Emerson Contemporary

“Artists Defusing Barriers to Discovery” feat. Nicole L'Huillier and Nathan Miner
2023-10-05 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
Organized in partnership with the Long Now Boston Conversation Series, this artist talk will explore artistic research as a place of possibilities; an open-ended strategy of experimentation and failure that can lead to new modes of thinking and reframes knowledge conventions. This program presents two artists whose transdisciplinary practices dynamically intersect with technology, science, and philosophy, and creatively challenge preconceptions as they expand the role of art in society.
Tickets are $5.

History and Archives: A Music Video Workshop with Dr. Julian Saporiti
2023-11-03 10:30 - 12:00
EVENTBRITE Registration required, limited seats (15), free.

In this workshop, musician and scholar Dr. Julian Saporiti will discuss how to use your personal story, family archive, and history in your work. He has used the medium of music videos to transform his doctoral research on Asian American history into easily consumable public art pieces. Through his project No-No Boy (Smithsonian Folkways Records), Saporiti has been able to reach broad (non-academic) audiences by using visuals and songwriting instead of academic papers.

Breaking down several videos included in the One Day We’ll Go Home exhibition, Saporiti will discuss the process of turning academic research into public art and offer insight into the societal impact public-facing history can have. Participants will be led through the artist’s production process and learn how rigorous archival research and deeply exploring one’s cultural background can produce rich ground for any creative practice.

Artist Talk with filmmaker and sculptor Tuan Andrew Nguyễn.
2023-11-03 16:00 - 17:00
Please join us for a talk and Q&A with filmmaker and sculptor Tuan Andrew Nguyễn.

Walker 202, 120 Boylston St. Boston, MA. Doors open at 4pm. Free, but Registration Required via EventBrite.

Nguyễn lives and works Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s practice explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His practice is fueled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement. Through his continuous attempts to engage with vanishing or vanquished historical memory, Nguyễn investigates the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. Through collaborative endeavors with various communities throughout the world, Nguyen sets out to cultivate and empower these strategies enacted and embodied by his collaborators. Through this collaborative practice, he explores memory as a form of resistance and empowerment, emphasizing the power of storytelling as a means for healing, empathy and solidarity.

Nguyễn, based primarily in Saigon, works between various mediums but devotes much of his attention towards producing moving-image works and sculpture. Nguyễn’s intrigued with the relationship between narrative and objects leads him to make projects that combine moving image and sculpture – oftentimes many of his films begin with an object, such as destroyed memorials built by former refugees, or the skeletal remains of the last rhino in Vietnam for instance, and its story. Approaching memory as a phenomenon that is intangible and abstract, Nguyễn often thinks beyond the restrictions of time (past, present, future) which also gives way to thinking about supernaturalisms (ghosts, specters, hauntings) as political tools.

Vietnam and Diasporic Aesthetics: Two Meditations. Dr. Howie Tam & Dr. Catherine H. Nguyen
2023-12-06 17:00 - 18:30 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Tiffany Chung, If Water Has Memories, 2022.

The first event in the Writing, Literature & Publishing Scholar Series, this program is presented in conjunction with One Day We’ll Go Home and supported in part by the Harvard University Asia Center. Taking as a point of departure some works of Vietnamese American artistic production both in the gallery space and beyond, this two-part talk with Catherine H. Nguyen (Emerson College) and Howie Tam (Brandeis University) explores different approaches of receiving and encountering artworks and engages diasporic aesthetics that grapples with the legacy of the Vietnam War and its enduring questions about creation and memory.

This event is supported by Emerson Contemporary, WLP Scholar Series, Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, Harvard University Asia Center

Catherine H. Nguyen is an Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures at Emerson College. She is a comparative literature scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora. Her current book project examines the Vietnamese mixed-race child and the transracial adoptee from the longue durée of the Indochina Wars to their refugee aftermaths. Her publications can be found in Adoption & Culture and forthcoming in L’Esprit Créateur as well as in the edited collections Redrawing the Historical Past and Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France.

HJT Howie Tam is Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University. He earned a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania and previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Dartmouth College and the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University. His articles have appeared in American Literature, the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. He is working on a book manuscript that studies forms of nationhood in diasporic Vietnamese literature published in the U.S. and France.

Patricia Nguyễn discusses moving through memory in performance art
2023-12-12 08:00 - 17:00
Patricia Nguyễn performs “Passage” at the Media Art Gallery.

By Maddie Browning

Patricia Nguyễn is an artist, scholar, and educator with work surrounding the aftermath of the Vietnam War and memory, loss, and healing. She utilizes performance art to understand how the feeling of water and land on her body reflect the emotions and experiences of Vietnamese refugees.

Her work is a part of Emerson Contemporary’s “One Day We’ll Go Home” exhibition running through December 16.

Emerson Contemporary connected with Nguyễn via Zoom to discuss her journey developing performance art, her conversations with refugees and their families, and what she hopes people learn from her art.

EC: When did you start developing performance art?

Nguyễn: I was trained in devised theater throughout elementary school, and then in high school, I did performance poetry and spoken word. It wasn’t until I went to Vietnam in 2010, and I encountered state surveillance and censorship [that] it transformed my work in performance poetry and theater into performance art to think about the power of how the body can help tell the story and what the body remembers.

EC: What artists are you inspired by?

Nguyễn: [Okwui Okpokwasili]. She did this amazing piece called “Bronx Gothic.” A lot of the people that inspired my work are Black feminists and women of color, feminists, artists, poets, theater makers.

