One December, on the longest night of the year, visitors to Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery were greeted by a thousand shimmering points of light scattered across a wooded dell. Stand motionless on a nearby platform, and the field of light collapsed, plunging the landscape into a suspended hush that echoed the Winter Solstice itself—the annual pause when the sun is said to stand still before reversing its path in the sky. Break your pose, and waves of light ripple outward, returning the dell to life.
This interactive artwork, “In Stillness,” was featured in SOLSTICE: Reflections on Winter Light in 2024 as part of MASARY Studios’ ongoing, multi-year collaboration with Mount Auburn Cemetery. Now in its sixth year, the immersive after-dark experience is quintessentially MASARY: rooted in cosmic phenomena, ecstatic mathematics, seasonal rhythms, and a belief in the transformative possibilities of public ritual. Founded in 2015, the Boston-based transdisciplinary studio traces its origins to Ryan Edwards, an installation artist with a background in West African drum and dance, who cofounded MASARY alongside media artist Sam “Samo” Okerstrom-Lang.
Those formative years as a percussionist laid the foundation for Ryan’s approach to public art. He sees rhythm as a universal constant, underpinning everything from folkloric music and ritualistic dance to tidal cycles and distant cosmic harmonies. MASARY operates as a genuine collective, and this holistic sensibility runs through the studio’s most evocative works, such as “Patterned Behavior,” an interactive installation in NYC’s Union Square Park Pavilion and North Plaza, activated by an endless stream of steps, stomps, pauses, meet-ups, meet-cutes, and eventual dispersions.
Lately, the studio’s attention has drifted beyond human ritual to the ancient metronome of the Earth. Their upcoming project, “Eco-Rhythms,” will bathe Boston’s Tobin Bridge in patterns of light inspired by changing ocean currents, fish migrations, and tidal cycles. In a coastal city where sea levels are expected to rise up to 40 inches by 2070, MASARY Studios illuminates the rhythms that bind us, inescapably, to the Earth.
In Today’s Q+Art Interview
MASARY Studios cofounder Ryan Edwards shares insights on building a culture of abundance, discusses the collective’s entry in our summer exhibition, 250: A Celebration of Public Art in the U.S., and explains why we don't need to invent grand theologies to answer life's biggest questions.
What makes MASARY Studios different from a standard creative agency or fabrication studio?
Ryan Edwards: One of the things we've really been committed to since the beginning is to be an art studio where we're endeavoring to ask questions we're curious about. That’s a fundamental distinction. A fabrication studio has client fulfillment. Someone comes to you with a thing, and you build that thing. If they want a little more blue, they get more blue. Our model has been capital “A” art projects, but it’s also collaborative, [as opposed to] being a Ryan Edwards Studio. I've been really passionately committed to a collaboration model.
Can you say more about how your collaborative process goes? How do you prevent egos from bumping into each other?
RE: I think having the right people is critical. Doing work on your own ego, confronting your insecurities, and everything that everybody needs to do to be the best human they can be. I think the people we work with are first interested in that and, secondly, in everything else. Certainly, there have been times when it's been tricky to figure out, but not many. A lot of it has to do with scarcity or abundance. When there aren't a lot of projects, everybody wants to be the lead.
We've built a culture of abundance, even though that makes it sound like we've got projects coming out of our ears. We're always hustling. But the attitude of abundance is one where, when one of my colleagues is the lead on a project, I'm very excited to support them. I'm very excited to be led by them. It's a relief for me not to be the director and be a composer instead. Creative leadership in some projects is very rooted, and we work together very collaboratively. But once something gets underway, you really do need to elect and appoint someone to be a creative director.
How do you meet the requirements of the commission, but also keep what feels like a very strong voice and visual style of your own?
RE: Our studio's been around for 11 years now, so there's now a body of work to reflect on. The themes and through lines, it's clearly a lot of rhythm and a lot of kind of environmental, ecological, cosmic sense of rhythm, which is very consistent with what I found in West Africa and in places that are fundamentally connected to their sense of place and a sense of spirituality.
The answers are actually in the dirt, in the forest, in the air, and in the water. We don't actually need to impose big, constructed theologies to answer life's biggest questions. They're actually quite available just in the environment. I'm a drummer, and drummers are kind of ritualistic fundamentalists, whether we think that way or not. Just carrying drums to places is a ritualistic act.
It's clear that you're taking pains to make these works appealing to the senses on multiple levels. How do you approach the interactive elements of your work?
RE: I think there are a number of our projects that are really intended to distribute the creative authority. I'll put it this way: A lot of our work is instrument building. And if you build an instrument, you are actually building something that has further creative potential to be played in different ways. You're then managing the nature of the instrument, how expressive it can be, and how you're controlling the instrument itself. Then you're also considering who plays it.
MASARY’s interactive installation ‘In Stillness’ was chosen to represent Massachusetts in our summer exhibition with CODAworx, ‘250: A Celebration of Art in the U.S.’ How did the idea for this piece come about?
RE: Mount Auburn Cemetery has been very fertile ground for us to produce new work annually and reconsider work over time. We get to understand a landscape and a relationship to the community in a really specific way. The artwork itself comes from research at the site, just observing how people connect with Mount Auburn, which is a beautifully landscaped cemetery. It's a place for the living and the dead. It's an active community asset. Over time, we observed people meditating, speaking with friends, just grieving, and spending time with lost loved ones. There was so much stillness that the landscape received. The landscape was designed for and has been maintained as a place where that stillness is cared for.
Our concept was to create something that recognized one's stillness. We wanted to explore that in an active way. It was a way to allude to the public’s relationship with the landscape through an active stillness.
What prompted you to begin work on ‘Eco-Rhythms’?
RE: “Eco-rhythms” came from an interest in doing something that contributes, at a civic scale, to the city and region we live in. That really was the beginning of the project: Asking, “What are we doing?” “How are we contributing?” “In what way can we make the most impact?”
So many things have come out of asking that question. We build monuments to a lot of dead white guys. Can we build monuments to other things? There's an incredible sculpture in Boston, “The Embrace,” which is basically a monument of a hug. What a cool thing to build a monument to. Is there any reason we can't be building monuments to ecology? And what would that look like? What does that mean? It comes from an awareness of the climate crisis, but also from a philosophy that connecting ourselves more sensually to Earth's rhythms is an effective and powerful method for deep and lasting change through connection, empathy, and embodied experience in addition to intellectual discourse.
MASARY Studios: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All images published with permission of MASARY Studios; featured artwork: “SOLSTICE: Eclipse”; photo: Aram Boghosian.