Echoes of the Heart: New England Media Art Biennial
2025-07-29 12:00 - 2025-12-13 18:00 (America/New_York) | Media Art Gallery
Iwalani Kaluhiokalani, The Radiance Chasers, 2025. Multidisciplinary installation, painting, paper cut-outs, video mapping, sound Sound score by Slamber Slusser

Iwalani Kaluhiokalani, The Radiance Chasers, 2025. Multidisciplinary installation, painting, paper cut-outs, video mapping, sound Sound score by Slamber Slusser.

Emerson Contemporary – Emerson College’s platform for presenting contemporary visual art – proudly presents Echoes of the Heart: The New England Media Art Biennial, a multimedia juried group exhibition featuring New England visual artists Clint Baclawski, Erik DeLuca, Iwalani Kaluhiokalani, Justin Levesque, VHF Studios, and Karlie Zhao. The exhibition is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from July 29- December 13 , 2025, free and open to the public Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6 pm.

This exhibition is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The National Endowment for the Arts

New media art now encompasses traditional film and digital video, as well as a wide range of technology, from AI to hand-built radio, representing an exciting and rapidly expanding genre in the contemporary art world. Yet, there are few venues for emerging and mid-career video artists to showcase their work in New England. This biennial aims to expand these opportunities for the region and celebrate artists with financial and technical support and the opportunity to expand and reiterate existing and/or new works.

Artist Reception, Thursday, September 18, 5-7pm

Tuesday, October 7, 6:30- 7:30pm, 6pm doors. In Conversation: Join artists Justin Levesque and VHF Studio as they discuss their broad ranging practices and what it means to be a practicing artist in our current climates. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA

Tuesday October 21, 6:30- 7:30pm, 6pm doors In Conversation: Join multidisciplinary installation artist Iwalani Kaluhiokalani and photographer Clint Baclawski as they discuss space, time, color and motion in their work. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA

Tuesday, November 4, 6:30- 7:30pm, 6pm doors In Conversation: Join artists Erik DeLuca and Wenran Zhao as they speak with Emerson professor and sound artist Amber Vistein to discuss experimentation, sonic textures and the art of presence.

Our artist centered public programming is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts.

Clint Baclawski is creating a new photographic sculptural installation part of his ongoing scroll series to consider the photographic impulse to capture the landscape as combined with the presentation strategies of advertising. Erik DeLuca is creating an interactive technology based object exploring silence and sound entitled White Spaces Radio. Iwalani Kaluhiokalani will combine innovative projection-mapping and sound to activate a challenging architectural area in the gallery’s entryway. Justin Levesque will reimagine his multimedia wall installation Geographical Problems for the Emerson space. VHF Studios will present a new iteration of their cheerfully riotous multi-media sculptural installation, Narcissus Looks Back: and They Love You. Karlie Zhao will create a site-specific piece for the windows facing Avery Street, and display her delicate, evocative piece Thread in the Air, which infinitely generates poetic texts through audience interaction.

Juried by Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Leonie Bradbury, Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr, and visual artist and curator Allison Maria Rodriguez, this exhibition recognizes the importance of contemporary new media art being created across the Northeast. Of the experience jurying, Allison Maria Rodriguez said:

“It’s been such an honor to be included in this process. It can sometimes feel like New England is dominated by more traditional artistic mediums – and that may be true – but it was so thrilling to see all the incredible new media artists working in the area that submitted to this call. The jury had a real challenge – in the best way! It proved that opportunities like this to showcase artists working in art and technology are so greatly needed, not only to support individual practices, but also to expand the conversation in the broader arts ecosystem – and I’m so grateful to the folks at Emerson Contemporary for making this happen!”

Hidden Histories: Elisa Hamilton, Clareese Hill, Sue Murad, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed part of Un-Monument
2025-09-01 12:00 - 2025-10-28 19:00 | Boston Commons, 139 Tremont St, Boston, MA, Boston, 02111, United States
Un-Monument is a two-year initiative that reimagines and fosters discourse around Boston’s monuments and memorials in a way that centers and amplifies a multiplicity of voices and creates authentic learning moments across the city. It invigorates public spaces through artist interventions that bring to the fore the rich histories that are often hidden.

Emerson Contemporary enthusiastically announces Hidden Histories, a series of four public art projects produced as part of the Un-Monument initiative of the City of Boston. Hidden Histories highlights the processes of collaboration, artistic research, and speculation in contemporary art.