The person that trained me is the first woman performance artist in Vietnam, and her name is Ly Hoàng Ly, who I have this lifetime performance with called “Memory vs. Memory.” She really helped me understand what performance art is and what it can do through collaborating with her. “Memory vs. Memory” began because both of our fathers were located on opposing sides of the Vietnam War. We’re their children, their daughters, and we inherit the memories that they’ve had to go through in particular because they’re the same age on opposing sides of the war and were both incarcerated after the end of the war – her father in an old French colonial prison, my father in the jungles near the border of Vietnam and Cambodia. So, for us, delving into performance art, delving into the cultural memory of specific objects like water or soil or metal, conjures these memories that are linked to our own fathers’ histories of revolution and war and incarceration.

EC: You say in your artist statement that land and water are crucial to your process. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about that.

Nguyễn: So the word for homeland, country, and nation in Vietnamese is “Đất nước,” which respectively means land and water, but in the diaspora land drops off, so the shorthand for saying homeland or country is “nước” or just water. So a lot of my work delves into the materiality of water itself, like, how does water soak into my body? How do I understand the porousness of my own skin? And how do we tap into both the internal waters that we already have and the external waters that I play with in performance when I drown myself in water, soak my myself with drenched fabric. How does that evoke the memory both within and external to me about whatever question I’m meditating on in relationship to the aftermath of the Vietnam War?

A lot of Vietnamese were forced to migrate by boat and over water, so a lot of them are known as boat refugees. I think about the materiality of water not just as a landscape of where forced migration happens, but as this place of life and death. I’ve interviewed so many different Vietnamese refugees, and all of them have said, “I was so thirsty on that boat, and there was water all around me and I couldn’t drink any of it.” The ocean is made up of saltwater, and saltwater could help you if you have a sore throat – you can gargle it – but if the ratio of saltwater is too much, it becomes toxic. So what is this line between what is healing and what is toxic? So really thinking about water, not only as a metaphor, but literally what does it do to the body?

And then land, so my father was incarcerated on former US military bases that had landmines in them. So land was literally weaponized against the Vietnamese people, both by the US government, and also in the aftermath of war as people who were drafted in the south of Vietnam that were aligned with the US also were incarcerated on these very lands. The precarity of life and death is contingent on if the bomb will explode.

EC: Going back to you talking about how you have interviewed a lot of refugees, how do you approach people that are hurting and tell their stories?

Nguyễn: So for refugees, they have to prove what they’ve been through to even gain refugee status. So the process of conducting oral histories is hopefully more of a reparative act, where it’s not just like, “Let me extract your story to see if you qualify for this paperwork or the status for particular rights and privileges.” It’s like, “Let me actually listen and ask you your story.” The way that I conduct oral histories, it’s based off of a relationship that I’ve already had with people, so either I’ve known them for quite some time, so they can trust me with their stories, or I’m introduced to them by someone who they already trust and that person is either in the room with me or has done a lot of the prep work to help support that person. So it’s always based in rapport and consent.

It’s really just being as present as possible and doing deep listening and gauging what people are comfortable with and what people are not comfortable with. At the end of the interview, I always check in with them, making sure that they’re okay, asking them if there’s anything else they want to share. And I ask I leave them with a hopeful question like, “What do you hope for yourself or your children or future generations?” or “What do you want to leave us with and what do you want us to learn?” so that it’s not a line of questions that focus on trauma or pain. It’s more of a line of questions and invitations to share and understand these histories with one another. I try to help those that I’m interviewing feel empowered after the interview that their story is important and what they went through was significant and that they’re not alone.

EC: You received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2010 to work in Vietnam and co-founded Cây, “the first life skills and art therapy reintegration program for human trafficking survivors along the border regions of Vietnam,” according to your website. Tell me more about the program and why you created it.

Nguyễn: So originally, I was supposed to go to Vietnam or Cambodia to work with survivors of sex trafficking and human trafficking. But the Vietnamese and Cambodian government shut down the organization that I was going to work with a week before my application was due. Luckily, my friend worked in Vietnam and works with an anti-human trafficking organization and brought me on to it.

I had a lot of pushback going back to Vietnam from my own family. They were like, “We escaped from there. Why would you go back?” For me, it was really important to see the other side of war and to see those that are still impacted by its aftermath, even if not in the way that we understand how people are directly impacted, but just in terms of the new neoliberal development policies and how that impacts indigenous folks who are also known as ethnic minorities. I wanted to see how development is impacting those who live in poor and rural areas, and who are being heard and neglected by the government and to work on young women’s empowerment through the arts. So I co-founded that program with my friend who was also interested in arts education, and we were interested in exploring how arts can be this tool to support people to express themselves and make sense of the conditions that they’re living in and feel like they can build community around that because art is the first thing that was used for the war in terms of propaganda and gaining public support, but it’s also the thing that is most censored and most surveilled.

EC: At Emerson, you performed “Passage” on November 14. What story were you telling through that performance?

Nguyễn: There was this beautiful photo that I had seen of a Vietnamese woman with her conical hat, and she was surrounded by all these beautiful green fishing nets, and she just loved her, so that’s what inspired the material that I worked with. I worked with different color tulle that evoked the water itself, and the water at different depths. I played with different colors of tulle to show the different dimensions and layers of water. In thinking about the creation of “Passage,” when you walk through the gallery space, you first walk into Tiffany Chung’s piece, and her piece is really about the forced migration right after the war. And then in the middle, you have Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s installation video, “[The] Boat People” where they land on this refugee camp, so it’s from the journey of leaving to the refugee camp, and then my three channel installation is at the far end of the gallery, and it’s really challenging the notion of refugee resettlement. So it’s kind of like if you move through the gallery, that’s the story that I saw, from departure to this liminal space of the refugee camp, to this place of resettlement.

