A bronze menagerie comes to Charlestown
Published August 2025
Editor's note: This story is an excerpt from WBUR's weekly arts and culture newsletter, The ARTery. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, sign up here
There’s a new 36-foot-long octopus on display in Boston as of this week. It’s made of bronze and weighs nearly 8 tons.
You’ll find the massive octopus on Dry Dock 2 at the Charlestown Naval Shipyard, as if it climbed out of the water by the USS Constitution Museum to meet a few land animal friends. A different wild animal sits on each of its hefty tentacles. There’s a gorilla, a rhino, an elephant, a zebra, to name a few. The piece is called “The Arms of Friendship.”
It’s one of three fantastical wildlife sculptures installed in Charlestown, on view for the next two years. The name of the collection is “Wildlife Wonders” by activists and artists Gillie and Marc, a duo known for public art displays of animals around the globe. This particular installation is organized by the Boston nonprofit Navy Yard Garden & Art, Inc.
“ The term that we gave is a ‘Bridge of Joy’ to connect Charlestown — which is divided by the Tobin Bridge,” said Robin DiGiammarino, president of Navy Yard Garden & Art. “We decided whatever we did would be a connector.”
In addition to the octopus, there’s another statue a short walk down 5th Street underneath the Tobin Bridge. That one is called “The Wild Table of Love,” and it features about a dozen wild animals sitting at a table together as if to share a meal. Two empty chairs function as an invitation for passersby to pose with the sculptures. The third is located closer to the water in the Charlestown Naval Shipyard Park. It portrays a figure with the head of a rabbit and the body of a human attempting to get a hippo to try something new. That work is aptly named “The Hippo Was Hungry to Try New Things with Rabbitwoman.”
DiGiammarino said the group collaborated with the Charlestown Coalitionand several of its partner organizations — including Turn it Around, Charlestown Trauma Team, Institute of Health Professions, Harvard-Kent Elementary School and the National Parks Service — to review proposals of four different art installations. “ The one that had the most votes was Gillie and Marc,” said DiGiammarino.
The sculptures represent wildlife in various, almost human, scenarios. Although the scenes are out of this world, DiGiammarino imagines the ways visitors can see themselves in these statues. “ There are different animals sitting at the table with all different food in front of them, and those animals in the wild would not get along,” she said. “But here they are having a meal together. So [there are] opportunities for conversation about food, food insecurity. Who's missing at the table? Who would you like to have join you at the table?”
The statues arrived in Charlestown last Thursday. They were transported from Manhattan to Boston on the back of a flatbed truck.
“ I actually have a friend who was driving back from New York City,” said DiGiammarino. “And on I-84 in Connecticut, she drove up and saw these sculptures on a flatbed.”
Navy Yard Garden & Art plans to announce events and curated offerings around these statues, including an augmented reality workshop with local tech company Hoverlay and a photo contest with a grand prize of a Gillie and Marc mini octopus statue.
The “Bridge of Joy” sculptures are on view through July 31, 2027.
