Emerson Contemporary

Augmented Reality Public Art Walking Tour: Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill
2025-10-04 14:00 - 15:30 (America/New_York)
Saturday, October 4, 2025, 2-3:30pm

Join artists Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill on a special artist lead walking tour of their two new public art projects Glimpses of Glapion and The Black Boston Dream Oracle in the Beacon Hill neighborhood.

Location: Meet at the Boston Common Visitors Center, 139 Tremont 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.

Lecture by Ruth Clemens: “Cultures, Technologies, and Media of the Sonic War Machine."
2025-10-14 12:00 - 13:00
Tuesday October 14, 12-1pm

Lecture by Ruth Clemens, “Cultures, Technologies, and Media of the Sonic War Machine.” Focusing on aural media and forgotten sound technologies from the early 20th century, this lecture presents a story of unexpected consequences that connects the international Dadaist avant-garde to 1940s Hollywood to military technologies and communication systems.

Clemens’ broad research interests cover film, cultural analysis, and comparative literary studies. Her work explores the intersections between textuality and materiality, media and politics, and language and technology. Her research interests are varied, with through-lines of critical post-humanism and the avant-garde across media, film, sound, and visual arts and the materiality of culture.

Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA

In Conversation: Elisa Hamilton, Clareese Hill and Ruth Clemens
2025-10-14 18:00 - 20:00
Hidden Histories Artists Elisa Hamilton and Dr. Clareese Hill will be in conversation with scholar Dr. Ruth Clemens. Moderated by Curator-in-Residence Dr. Leonie Bradbury for a discussion about the expansive role of speculative, cartographic, and de-colonial historical research methods.

Dr. Ruth Clemens’ broad research interests cover film, cultural analysis, and comparative literary studies. Her work explores the intersections between textuality and materiality, media and politics, and language and technology. Her research interests are varied, with through-lines of critical post-humanism and the avant-garde across media, film, sound, and visual arts and the materiality of culture.

Elisa H. Hamilton is a socially engaged multimedia artist who creates artworks and community-centered projects that emphasize shared spaces and the hopeful examination of our everyday places, objects, and experiences. She holds a BFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MA in Civic Media from Emerson College. Her most recent project Glimpses of Glapion presents a series of digital vignettes honoring the life and legacy of a historic figure Louis Glapion in the augmented reality application Hoverlay as part the the exhibition Hidden Histories and the City of Boston’s Un-monument Initiative.

Dr. Clareese Hill is a practice-based art researcher in XR and Immersive Media. She explores the validity of the word “identity” through her perspective as an Afro-Caribbean American woman and her societal role projected on her to perform as a Black feminist academic. Her most recent project 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

Our artist centered public programming is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts. Hidden Histories is funded by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-monument initiative, supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation

In Conversation: Clint Baclawski and Iwalani Kaluhiokalani
2025-10-21 18:00 - 20:00
Tuesday October 21, Talk from 6:30- 7:30pm, 6pm doors

In Conversation: Join multidisciplinary installation artists Iwalani Kaluhiokalani and photographer Clint Baclawski as they discuss space, time, color and motion in their work on view as part of Echoes of the Heart until December 13, 2025. Moderated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury.

Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA

Clint Baclawski works with photography, technology, light, and space. He received his BFA in Advertising Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Post-Baccalaureate from Bucknell University, and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Design. He is Boston-based and has been an adjunct professor in Graduate Studies at MassArt since 2017. In 2022, Baclawski had residencies in both Venice, Italy, and Wassaic, NY.

He was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship Grant in Photography in 2019. Baclawski exhibits his work extensively throughout the United States, and his work is included in many private and institutional collections including Children’s Hospital, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Whitehead Institute, and Fidelity. He has been published in Boston Art Review, FRAME (Amsterdam), Boston Home Magazine, Designboom, The Boston Globe, and The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Volume II (New York, NY). Clint’s studio is located in Boston’s South End.

Iwalani Kaluhiokalani is a Boston-based painter and interdisciplinary installation artist whose work centers movement. She holds a BFA in Painting with Distinction and Departmental Honors from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, where she also studied dance and performance art in the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) program. She later continued studies in Laban Bartenieff Movement Analysis, completing a Laban Institute of Movement Studies program at Lesley College, Cambridge, MA.

Kaluhiokalani is part of Kingston Gallery, Boston and her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, The Pfizer Building and LabCentral of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, New Art Center Newton, and La Traverse/Catherine Bastide Projects in Marseille, France. She has created installation work for corporate collections and for the ACTivate residency at Boston Center For the Arts. Kaluhiokalani’s work is held in individual and corporate private collections.

In Conversation: Artists Jack Gruman and Logan Puleikis of VHF Studio will be talking with Malic Amalya
2025-11-19 18:00 - 19:30
Wednesday, November 19, Artists talk 6:30- 7:30pm, 6pm doors –

In Conversation: Artists Jack Gruman and Logan Puleikis of VHF Studio will talk with Malic Amalya, Assistant Professor of Experimental Media and Film Production, about the conceptual underpinnings of their installation “Narcissus look back: and they love you,” that is currently on view at the Emerson Media Art Gallery until December 13th.

This embodied, multi-sensory experience with a camp aesthetic explores loneliness as a collective experience in our current moment. They will discuss the tenuous and often shifting relationship between spectator and performer, loops of identity, and the duality of being haunted/haunting. With Malic Amalaya, the artists will discuss major influences on their piece, the political and moral values intrinsic to their work, and the challenges they’ve faced making and relating to art at this socio-political moment.

VHF STUDIO is a new media collective founded by artists Jack Gruman and Logan Puleikis. As collaborators they make genre-defying installation work, blurring the boundaries of “low” and “high” art. They pull inspiration from the queer club scene, haunted houses, and popular media to create high concept large-scale multi-channel video and sound installations.

Moderated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury

Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA

Lisa Tang: "Be Whole In Everything" MFA Thesis Show
2025-12-01 12:00 - 2025-12-03 18:00
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, Jennifer Hall, Ph.D., and Martina Tanga, Ph.D.

Public Art Walking Tour with artists Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill *RESCHEDULED to April 18, 2026
2026-04-18 14:00 - 15:30
Join artists Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill on a special artist lead walking tour of their two new public art projects Glimpses of Glapion and The Black Boston Dream Oracle in the Beacon Hill neighborhood.

Meeting Point: Boston Common Visitor’s Center

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.