So in the middle of the gallery space, I wanted to imagine that it was all water, and the tulle evoked that sense of water. So I started the performance in the middle of Tiffany’s installation. And part of what I did was, I sunk into all this tulle that was surrounding me to be with the material, meditate with her piece, and have it be infused into my performance work. And then I carry the tulle into the main gallery space, and part of carrying the tulle is imagining, “What does it mean to literally try to carry water?” And it’s spilling over, it cannot be contained in any way. Then I dive into the tulle, and I’m wrestling in the midst of it, trying to explore my breath, trying to explore tension, trying to explore moments of feeling like I’m swimming or floating or drowning or shifting and just thinking about what the space could be. And meanwhile what’s being projected onto me from the projector above are these incremental numbers that are going up and down in different ways to symbolize the number of growing refugees that are left to die at sea or abandoned by nation states or government.

So that’s being projected on my body as I’m moving under and with and through the tulle and exploring expansion and contraction and breath and thinking about the bodies that were forced to migrate by sea and those that drowned or were thrown overboard or couldn’t make it. What does it mean to dive deep into the ocean where these bodies have landed? So then I struggle to get out of the tulle and go back in because the answer isn’t resettlement. The answer isn’t, “Let me arrive at some place, and it’ll save me. Let me get out of the water.” It was really thinking about, “Let’s return to the water,” and “What can the water teach us, and how can we build other worlds and imaginaries through the water?” And then I worked with Fiona Fiona Ngô who created a really beautiful experimental sound piece that really framed the performance and was a call in response to the piece.

EC: Your Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans bio states that growing up your parents told you stories about their experience escaping Vietnam during the war as boat refugees to Malaysia and Indonesia and resettling in the United States in the ‘80s. How do those stories inform your work?

Nguyễn: They deeply inform my work in that they are the ones that I’m theorizing with. They helped me understand the political stakes of war in how they’ve survived and how they don’t want that to happen to anyone else in any capacity. So I draw on their stories to create my performance gestures, and I draw on their stories and their legacies to think about, “What is the purpose of this work?” and really thinking about how it’s to connect with audiences to share these histories and these stories. That’s how they want their stories to be passed on.

EC: What do you hope people learn from experience in your art?

Nguyễn: I hope it offers a space for people to grieve and to mourn, especially as we’re witnessing different levels of violence all the time. I want people to understand that war and the process of nation building always results in forced migration, always results in the predetermination of who gets to live and who gets to die or who has to die for someone else to live. I want people to learn the human stakes of what it means to delve into these histories, not only just as something that’s happened in the past, but as a lens to think about the future, as a way to think about how we can build a better world by not forgetting and erasing the violences and the ugly histories and the heartbreaks of the past. How do we acknowledge them and also transform them so that we can build a better world, a better future for all of us and other generations to come?

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Musician Julian Saporiti approaches refugee storytelling with compassion
2023-12-15 08:00 - 2023-12-16 17:00
By Maddie Browning

Berklee alum Julian Saporiti releases music inspired by his fieldwork and research on Asian American history under the pseudonym No-No Boy – a reference to John Okada’s novel of the same name.

A selection of his songs and music videos are a part of Emerson Contemporary’s “One Day We’ll Go Home” exhibition on display through December 16.

Emerson Contemporary chatted with Saporiti on Zoom about his favorite musical artists, collaborating on artistic projects with his wife, and checking his privilege with the monks at Blue Cliff Monastery.

EC: What artists are you inspired by?

Saporiti: There’s a painting in the MFA in Boston called “Slave Ship” by [Joseph Mallord William] Turner, and when I was in school at Berklee, I would go see that painting a lot. It’s a really horrible subject matter, it’s this wrecked slave ship, so it’s all these bodies in the ocean but it’s full of [these] beautiful sunset or sunrise colors – oranges and pinks – mixed with the turbulence of the ocean. So that was always super striking, and very similar to a lot of the work that I do, which is dealing with stories of people crossing oceans under not so good circumstances. But that painting, I was always entranced by that when I lived in Boston, and I would go see that all the time.

EC: What are some of your favorite musicians?

Saporiti: When I was in Boston, as a [college student], I used to go to the symphony every week and the BSO because they had a student card, so you go every Thursday for like 25 bucks a semester. I remember I saw this piece, Hector Berlioz is the composer, and he wrote a piece called “The Damnation of Faust,” which is this overwhelming three choruses based on the Faust mythology, and that’s one of my favorite pieces of music of all time. And then I also love the rock and roll or hard rock I grew up with like Rage Against the Machine and Weezer and Nirvana and all that grunge stuff. And then my dad’s record collection, The Beatles, Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Bob Dylan.

I like all that very entrenched, canonized stuff, but my favorite experiences are just hearing someone in front of me play an instrument. It doesn’t even have to be a particular piece of music. It’s just like, if there’s a clarinet player in an Italian restaurant, I’m always drifting out of whatever conversation I’m in to hear just the sound of their instrument. I’m really appreciative of live music because there’s just something so captivating and infinite in that very small experience that you can’t get with recorded music.

EC: Your music is rooted in storytelling. How do you use different sounds to tell those stories?

Saporiti: A lot of different ways. Sometimes it’s just textures of different instruments [that] might fit a lyric, you know, the difference between a plucked guitar with your fingers to a nice ethereal keyboard pad or something. I use a lot of samples, and I tell a lot of stories that are based on my historic research as an academic – these histories of Asian American folks and refugees and immigrants mostly. I sample from my field research sites, so if I go to an old refugee camp or something, I’ll knock on the barbed wire or the wood, and then I’ll turn that into a drum kit. So that’s what you hear on my recorded music to try to use the textures and real audible sounds of history inside the records themselves.

Empire Electric by No-No Boy, album cover.

EC: What has your experience been like collaborating with your wife, Emilia, who directs and does lettering for your music videos featured in “One Day We’ll Go Home”?

