mind, Holzer’s Guggenheim project is one of the great site-specific works of my generation. It is also part of a larger history that has grown in some very interesting ways.

New York City has one of the largest urban populations of Indigenous people in the United States, but for many, that history has been hidden — and artists, researchers and community leaders are working to shed light on it.

For almost three decades, Alan Michelson has attended to place, histories, and futures, and the lived realities of Indigenous peoples in North America.