Emerson Contemporary

"Dis-placement / This-placement"
2026-04-16 12:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | 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.

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.