Saporiti: Awesome because we want to be around each other as much as possible. That’s why we got married. I have found someone who I just love sharing my life with, and my life is so artistically driven, it would kind of be impossible for me to be in a full time relationship with someone if they didn’t share in that and vice versa. Like right now you’ve caught me in the middle of her law school exam final week, so I’m basically chauffeur and making all the meals and helping her study with flashcards and making sure the sleep schedule is good. So we look at everything we do as a team. And she’s a wonderful artist in her own right – a visual artist. She helps me produce the songs that I make as well. She sings when we perform live. She also has sewn this incredible stage jacket I wear in one of the videos which has hand embroidered little stories from my Vietnamese American childhood on it.

EC: Tell me a little bit more about the songs you included in “One Day We’ll Go Home” and what stories you are telling.

Saporiti: “Boat People” is in there and that is very central to the Vietnamese American story because I think most refugees or a good deal of us can trace their families where they directly came over as boat people. These folks who had to escape South Vietnam on these rickety little fishing boats. That song is taken directly from an archival interview of this guy who was a boat person who went to Canada. The lyrics basically tell this really cinematic story of this guy, Dr. Tran, who eventually made it to Montreal but he had to escape Vietnam, got into this little fishing, boat pirates attacked them, eventually made it to Pulau Bidong – this refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia. It’s harrowing, and I think that it’s really important to tell one story at a time as a teacher and also as a songwriter because it’s really hard for students or for listeners to take in a million people. You can’t understand that number, so boiling it down to telling these personal stories detail by detail, and then setting it to music, I think that’s a very emotional way to speak to this larger humanity issue of refugees and immigrants and movements of people – things that are happening right now in the Middle East, right now in Asia and Central America. This is just one person, but if you can empathize with that one person, then maybe you can empathize more deeply with the global issue of refugees and displacement.

EC: In conducting your field work, how do you go about talking to refugees when you’re working on new music?

Saporiti: I never talk to anyone with a goal of anything. I just explore and hang out and talk to people like people, and then if it comes up that they have an interesting story, and they share that with me, I might ask questions I’d ask anyone. If we’re having a drink at a bar, I would talk to everyone the same way, you know, just be a good hang. That’s something they should lead off with [in] anthropology classes, just be a good hang, don’t needle people to relive their trauma. It’ll come out if it comes out. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and that’s all right. That’s something I had to learn when I first started interviewing people for my No-No Boy project. I was talking to a lot of people who used to live in a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming during World War II, and I would kind of right off the bat be like, “Tell me about the worst three years of your life,” which is a [expletive] up thing. Because, as someone who comes from some really harsh family history, you don’t want to define people by the worst parts of their life.

I’ve gone down and hung out in the Mexican camps across the border just to, especially as a son of a refugee, see what’s happening now and speak against it, tell people what I’ve seen, help out if I can. And it’s kind of up to [the refugees] what they want to share and just try to go in with a sense of reciprocity, giving something first before you take something away from them, which is their story.

I always bring down those Instax Polaroid cameras and just take pictures for people who have lost everything and having a picture of their kid means a lot to carry with them and then giving them the camera and a ton of film so they can take pictures of their friends. That little stuff, that can mean a lot, and then maybe you get some cool conversations and maybe that turns into art or songs, but that’s really secondary.

EC: Your song “Little Monk” on [your third album] Empire Electric is inspired by your experience at Blue Cliff [Monastery]. How does that experience influence your music going forward?

Saporiti: Pretty completely. My wife and I weren’t married at the time but we had started dating at Brown University. She had graduated with a sociology degree, and I could leave campus because I was a PhD student, and I had all my coursework done. And we just wanted to get out of there. When you’re 18 to 22, you’re never more aware. You don’t have mortgages to pay yet or kids to worry about, so that’s when the world really is spitting in your face the most, and you notice it, and you still have energy. Brown is a particularly liberal, progressive, activisty place, and it was so scary to be there at that point in time, because there were a lot of people just yelling about everything constantly and not really necessarily being informed about what they were yelling about. They were protesting everything but how rich those kids were, never protests about economic class but everything else, but with no substance behind it. I wanted calm in my life. I wanted the world to change. That’s why I went down to the Mexican border during a spring break to see these refugee camps for myself, instead of just yelling about what people were yelling about on Facebook. I wanted to actually go see for myself and see if I could actually help out.

The monks will sort you out because they just don’t buy into that because there’s greater truths for them. That’s not to say they don’t acknowledge there’s pain and suffering in the world. That’s what Buddhism is about. It’s acknowledging suffering and trying to overcome it in your life. I felt like I was just angry and I felt a poison in me from all the politics in the world, and all the suffering and [the monks] gave me tools to deal with that whether that was meditation or mindfulness stuff, just walking around. And yeah, that has sort of dictated my path. I don’t really use social media anymore. I’ll read the newspaper once a week instead of doom scroll constantly to see all the hell that’s happening because it’s not going to change in a week’s time. If I read one good article about the war over in the Middle East that’s going to be pretty thorough, and I’ll catch up on what’s happened that week.

I think what I learned is to tend to your own garden. I don’t want to yell about what’s happening at a southern border if I’m being an [expletive] to my friend that week. That’s something I can help. I can help being present and helping someone else that I know and love instead of abstractly spinning out because the world is on fire. And also checking my own privilege, right? I’m someone who has a PhD, and makes a living doing art. I have a beautiful wife, I have a roof over my head, which has not always been the case in my life and, talking about refugees, is not the case for a lot of people now. The monks really helped me check my privilege and get out of that elite campus protester culture. They let me empty out and see that life is still wonderful for some people. For some people it’s not, but for me, it is, and let me acknowledge that first and take solace and strength in that and then see how I can help the people in my community or if I do go somewhere where I can help.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Workshop: Kameelah Janan Rasheed on Wayward Sentences (writing constraints and algorithmic scores)
2024-01-19 13:30 - 15:30
Workshop: Kameelah Janan Rasheed on Wayward Sentences (writing constraints and algorithmic scores)January 19, 2024 @1:30PM Eastern on Zoom (RSVP required)

Rasheed considers learning “as a process of radical slowing down/de-acceleration in the midst of the efficiency and optimization frenzy; an engagement with curiosity, serendipity, improvisation, and tangents; learning as a persistent reminder of the shifting ecologies of what it means to know something.”RSVP here

If, Then: Technology and Poetics,
2024-01-19 13:30 - 15:30 | On line, ZOOM
Learn from visual artist Kameelah J. Rasheed in this satellite workshop

Join us for Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s satellite workshop (conducted over zoom), in partnership with John Hopkins University. In If, Then: Technology and Poetics, Kameelah explores the relationship between writing constraints and algorithmic scores (dubbed wayward sentences).

