Hyde Park Artist Jane D. Marsching Invites Neighbors to Care for Boston’s Urban Trees With Tree Care Hyde Park
The community-centered public art project will bring plant-dyed textile tree tags, workshops and a mobile printing and planting press to Hyde Park this fall
The Printing/Planting Press, 2026
Boston (September 2, 2026) – Boston-based interdisciplinary artist Jane D. Marsching will debut Tree Care Hyde Park, a public art project for trees and their neighbors that will unfold across Hyde Park’s urban canopy on Thursday, September 10, 2026, presented through the Boston Public Art Triennial (The Triennial)’s Public Art Accelerator.
Rooted in Marsching’s long-running practice exploring ecology, climate resilience and multispecies relationships, Tree Care Hyde Park celebrates and expands the community of care between urban trees and their human neighbors. Through a series of community gatherings, a printing and planting press in the form of a wheelbarrow, and plant-dyed and printed textile tree tags, the project invites residents to encounter trees as caregivers, companions and active members of the neighborhood.
The project will mark over nine acres of Hyde Park with 1,000 brightly colored textile tags printed with short, multi-sensory invitations to hum, breathe, move, whisper and dream with the trees. Appearing in urban wilds, parks, neighborhood streets and community members’ yards, the tags will each include a link to the project’swebsite and custom map, where visitors can learn more about the trees, the project sites and the local organizations working to plant, preserve and protect Hyde Park’s urban canopy.
At the center of the project are participatory workshops led by Marsching, where community members will use ink made from the bark, nuts, berries and flowers of Hyde Park trees to write and print their own textile tags using a mobile printing and planting press in the form of a wheelbarrow. Participants will be invited to take their tags home and hang them on trees in their own yards, on their streets or in local parks, with each community-tagged tree added to the project map.
“These trees are already caring for us, cooling our streets, filtering our air and witnessing our lives. Tree Care asks how we might care for them in return,” said Marsching. “I wanted the project to feel less like public art placed onto a neighborhood and more like a conversation growing from within it. The workshops invite people to slow down enough to imagine trees as collaborators, caretakers and companions.”
The project is anchored in the environmental and civic context of Hyde Park, Boston’s southernmost neighborhood, where Marsching is a longtime resident. While the neighborhood includes green spaces such as Stony Brook Reservation and the Neponset River, Hyde Park is also experiencing rapid tree canopy loss due to lower planting rates, development, construction and aging trees. Developed in collaboration with local partners, Tree Care Hyde Park shines a light on the community organizations already working to counter that loss and build a culture of care for the trees that shape daily life in the neighborhood.
Event partners include the City of Boston Urban Forestry Division, Hyde Park Branch of the Boston Public Library, Hyde Park Community Land Trust, Hyde Park Historical Society, Hyde Park Neighborhood Association, Keep Hyde Park Beautiful, Neponset River Watershed Association, Save Crane Ledge Woods Coalition, Southwest Boston CDC Green Team and Tree Boston, among others.
The project’s physical hub will be located in the foyer and windows of the historic Everett Square Theater at 11 Fairmount Ave. in Logan Square, where the printing and planting press and a large project map will be installed throughout the project’s run.
Marsching created Tree Care Hyde Park with the support of and funding from the Triennial’s Public Art Accelerator, where she was a part of the eighth cohort.
“With Tree Care Hyde Park, Jane has created a project that is both expansive and deeply local, inviting residents to engage with the trees that shape their daily lives in personal and participatory ways,” said Jasper Sanchez, assistant curator at The Triennial. “That neighborhood-rooted approach is exactly what the Public Art Accelerator is intended to support: ambitious public art that grows from community, reflects the character of Boston’s neighborhoods and opens new ways of seeing the places we share.”
Tree Care Hyde Park will be on view from September 10 through November 5, 2026, throughout Hyde Park, with a public opening reception on Saturday, September 12 from 3-5 p.m. in the Hyde Park Branch of the Boston Public Library’s garden at 35 Harvard Avenue. The rain date is Saturday, September 26 from 3-5 p.m.
Additional free community programs will include:
Tree Care Community Art Workshops
Hyde Park Library | Thursday, September 10 | 6-7:30 p.m.
Dell Rock Urban Wild | Friday, September 18 | 5:30-7 p.m. (with Keep Hyde Park Beautiful)
The Pryde | Tuesday, October 6 | 6-7:30 p.m.
Tree Giveaway
Hyde Park Library | Saturday, September 26 | 10 a.m.-12 p.m. (with Keep Hyde Park Beautiful and Tree Boston)
Tree Care Hyde Park Project Presentation
Hyde Park Neighborhood Association Meeting, Hyde Park Municipal Building | Thursday, October 1 | 6-8 p.m.
Roseberry Ruskindale Road Neighborhood Association Meeting | Tuesday, October 13 | 6:30-8 p.m. via zoom
Tree Planting
Amatucci Park | Sunday, November 8 | 10-11:30 a.m.
For more details on upcoming programs, visit the Tree Care calendar. To learn more about Tree Care Hyde Park, visit treecarehydepark.com. To learn more about Marsching, visit janemarsching.com or follow @studiojane on Instagram.
For more about the Triennial’s Public Art Accelerator and to stay updated on upcoming programs visit: https://www.thetriennial.org/
ABOUT JANE D. MARSCHING
Jane D. Marsching is a Hyde Park-based interdisciplinary artist who makes opportunities to foster an experience of wonder, to commune with the beings that we live with, and to catalyze an urgent response to the ecological story of our time. Recent projects include Utopia Press, a mobile letterpress in the form of a backpack which was used to create large-scale banners printed with tree inks in the forest, created as an artist in residence at Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA. Dear Harbor Radio, created as part of the collective Plotform, was a nomadic bike-powered interspecies love letter writing and recording studio that roamed the shores of Buzzards Bay, MA.
Exhibitions include: Northern Spark, Minneapolis, MN; Kilroy Metal Ceiling, Brooklyn; Galerie Lucy Mackintosh, Lausanne, Switzerland; Tierra des Explorades, Buenos Aires; ICA Boston; and MassMoCA. She has received grants from Creative Capital and Artadia, among others. An occasional writer, her most recent essay was published by St. Lucy Press in Running Falling Flying Floating Crawling, edited by Mark Alice Durant, 2020.
She is a cofounder and member of Platform2: Art and Activism (2009-2012), an experimental forum about creative practices at the intersection of social issues. She and Andi Sutton worked together from 2013-2020 with many others as part of the collective Plotform on projects that activated engagement in our local communities around climate activism, citizen science, and water ecologies.
At Massachusetts College of Art and Design she is Professor and Director of the Sustainability Minor. She founded the MassArt Resilient Pigment Library in 2021.
ABOUT BOSTON PUBLIC ART TRIENNIAL
Boston Public Art Triennial is the city’s first and only public art organization dedicated to supporting artists and communities in bold, contemporary, public art. The Triennial’s mission is to foster relationships between artists and the public to create bold public art experiences that open minds, conversations, and spaces across Boston, resulting in a more open, equitable, and vibrant city.
For a map of the Triennial sites, please click here.
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