Emerson Contemporary

Lisa Tang: "Be Whole In Everything" MFA Thesis Show
2025-12-01 12:00 - 2025-12-03 18:00 (America/New_York)
This work is a non-doctrinal spiritual practice made visible. It draws on prehistoric abstraction, sacred geometry, and the ordinary courage of repetition. Each element invites a small, complete gesture: to strike, to bow, to trace. The videos loop; the stones hang; breath returns. Nothing is illustrated, yet everything is implicated — matter, memory, tide, light.

To be whole in everything is not to be grand. It is to become exact in presence: to place your full attention inside the tiniest coordinate, until the world answers back.

Leaning Against The Wall: Photo Practicum Fall 2025
2025-12-08 12:00 - 2025-12-10 18:00
You are cordially invited to attend this year’s Photo Practicum Fall 2025 exhibit

This semester, students in Lucie March’s photography class dove into themes such as identity, the passing of time, and our roots represented through six different personal projects. We invite you to join us for the reception of our show at the Huret & Spector Gallery on December 9th, from 6 pm – 8 pm. We hope to see you there!

Exhibiting artists: Emilie Dumas, Kiki Tobor, Natalie He, Danny Kennedy, Zoë Grandstaff-Gruber, Cooper Rich

A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air
2026-01-21 12:00 - 2026-03-28 18:00
Nelly-Eve Rajotte, Les arbres communiquent entre eux à 220 hertz, 2024. Video installation: 3-channel 4K video, colour, generative sound, 25 min; modular synthesizer, electrodes, and tree. VFX artist and software developer: Codrin-Mihail Tablan Negrei. Courtesy of the artist.

A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air, a four-person exhibition featuring works made through innovative intersections of science, aesthetics, and spirituality.

Artists Margaux Crump, Julia Krupa, Eileen Ryan, and Nelly-Eve Rajotte realize the potential of communicating directly and sharing authorship with the materials they use to make their art. Their artistic practices are intuitive and collaborative, enabling trees, stones, salt, and air, among other materials, to inform the creative process and the resulting potential meanings. Their methods include a cloud chamber, oral history, bio-sonification, LIDAR scanning, fumage, and saining.

The resulting works of art forge stronger interspecies connections and increased empathy and hope for the future. These innovative modes of working also raise questions: do the artists translate on behalf of the materials? How do speculation and anthropomorphism fit into these explorations of restoration, time, and scale? The four immersive installations engage viewers in dynamic aesthetic experiences that may linger beyond the gallery as a shift in perspective.

Curated by Shana Dumont Garr

Exhibition catalogue featuring essays by Shana Dumont Garr, Doctoral Candidate, and Martina Tanga, Ph.D.

SentientLand-Guide-webDownload

Messing With Language: A Multimodal Pop-Up Exhibition
2026-03-23 17:00 - 19:00 | Huret & Spector Gallery; Tufte Building
Exhibition Open March 23 – 25

Opening Reception: March 23, 5:00 – 7:00 PM

Mark Hernandez-Motaghy

Jihyun Lee

Gavin Miller

Brooke Toczylowski

Renato Verdugo

kathy wu

Language is deeply tied to culture, history, and our identity. It is a tool of communication and a carrier of meaning that takes infinite forms, functions, and uses. But language also carries implicit politics in how we name, represent, and categorize the world around us.

This exhibition brings together six artists working in the Northeast whose practices critically examine our perceptions of language, and, by extension, of power. Working across projection, sound, installation, translation, and code, their distinct creative processes explore alternative systems of communication and ways of knowing. Through these interventions, Mark Hernandez-Motaghy, Jihyun Lee, Gavin Miller, Brooke Toczylowski, Renato Verdugo and Kathy Wu pick apart linguistic systems, inviting new possibilities for expression.

Curated by Sophie Dodd

*Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP.

Contact contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit.