This workshop will be conducted over zoom. You can RSVP or attend the workshop using this link.

Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

Rasheed thinks conceptually about text, type, and printed matter and uses publishing as a platform to engage and enlarge conversations with others. Her work invites important questions about the materiality of text, such as, “What is the shape of a failed sentence?” or even to quote Fred Moten speaking to the work of Renee Gladman, “Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?” These questions are central to the artist’s practice.

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Curious about the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheed explores Black knowledge production and fugitivity. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.

Exhibition hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm.

Artist Reception Kameelah Janan Rasheed
2024-01-23 17:00 - 19:00
Join us to celebrate the brand new exhibition of “Kameelah Janan Rasheed: all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext,” a multimedia solo exhibition featuring visual artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed (American, born 1985) on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from January 23 – March 23, 2024.

Rasheed thinks conceptually about text, type, and printed matter and uses publishing as a platform to engage and enlarge conversations with others. Her work invites important questions about the materiality of text, such as, “What is the shape of a failed sentence?” or even to quote Fred Moten speaking to the work of Renee Gladman, “Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?” These questions are central to the artist’s practice.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Lucid Dream, still, 2024

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Curious about the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheed explores Black knowledge production and fugitivity. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.

Exhibition hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm.

Writing With Word Games (**NEW DATE)
2024-02-26 14:00 - 16:00 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
Learn from visual artist Kameelah J. Rasheed. NEW DATE: MONDAY, 26, 2-4pm, FEBRUARY.

Join our artist in residence Kameelah J. Rasheed in a Writing With Word Games workshop.

Register for this workshop over here.

Writing With Word Games, a text score workshop, Friday, February 26, 2-4pm. Registration required: Eventbrite

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

Get out of your way and learn to write with games, constraints, and algorithms. The workshop’s purpose is not to create a perfect piece of writing; rather, it is an invitation to get a bit feral and messy as we pull language into our orbit. Each participant will leave with a writing prompt created by another attendee.

i am not done yet, 2022. Solo at Kunstverein Hannover (Hannover, DE) Archival Inkjet Prints, Vellum, Xerox Paper, Acetate, Plexiglass, Acrylic, Watercolor, India Ink and Oil Stick Painting, Video

The multimedia site-specific installation combines new video drafts and existing video works from the last three years. All created using some form of a writing and video editing constraint, these works live alongside several 2D works also created using constraints to explore the agility and limitations of language. With an investment in Black experimental poetics, non-linear cosmologies, and fugivity, Rasheed asks, “What can be captured through writing? What is lost? And how can this inevitable loss be an invitation to consider other modes of communication?”

Kameelah J. Rasheed's Book Launch (NEW DATE)
2024-02-27 16:30 - 18:00 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
Attend the artist’s Scratch Disk Full launch event. THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED DUE TO ARTIST ILLNESS to TUESDAY, FEB. 27..

Join our artist in residence Kameelah J. Rasheed for the launch of her book, Scratch Disk FullAttendees will receive a complimentary copy of the publication.

Scratch Disks Full asks, in the spirit of Sankofa: What did you leave behind? What would happen if you went back and got it? Scratch Disks Full is a publishing project for those with leaky sensory gating, sprawling interests, kinetic brains, and “too many ideas.” We publish the excess, the dirty data, the spillage, the noise, the leftover, and the unfulfilled.

A scratch disk is a hard disk used as a workspace to store data temporarily. In applications like Adobe Photoshop, the scratch disk is used to hold the data being edited. When an error reads “… the scratch disks are full.” it means there is not enough space on the drive to perform the upcoming task. The users need to find space elsewhere or end the process; they are left holding the excess energy of an unfulfilled action.

Scratch Disks Full is a publishing project producing readers, workbooks, and lo-fi playthings exploring the excess of an exhibition, piece of writing, lecture, performance, or even other publication. By excess, we do not mean process work leading up to a final work; we literally mean the embodied experiences you could not give yourself over to due to spiritual unreadiness, the sentences you had to blunt because there was not enough time for further editing; the feral idea that blossomed during a performance and began to shape you as much as you shaped it.

This offering will explore the excess of the current exhibition — notes, diagrams, excerpts of writing, and other leftovers.

Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores writing practices across all species,states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Curious about the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheedexplores Black knowledge production and fugitivity. She creates sprawling,“architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints;performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to bedetermined. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.Her recent solo exhibitions include KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). In 2024, she will have a solo exhibition at REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA). Rasheed is the author of five artists’ books:in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing,2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions,2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring theStacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). She is an adjunct instructor at the Cooper Unionand Barnard College, a Critic at Yale School of Art, Sculpture, and an instructor at theSchool for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consultingbusiness that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions indesigning expansive and liberatory learning experiences.

Rasheed is represented by NOME Gallery in Berlin, Germany.

Lecture-Performance with Kameelah J. Rasheed
2024-02-27 18:00 - 19:30 | Walker 202, 120 Boylston Street Boston, MA, Boston, Massachusetts, 02116, United States
Learn with our visual artist in residence!

Join our artist in residence Kameelah J. Rasheed in a lecture-performance workshop conducted at Emerson College.