LAUNCH PARTY: SEPTEMBER 18, 5-7:30PM, Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, 02111

WHAT: A Series of Public Art Activations that are part of Un-Monument, a multi-year public art initiative to bring temporary monuments and free programming to the City of Boston that expand the inclusive histories represented in public spaces across the City.

WHEN: September 1 through October 28, 2025.

WHERE: Beacon Hill, Boston Common, and MBTA trains and stations along the Green and Orange Lines, and virtually via the Hoverlay augmented reality application.

This initiative is funded by the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture and the Mellon Foundation.

Curated and produced by Emerson Contemporary, the exhibition will present a series of four public art projects featuring Elisa Hamilton, Clareese Hill, Sue Murad, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Combining the gallery’s mission to educate by doing, the inclusive experience of walking tours, and the idea that history is a living subject that constantly evolves, the artists received this prompt: find an aspect of the city’s past that is not currently well-known or understood and create art using new media technologies to amplify those stories.

Emerson Contemporary collaborated with Boston’s foremost historic archives: The Boston Athenaeum, Historic New England, and Massachusetts Historical Society, and the artists were subsequently invited as community research fellows. With the generous support and collaboration of the archives’ staff, artists were provided access to their rich collections and many objects that served as inspiration for their thought-provoking projects.

Sue Murad, ASSEMBLE, 2025

To support public access to Hidden Histories, the gallery has continued to build on their multi-year collaboration and partnership with Hoverlay, a Boston-based augmented reality platform where users can compose and publish immersive content. Hoverlay enables any storyteller to utilize AR to transform how they tell their stories by placing virtual story objects out in the world to be accessed by visitors’ smartphones.

Kameelah J. Rasheed: I have Asked Myself: “Can a Sentence be Haunted? And if so by what?”
2025-09-02 08:00 - 2025-10-30 17:00
In her public poetry project I have Asked Myself:“Can a Sentence be Haunted? And if so by what?” Kameelah J. Rasheed responds to Boston’s memorial landscape by exploring the layered histories of Boston as discovered in the archives of the Boston Athenaeum. Rasheed gathered marginalia and ornate typefaces from their collection of Boston’s oldest books. These fragments are interwoven or sampled into digital designs to form visual poems to be displayed on digital signage situated around the Boston Common. Additionally, the poems will be placed inside public transit cars on the Orange and Green lines. The poems are inspired by Toni Morrison and act as an interruption in the ad-based public view to consider the complexities of our current socio-political context.

Elisa Hamilton: Glimpses of Glapion
2025-09-18 08:00 - 2025-10-28 17:00
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.

This project is part of Hidden Histories, a series of four public art activations produced as part of the Un-Monument initiative of the City of Boston, viewable September 1 through October 28. This project can be viewed virtually via the Hoverlay augmented reality application at 5 Pickney Street, Beacon Hill. On site public signage will provide a Qr code and instructions to download the app and access the exhibition.

Un-Monument is a multi-year public art initiative to bring temporary monuments and free programming that expand the inclusive histories represented in public spaces across the City. Hidden Histories, curated and produced by Emerson Contemporary, highlights the processes of collaboration, artistic research, and speculation in contemporary art.

To support public access to Hidden Histories, Emerson Contemporary continues to build on its multi-year collaboration and partnership with Hoverlay, a Boston-based augmented reality platform where users can compose and publish immersive content. Hoverlay enables any storyteller to utilize AR to transform how they tell their stories by placing virtual story objects out in the world to be accessed by visitors’ smartphones.

This project is funded by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-monument initiative, supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts.

Clareese Hill: The Black Boston Dream Oracle
2025-09-18 08:00 - 2025-10-28 17:00
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.

This project is part of Hidden Histories, a series of four public art activations produced as part of the Un-Monument initiative of the City of Boston, viewable September 1 through October 28. This project can be viewed virtually via the Hoverlay augmented reality application at 3 separate locations on Beacon Hill: 8 Smith Court, 65 Anderson Street and 27 Myrtle street. On site public signage will provide a Qr code and instructions to download the app and access the exhibition.

Dr. Clareese Hill is a practice-based researcher. 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. Dr. Hill has performed lectures at The Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths University of London, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, The Chicago Art Department, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. She was also a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future fellow (Phase One). Dr.Hill has published peer-reviewed academic essays in THEOREM Journal, Architecture, and Culture Journal, and has an upcoming article in Antennae, The Journal of Nature and Culture.