In Conversation: Julia Krupa and Eileen Ryan
2026-03-26 12:00 - 13:00
Thursday, March 26, 12–1 PM

Join us for a conversation with artists Julia Krupa and Eileen Ryan as they discuss their work in A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air.

Krupa and Ryan will explore their innovative artistic practices that blur the boundaries between creator and material. Through methods, including oral history and specimen collection, forge collaborative relationships with natural elements—inviting beetles and herbs to become active participants in the creative process.

This conversation delves into the intersections of science, aesthetics, and spirituality that shape their work. Together, these artists, who created immersive installations in A Sentient Land, address questions central to the exhibition: How do we translate on behalf of non-human materials? What role do speculation and anthropomorphism play in fostering interspecies connections? How can artistic practice generate greater empathy and hope for our shared future?

View the event here:

A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air is on view through March 28, 2026, at Emerson Contemporary, 25 Avery Street, Boston.

Artist Presention and Mindfulness Exercise with Julia Krupa
2026-03-26 17:30 - 19:15 | Emerson Contemporary
Julia Krupa, Herstory Paintings, installation view.

Artist Julia Krupa creates large-scale paintings with herbs and other plants she forages from rural Poland, where she is based. She is visiting Boston as one of the four artists in A Sentient Land: Artistic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air. Learn how Julia makes dyes with plants, along with her doctoral research informing this process. A fascinating part of her process involves interviewing elder herbalists based in the Carpathian region of Southern Poland. Her field work and research evolve into paintings and innovative, panoramic video documentation, both of which are on view in the space where the workshop takes place.

No prior skills or materials required to attend.

"GATHER"
2026-03-31 12:00 - 2026-04-08 17:00 | Huret & Spector Gallery; Tufte Building
Image Credit: Shannon Johnson, With one look you take me back to everything I used to be, 2025, from the series “Gathering Rosebuds,” archival inkjet print and ink on Rives BFK paper, 29 x 40 inches, courtesy of the artist.

Huret & Spector Gallery

March 31 – April 8, 2026

GATHER, a student-curated exhibition of photographers and lens-based artists exploring meaning, memory, connection, and community at a transformative moment.

Student Lightning Talks: Friday, April 3rd, Noon

Opening Reception: Friday, April 3rd, 5-7 pm

Photography and related media have the power to knit together people, places, and things, both literally and metaphorically. The present moment seems fraught with peril, and systems appear to be unravelling. Yet, at the same time, we have witnessed the power of unity, of people coming together to empower and support each other.From a thematic, regional open call, 14 emerging student-curators selected 14 emerging artists from New England, ranging from undergraduate to graduate students, emerging to more established, and several pieces per person to present a fuller picture. The resulting exhibition GATHER showcases a broad range of media and genres, including portrait and vernacular photography; printing and sewing on fabric; collaborative and woven imagery; video and 16mm film installation; and kinetic and multi-media sculpture — using analog, digital, and historical processes.

In the pieces selected for GATHER, we were delighted to see new themes emerge including communities and collection, identity and queerness, nostalgia and nature — all with an overall meditative and hopeful tone. In addition, the chosen artists represent a wide geographical range, gathering together artists from across Great Boston and New England. GATHER aims to weave these various threads together to make a larger whole and make a difference.

GATHER was curated by upper-level Emerson undergraduate students (listed below) as part of the seminar VM415, “Curating Contemporary Art,” taught and led by Leslie K. Brown, PhD. As a part of the class and the exhibition, students are responsible for all aspects of the exhibition, encompassing graphic designs, loan agreements, object checklists, educational didactics, social media assets, and press materials.