In this lecture performance, Rasheed will offer a live annotation of her 2024 keynote lecture at the CODEX Foundation conference. In this live annotation, Rasheed will respond to past and future versions of herself in conversation with ideas of translation, wayward writing, and Lucille Clifton’s spirit writing.

This event is proudly supported by Emerson College’s Public Art Think Tank (PATT)

Location is Room 202, Walker Building, 120 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02116. Registration is required for guests without an Emerson ID. Register for this free workshop over here.

About Kameelah Janan Rasheed

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Curious about the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheed explores Black knowledge production and fugitivity. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.

Her recent solo exhibitions include KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). In 2024, she will have a solo exhibition at REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA). Rasheed is the author of five artists’ books: in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). She is an adjunct instructor at the Cooper Union and Barnard College, a Critic at Yale School of Art, Sculpture, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences.

Rasheed is represented by NOME Gallery in Berlin, Germany.

Un-monument Call to Work: Augmented Reality Artist Workshop
2024-03-30 12:00 - 2024-04-16 17:00
Image credit: Elisa Hamilton, sketching using the Hoverlay app. during the pilot workshop in 2021

Emerson Contemporary, is announcing an augmented reality artist workshop designed to support artists in gaining access to the skills and technology needed to either translate previous work, or create new work, in the medium of augmented reality (AR).

The workshop takes place 10 a.m. – 2:30pm, on five Saturdays: May 4- June 15, 2024. *no workshop on Memorial Day weekend.

The goal of the incubator is to provide training opportunities for artists who have traditionally faced an “access gap” due to the high start-up costs of these design tools and the cultural barriers within the new media art field, primarily affecting women, LGBTQ artists, Latinx, and BIPOC artists. The program provides a stipend, assistance with the production process, technology exploration and mentorship. In turn, by providing support and access, we aim to expand the demographics of artists working in AR.

Ten artists from the greater Boston area will be invited to participate in this program. Each artist received a stipend of $750 to participate and to compensate for their time and energy and offset costs for transportation, child care, or lost work to remove an additional potential barrier to this resource.

Those interested can attend virtual Q&A sessions on April 2 at 6 p.m. or April 3 at 12 p.m. on Zoom.

The written question deadline is Tuesday, April 9 at 5 p.m. and the application closes April 16 at 5 p.m.

Information for the Q&A sessions and application can be found here.

This program is funded by an Un-monument: Transformative Public Art Grant from the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture. This opportunity is open to all professional artists, including individuals, and artists who operate as for-profit businesses and nonprofits.

Water Memories: A Happening...
2024-04-16 17:00 - 19:00
Join us to celebrate a multi media installation environment created by Zhiyao Ding, Mila Jafarnejad, Alexander Nezam, Nikita Potnis, Marcus Santos, Yangyanyun Tang, Siqi Xiong, and Yishu Yu whose work is the culminating project from the Film and Media Arts graduate installation art course “Space, Place, Image, Sound.” Location: Huret and Spector Gallery, please enter on the 7th Floor.

Although we don’t remember it, every newborn human being develops in the amniotic fluid of their mother. Our first interaction with the external world is to leave the water and breathe land’s air. One of the criteria for exploring a planet’s habitability is evidence of water, because without it life cannot live. Water exists in many forms: oceans, rivers, clouds, snowflakes and even inside our bodies.

Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto studied the molecular structure of water and discovered that when water was exposed to different human emotions the molecular structure of water changed. He realized that the water we drink, use and interact with every day has memory. Water remembers.

This exhibition explores many modes of interacting with water including memories of water, the biological and cultural significance of water. How would it feel to submerge yourself in water again? Fear? death? cleansing? or a warm embrace? After all, every drop of water once belonged to the sea, and all life will eventually meet again as one.

Transforming Boston: Art and Technology Incubator
2024-05-01 12:00 - 2024-06-30 19:00 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
A workshop series conducted by Michael Lewy

Transforming Boston: Art and Technology Incubator is our public-facing artist training and mentorship initiative, which offers access to new media technology for artists to either translate previous work or create new work. The incubator serves practicing artists who have faced obstacles due to the high start-up costs of these design tools and the cultural barriers within the new media art field. Ten artists from the Boston area have been invited to participate in this year’s program focused on Augmented Reality and develop their skills while designing a project.

This weekly confluence of ideas & creative exploration features guest lectures by Nicolas Robbe, Lauren Moffett, and Liz Nofziger. The goal of the 2024 incubator is to offer training opportunities and access to technology for artists to either translate previous work or create new work in the medium of augmented reality (AR). The program provides assistance with the production process, technology exploration and mentorship.

The 2025 cohort will focus on projection mapping.

off the pedestal
2024-08-01 00:00 - 2024-10-05 23:59 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
off the pedestal is a group exhibition in the Media Art Gallery, comprising contemporary artists whose work addresses the national conversation around monuments featuring visual artists Laura Anderson Barbata, New Red Order, and Paula J. Wilson.

View exhibition documentation.

This exhibition is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from August 1 – October 5, 2024. The exhibition is free and open to the public Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6 pm. This exhibition is part of Emerson Contemporary’s Regarding Monuments: Visualizing Hidden Histories, a multi-year initiative that includes exhibitions centered on monuments, several public art installations, and a technology incubator.

Curated by Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Leonie Bradbury and Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr, off the pedestal speaks directly to the national phenomenon of the removal of Confederate and other racist monuments in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Although monuments are generally presented as permanent, timeless, and expressive of universal values, this exhibition proposes that public memory could be more effectively addressed and activated through ephemeral expressions.

off the pedestal is supported by the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture (MOAC) program “Un-monument | Re-monument | De-monument: Transforming Boston.” It is a city-wide initiative that aims to transform the nation’s commemorative landscape to ensure collective histories are more completely and accurately represented.

off the pedestal is further supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Laura Anderson Barbata’s multidisciplinary performance work Indigo is a call to action in response to the violence and murder of Black persons at the hands of the police. A group of sixteen resplendent characters clad in hand-dyed fabrics, woven details, and ornate stitching, many standing at the height of stilts, powerfully demonstrate the textile art aspect of Barbata’s vision.

