Many Bostonians who ride the MBTA’s Red Line or who shop at Haymarket know the work of Mags Harries, even if they do not know the artist’s name. In the 1970s and 80s, Harries created a series of site-specific installations around Boston, including the cascade of “lost” bronze gloves that animate the long escalators at the Porter Square subway station, and bronze casts of crushed cardboard boxes, fruits, and vegetables that litter the ground at Haymarket, permanent reminders the lively scrum of that informal market.

These are among Harries’s best-known works, excellent representatives of a career that has been devoted primarily to public art projects that attempt to capture in solid form the ephemeral activities that animate those spaces. Such works must be experienced where they are, out in the world, but those projects sometimes prompted Harries to create more domestically scaled and collectible works as well. These works are sometimes preparatory sketches, but they can also serve as ambassadors for the larger public works. This print of a glove in motion postdates the cycle at Porter, a memento of a project that was immediately beloved by critics and public alike.

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