The Artists of GATHER:

“Alchemy of the Unknowns”:Lisa Tang Liu & James David Tabor (Stoughton, MA & Phoenix, AZ)

alina balseiro (Medford, MA)

Douglas Breault (Bridgewater, MA)

Haley Cooper (Abington, MA)

Beth D’Elia (Barnstable, MA)

Porter Gifford (Cambridge, MA)

Monica Hamilton (Salem, MA)

Jessie James (Medford, MA)

Shannon Johnson (Boston, MA)

Lee Kilpatrick (Arlington, MA)

Lisa Tang Liu (Stoughton, MA)

Jordan Marshall (Brookline, MA)

Michelle Schapiro (Roxbury, MA)

Francine Weiss (Newport, RI)

Emerging student-curators of GATHER: Abigail Andrews, Anjali Bakhru, Dylan Boyd, Sophie Dodd, Claire English, Julia Giammarco, Lang Han, Ruyi Huang, Kitty Lei, Daniel Petrylka, Arlo Rader, Jie Sun, Bianca Todini, Maya Wang.The students in Emerson Curatorial Practices represent majors from Media Arts Production (SOF), Writing, Literature & Publishing (WLP), and Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS), with minors as diverse as Art History, Curatorial Practice & Visual Culture, History, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, and Science.

* Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID are required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP. Contact mailto:contemporary@emerson.edu contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit. Hours are Monday through Friday, 12-5 pm.

RSVP for the Lightning Talks

RSVP for the Opening Reception

Opening Reception for the student-curated exhibition, GATHER
2026-04-03 17:00 - 19:00 | Huret & Spector Gallery; Tufte Building
Lisa Tang Liu, Analog Girl In A Digital World, 2023, from the series “Self-Reconstructed,” cyanotype print woven with inkjet print, 14 x 14 inches, courtesy of the artist

This opening reception celebrates the fourteen artists of GATHER, a photography exhibition curated by students of a seminar, Curating Contemporary Art,” taught by Dr. Leslie Brown.

In the pieces selected for GATHER, new themes emerge, including communities and collection, identity and queerness, nostalgia and nature — all with an overall meditative and hopeful tone. In addition, the chosen artists represent a wide geographical range, gathering together artists from across Great Boston and New England. GATHER aims to weave these various threads together to make a larger whole and make a difference.

* Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID are required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP. Contact mailto:contemporary@emerson.edu contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit. Hours are Monday through Friday, 12-5 pm.

RSVP for the Opening Reception

"Dis-placement / This-placement"
2026-04-16 12:00 - 17:00 | Huret Spector Gallery, Tufte Building
Dis-placement of home. This-placement of identity.

Dis-placement of identity. This-placement of meaning.

Dis-placement of meaning. This-placement of home.

“Dis-placement/This-placement” brings together nine works that explore the inseparable mechanics of loss and emergence. What is displaced does not leave a void; it makes room for what could not have appeared otherwise. The works do not resolve this loop; they inhabit it.

Opening reception: April 16, 5-7:30 pm.

Participating artists:

Bahar Hassani Dorabadi

Douglas Tarnovean

Duo “AlGol” (Aleksandra Borovikova, Gökçe Oraloğlu)

Fadime Icin

Mahdokht Molaei

Rebecca Williams

Yang Han

Yifei Chen

Yinyin Lu

* Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID are required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP. Contact mailto:contemporary@emerson.edu contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit. Hours are Monday through Friday, 12-5 pm.

Public Art Walking Tour with artists Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill, in Collaboration with MAAH
2026-04-18 13:00 - 15:00
Join artists Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill on a special artist-led walking tour of their two public art projects, Glimpses of Glapion and The Black Boston Dream Oracle in the Beacon Hill neighborhood.

Meeting Point: Boston Common Visitor’s Center

Join artists Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill on a special artist-led walking tour of their two public art projects Glimpses of Glapion and The Black Boston Dream Oracle, followed by a reception and Q&A with the artists at The Museum of African American History at 46 Joy Street, Boston. The walking tour will begin at Boston Common Visitors Center at 139 Tremont St, Boston, at 1:00pm, with the reception and Q&A at The Museum of African American History beginning at 2:15pm.Emerson Contemporary is thrilled to collaborate with the Museum of African American History (MAAH) for this program. After the walk, an artist Q&A session will take place at the African Meeting House at 46 Joy Street, Boston, MA.

