Best of Boston

From January through April, this 16-piece initiative from the Downtown Boston Business Improvement District represented a welcome shift for a city that, only 17 years ago, shut down when LED-lit panels of Aqua Teen Hunger Force characters prompted a bomb scare. Winteractive’s most spectacular installation was Max Streicher’s inflated pair of gargantuan clown heads, but it was artist Mark Jenkins’s hyper-realistic human sculptures that underscored Boston’s changing attitude when it comes to public art: When a concerned citizen reported one of Jenkins’s lifelike figures to authorities — a stationary ski-masked fisherman seated on a School Street ledge — the piece was temporarily removed and then relocated without incident. Boston, you’ve come so far.