New Red Order’s large-scale video installation Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples. They base their critique on historical events, and the pacing of the digitized imagery, accompanied by skillful sound design, transports viewers into their speculative reveries.

Paula J. Wilson’s performative video Living Monument and 2D wall work Thyself monumentalize Black female bodies through dramatic scale and bold gestures. Her work elevates embodied histories and reminds us that joy and celebration are crucial parts of resistance.

Works featured in this exhibition include:

New Red Order, Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality, HD video (video still), 2020

A two-channel video Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality by New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society that works with networks of informants and accomplices to create grounds for Indigenous futures. Crimes Against Reality focuses on two public sculptures by James Earle Fraser — End of the Trail (1894), a statue originally intended to be installed on the California coast at the scale of the Statue of Liberty, and the statue of Theodore Roosevelt (1939) that was removed from outside the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, in 2022 — both of which commemorate the origin myth of America.

Little Jaguar (Laura Anderson Barbata) and Diablos (Jarana Beat). Intervention: Indigo, Bushwick, 2015. Photo: Rene Cervantes

Laura Anderson Barbata Intervention: Indigo presents a call to action to serve and protect in response to police violence. The point of departure is the color Indigo, a dye used around the globe that has been associated with protection, wisdom and royalty. Created in in collaboration with the Brooklyn Jumbies, Chris Walker and Jarana Beat, Indigo was performed first in Brooklyn and again in Mexico City in 2020 in collaboration with muca Roma, Chris Walker, Los Diablos de la Costa de Guerrero Los Rebeldes de El Capricho, Elizabeth Ross, Danza UNAM and Pro-Alterne Teatro. The work is a call to action to serve and protect, and of protest in response to the violence and murder at the hands of the police of Black people living in the United States and all over the world.

Paula J. Wilson fuses wide-ranging techniques and media with her observations of the natural world, where it is a matter of survival to make space for oneself to live, love, and make art. Recurring themes of feminine power, natural life systems, and art-making itself converge under the umbrella of regeneration and change. Narrative artworks that place feminine subjects in positions of power. Her expansive practice forcefully proclaims her place in the (art) histories she engages.

off the pedestal - Artist Reception
2024-09-17 17:30 - 19:30
Come celebrate off the pedestal, a multimedia group exhibition featuring visual artists Laura Anderson Barbata, New Red Order, and Paula J. Wilson. This exhibition is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from August 1 – October 5, 2024. The exhibition is free and open to the public Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6 pm.

Laura Anderson Barbata, Indigo, 2017

Curated by Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Leonie Bradbury and Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr, off the pedestal speaks directly to the national phenomenon of the removal of Confederate and other racist monuments in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Although monuments are generally presented as permanent, timeless, and expressive of universal values, this exhibition proposes that public memory could be more effectively addressed and activated through ephemeral expressions.

Laura Anderson Barbata’s multidisciplinary performance work Indigo is a call to action in response to the violence and murder of Black persons at the hands of the police. A group of sixteen resplendent characters clad in hand-dyed fabrics, woven details, and ornate stitching, many standing at the height of stilts, powerfully demonstrate the textile art aspect of Barbata’s vision.

New Red Order’s large-scale video installation Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples. They base their critique on historical events, and the pacing of the digitized imagery, accompanied by skillful sound design, transports viewers into their speculative reveries.

Paula J. Wilson’s performative video Living Monument and 2D wall work Thyself monumentalize Black female bodies through dramatic scale and bold gestures. Her work elevates embodied histories and reminds us that joy and celebration are crucial parts of resistance. This exhibition is part of Emerson Contemporary’s Regarding Monuments: Visualizing Hidden Histories, a multi-year initiative that includes exhibitions centered on monuments, several public art installations, and a technology incubator.

Artist Talk: Laura Anderson Barbata
2024-09-18 17:00 - 18:00 | Media Art Gallery
As a part of Laura Anderson Barbata’s work in Emerson Contemporary’s off the pedestal multimedia installation, the artist will be giving a talk at the Media Art Gallery on September 18th, from 5:00-6:00pm (doors open at 4:30 pm).

Barbata’s inspiring performance work Indigo is a call to action in response to the violence and murder of Black persons at the hands of the police. A group of sixteen resplendent characters clad in hand-dyed fabrics, woven details, and ornate stitching, many standing at the height of stilts, powerfully demonstrate the textile art aspect of Barbata’s vision. Come celebrate off the pedestal, a multimedia group exhibition featuring visual artists Laura Anderson Barbata, New Red Order, and Paula J. Wilson. This exhibition is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from August 1 – October 5, 2024. The exhibition is free and open to the public Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6 pm.

Laura Anderson Barbata, Indigo, 2017

Curated by Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Leonie Bradbury and Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr, off the pedestal speaks directly to the national phenomenon of the removal of Confederate and other racist monuments in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Although monuments are generally presented as permanent, timeless, and expressive of universal values, this exhibition proposes that public memory could be more effectively addressed and activated through ephemeral expressions.

New Red Order’s large-scale video installation Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples. They base their critique on historical events, and the pacing of the digitized imagery, accompanied by skillful sound design, transports viewers into their speculative reveries.

Paula J. Wilson’s performative video Living Monument and 2D wall work Thyself monumentalize Black female bodies through dramatic scale and bold gestures. Her work elevates embodied histories and reminds us that joy and celebration are crucial parts of resistance. This exhibition is part of Emerson Contemporary’s Regarding Monuments: Visualizing Hidden Histories, a multi-year initiative that includes exhibitions centered on monuments, several public art installations, and a technology incubator.