Elisa Hamilton’s project Glimpses of Glapion will present a series of digital vignettes honoring the life and legacy of Louis Glapion. Glapion was a French, biracial hairdresser and barber who, together with his friend George Middleton, built and owned what is now considered the oldest extant house in Beacon Hill, located at 5 Pinckney Street. While more is known about Middleton, the artist’s research has uncovered glimpses of Glapion that speak to an interesting and noteworthy life based in Beacon Hill. Hamilton seeks to honor Glapion and enliven curiosity about his lived experiences in our city. The AR experience will be available on Hoverlay and accompanied by a research document designed for educational purposes.

Clareese Hill’s The Black Boston Dream Oracle is a speculative reimagining of The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book written by Chloe Russel, a 19th-century Black woman from Massachusetts. By blending historical wisdom with future-focused fabulations, the Black Boston Dream Oracle will provide a unique space for reflection, healing, and imagining new possibilities for liberation and collective well-being through early Black feminist thought. The Oracle will be presented as an Extended Reality (XR) experience available on the Hoverlay application, accompanied by a web-based research document designed for educational purposes.

What Distance Holds: An MFA Thesis Exhibition Featuring video installations by Sarasa Kikuchi and Rui Shen
2026-04-21 12:00 - 2026-05-10 18:00 | Media Art Gallery
Sarasa Kikuchi, 13 Hours Ahead, video stills, 2026

Sarasa Kikuchi and Rui Shen invite viewers into the contemplative textures of fluid identity, invisible labor, and immigrant guilt, exploring what remains amid absence with innovative aesthetics and immersive strategies that invite viewers to linger and feel.

View the trailer

Sarasa Kikuchi — 13 Hours Ahead

Six-channel spatial cinema

Thirteen hours separate a mother in Japan from her daughter in the US. In Kikuchi’s immersive six-channel installation, that gap becomes something one can feel in their body: two lives unfolding in parallel, connected, yet never quite touching. Through quiet domestic scenes, layered soundscapes, and a fractured screen arrangement, 13 Hours Ahead asks what it means to love someone you can only reach across time zones. It holds space not only for the immigrant who left, but for the parent left behind — a perspective rarely given its full weight.

Rui Shen, Elsewhere, installation view, 2026

Rui Shen – Elsewhere

Video Installation

Shen considers the continuous becoming of identity. The moment one tries to answer who they are, something shifts. Shen’s installation uses a single word, I, — the most personal word in any language — to meditate on the essence of becoming.

A fan stirs the suspended surface of horizontal screens upon which projections of “I” form and dissolve. They gather, briefly cohere, then scatter again. The quiet circuit demonstrates how alive it is, always moving, always just beyond the labels we reach for.

What Distance Holds Opening reception: April 22, 2026, 5 – 7 PM at 25 Avery Street, Boston

On view April 21 – May 10 · Tuesday through Sunday, 11am – 6pm

Free and open to the public.

Second Nature: A Photo Exhibition Presented by the Spring 2026 Photo Practicum Class
2026-04-27 12:00 - 2026-04-29 18:00 | Huret and Spector Gallery
This exhibition features photography by students in the Photo Practicum course who spent their semester working on one specific project. The resulting works encounter themes of time, growth, exploration, and a sense of self. Each project uniquely asks questions about the world we live in and how we occupy it. Students worked with analog and digital photography, along with bookmaking and mixed media, to create their various projects.Presented by Doris (Leping) Cao, Kaileigh Clark, Natalie He, Andrés Herrera, Yixin Hu, Danny Kennedy, Lilli Drescher, Grace Kinney, Ela Moss, Hammond (Shi) Qi, Kiki Tobor, Maya Wang, and Wendi Zhang.Opening reception: April 27, 6-9 PM.The exhibition can also be seen during gallery hours from 12-6 PM, April 27-April 29.

* Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID are required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP. Contact mailto:contemporary@emerson.edu contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit. Hours are Monday through Friday, 12-5 pm.