To support public access to Hidden Histories, Emerson Contemporary continues to build on its multi-year collaboration and partnership with Hoverlay, a Boston-based augmented reality platform where users can compose and publish immersive content. Hoverlay enables any storyteller to utilize AR to transform how they tell their stories by placing virtual story objects out in the world to be accessed by visitors’ smartphones. Public signage on Beacon Hill, the T and in the Common will provide a Qr code and instructions to download the app and access the exhibition.

This project is funded by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-monument initiative, supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts.

Launch Party Hidden Histories
2025-09-18 17:00 - 19:30 | Media Art Gallery
Join us for a spectacular event celebrating the launch of Emerson Contemporary’s public art exhibition Hidden Histories featuring art projects by Elisa Hamilton, Clareese Hill, Sue Murad, and Kameelah J. Rasheed. Artist will be present to discuss their unique works and visitors can partake in student led walking tours of the projects. Part of the City of Boston’s Un-Monument initiative to transform and expand Boston’s conversation around public art, monuments, and who should be memorialized and why.

Event Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery St. Boston, Ma 02111

Sue Murad: ASSEMBLE, Performance Action on the Boston Common, 2025
2025-10-03 12:00 - 2025-10-05 16:00
Sue Murad, ASSEMBLE, Reimagined Historic Walking Tours in Boston Common, 2025.

Sue Murad’s ASSEMBLE: Performance Instructions For Public Arrangement is a participatory performance that reflects on the ways we gather in public space—particularly the historic Boston Common—through the objects we bring with us or discover there.

Murad created a series of prompts inviting people into an embodied experience of the Common, creating a temporal micro-culture for each tour group in celebration of the right to peacefully assemble. The guided, interactive experience unfolds across the landscape, inviting participants into ephemeral arrangements shaped by memory, proximity, and shared attention.

Based in the Boston Common, Murad’s part of the Hidden Histories walking tour is inspired by the archival photos of people spending time together in the park from the nineteenth century to the present. The project bears witness to the many generations of people who have gathered together for rest and rallies, labor and loitering, play and protest. As such, Murad presents a contemplative investigation of the often overlooked First Amendment right to peacefully assemble.

ARTIST LED TOUR: Friday, October 3, 12-1:30pm.

ARTIST LED TOUR: Saturday, October 4, 12-1:30pm.

ARTIST LED TOUR: Sunday, October 5, 12-1:30pm.

Self-guided tours are available with the Hoverlay Augmented Reality application at channel: Un-monument: 1:30-4:00pm or anytime that works for you

Augmented Reality Public Art Walking Tour: Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill
2025-10-04 14:00 - 15:30
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, 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.

Thin Places: Thresholds of Transmission
2026-09-15 12:00 - 2026-12-12 18:00
Thin Places: Thresholds of Transmission

September 15 – December 12, 2026

Emerson Contemporary, Media Art Gallery, Boston, MA

Sabrina Ratté, PLANE of INCIDENCE, Single-channel video (still), 2024.

Thin Places: Thresholds of Transmission brings together works by Beatrice Glow, Megan and Murray McMillan, and Sabrina Ratté that explore the unstable boundaries between object-hood and atmosphere, material presence and ephemeral experience. Across sculpture, moving image, and installation, the exhibition considers how contemporary artistic practices are shaped by forms of ecological, technological, cosmic, and sensory transmissions that exceed fixed or stable material states.

The artists included in the exhibition approach matter not as static substance, but as dynamic process: something continuously shifting across thresholds of visibility, perception, and relation. Astrophysical systems, environmental histories, speculative fictions and digital simulations become intertwined fields through which viewers encounter forms that are at once tactile and immaterial, intimate and planetary. Across the exhibition, distinctions between the virtual and the physical, the speculative and the real, are in doubt.

Beatrice Glow, Textures of Time, single channel video, 2025.

Beatrice Glow’s materially grounded installations trace the movement of cultural, ecological, and historical forces across global systems of exchange, connecting sensory experience with environmental transmutation. Megan and Murray McMillan’s sculptural and video-practice translates cosmic and environmental phenomena into embodied spatial encounters, activating relationships between gravity, perception and physical form. Sabrina Ratté’s speculative digital environments imagine hybrid ecologies in which technological systems and organic forms merge into continuously evolving atmospheric worlds.

Megan and Murray McMillan, This Collapsed and Expanding Breath, Three-Channel Video Installation, 2025. Installtion view, The Jamestown Art Center.
