John Hancock Building

Arrechea graduated from Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte in 1994 and debuted at that year’s Fifth Havana Bienal as a member of the collective Los Carpinteros. Since leaving the group in 2003, Arrechea has explored the nature of surveillance, capitalism, and architecture in an interdisciplinary and multimedia solo practice that has been featured in major exhibitions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale (2011) and Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deception in Cuban Art since 1950, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2017).

John Hancock Building belongs to a series of rolled-up skyscrapers based on the idea of what Arrechea has termed “elastic architecture.” Suggestively furling and unfurling as the markets turn, these “elastic” variations—of the Seagram Building, the Empire State Building, and the Chrysler Building, among others—belie the iconic verticality and monumentality of their namesakes and the corporate and municipal power held therein. “I wanted to work with the idea of a building as something that changes for the city as it evolves,” Arrechea explained. “Cities change through success and failure, but you always have to keep them dancing” (quoted in L. Fredrickson, “Elastic Architecture: A Cuban artist bends Manhattan,” Modern Painters, March 2013, p. 31). John Hancock Building takes as its subject the minimalist, blue-glass John Hancock Tower, completed in 1976 in Boston’s Back Bay. The building was christened in honor of its original occupant, John Hancock Insurance, itself named after the Boston patriot famously remembered for his bold signature on the Declaration of Independence.

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park