How to Commit Crimes Against Reality: ARTIST TALK with New Red Order
2024-09-26 18:00 - 19:30 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
*Doors open at 5:30pm

“Do you want to realize your fullest potential? Be your truest self? Act with confidence? Attract abundance? Alleviate anxiety? Experience clarity? Know your purpose? Be the change you want to see? Be truly present? Experience real freedom? Change the world? Be a part of the solution? On some level, we all want to feel this way, but sometimes in our globalized, capitalist, settler-colonial society it feels impossible. Which is why the New Red Order is developing a dynamic system to help our accomplices achieve all of this and more. This sneak peek of our free introductory video, Never Settle, will tell you what you need to know to take control of your life today!”

As a part of New Red Order’s work in Emerson Contemporary’s off the pedestal multimedia installation, the artist group will be conducting a workshop on September 27th, from 2-3:30 pm at Emerson’s Media Art Gallery.

New Red Order’s large-scale video installation Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples. They base their critique on historical events, and the pacing of the digitized imagery, accompanied by skillful sound design, transports viewers into their speculative reveries.

A "Give it Back" Workshop With New Red Order (NRO)
2024-09-27 14:00 - 15:30 | Student Performance Center, Little Building, 80 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02116, United States
Give it Back Workshop

New Red Order (NRO) will unpack their “Give it Back Program” which recruits, normalizes, and promotes the ongoing practice of voluntary land return from settlers back to Indigenous peoples through a multiplicity of swerving artistic and political strategies including: advertising, network creation, promotional videos, public art, performance and organizing. NRO will work with students to help devise strategies for how their own work can expand past the limitations of art and into the world to create material changeNew Red Order will be conducting the workshop on September 27th, from 2:00 – 3:30 pm at Student Performance Center, Little Building, 80 Boylston St. RSVP your spot at the workshop right here.**RSVP required for non-Emerson guests

New Red Order’s large-scale video installation Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples. They base their critique on historical events, and the pacing of the digitized imagery, accompanied by skillful sound design, transports viewers into their speculative reveries.

Louis Cameron: NOW IS THE TIME
2024-10-22 00:00 - 2024-12-14 23:59 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
Emerson Contemporary Presents: Billboards, posters and text-based works in “Louis Cameron: Now Is the Time” Exhibition explores the civil rights movement, gun violence, and hip hop culture.

Emerson Contemporary proudly presents Louis Cameron: Now is the Time, featuring billboards, posters and text-based works that explore the civil rights movement, gun violence and hip hop culture. It is underway, on view through December 14, 2024 at Emerson College’s Media Art Gallery in the heart of downtown Boston.

The free exhibition features several large-scale, wall-mounted vinyl text pieces from the ongoing Hip Hop Onomatopoeia series, a body of work that explores the conversation on gun violence within hip hop music. The works are text based, using the onomatopoeia of gun shots in hip hop songs as their reference. Cameron focuses on onomatopoeia because of its emotional resonance. Additional works from the Excavation and Displacement series are also on view.

Exclusively for this exhibition, Cameron designed a limited-edition take home poster titled

I Got To Have It, serving as a monument to Hip Hop culture and black music in Boston. It features a poem that peels back the layers of a song to reveal its connections to the history of Black music. Indicative of Hip Hop’s sampling culture, the poem is composed of a source song and the song titles that it sampled from.

Notably, these sampled songs touch on key points in the lineage of Black music such as James Brown, the Blues, and spirituals. The poster addresses urban realities and gun violence, the self-determination of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, and features the title of a song that refers to the African American spirituals such as Wade in the Water. The choice of typeface provides a reference to Hip Hop culture for the presentation of the poem.

Additionally, Cameron will present the “I AM… Portfolio” a group of posters addressing the recent violence against Black men and disregard for their lives in America. The title refers to rally calls and protest chants from the 1960s to the present. While violence against Black people is center stage in the current American cultural conversation, presenting a project by Black male artists – including Sanford Biggers, Rashid Johnson, and Shaun Leonardo, among others – offers valuable insights and counter representation.

Louis Cameron was born in Xxxxxxxx, Ohio, USA; lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He earned a B.F.A. from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia.https://www.louiscameron.com/

Woop! Woop! What’s That Sound Noise? (Interactive Lecture)
2024-11-18 00:00 - 23:59 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Presenting, a workshop on Hip-Hop culture with Dr. Brent Smith

Back in 1993, Hip Hop culture had reached twenty years of life and was boldly making its way through emerging adulthood. Its emcees and other artists challenged boundaries on self-expression, self-determination, and even community. The soundtrack of our societies and our lives would come to make way for insights wrapped into Sound of The Police (KRS One), U.N.I.T.Y. (Queen Latifah), C.R.E.A.M. (Wu Tang Clan), Now I Feel Ya (Scarface), How Many Emcees (Black Moon), Streiht Up Menace (MNC Eiht), and more. Hip Hop of 1993, arguably one of its greatest years, prompted or provoked us like a siren: Woop! Woop! What’s That Sound Noise?

Join us for a community talk led by Dr. Brent Smith as we explore this topic in relation to our current exhibit, Louis Cameron: Now is the Time.

Emerson Contemporary proudly presents Louis Cameron: Now is the Time, featuring Billboards, posters and text-based works that explore the civil rights movement, gun violence and Hip Hop culture. The exhibition features several large-scale, wall-mounted vinyl text pieces from the ongoing Hip Hop Onomatopoeia series, a body of work that explores the conversation on gun violence within Hip Hop music.

School of the Arts: Art Party
2024-12-05 00:00 - 23:59 | Emerson Contemporary
Art Party Alert!

Get ready for Emerson Contemporary’s FIRST EVER ‘Come Make Your Own Art’ Party! – Featured workshop artists are: Rikiesha, Robin Danzak, Jay Antidesign.

Join us for an evening of zines, posters, snacks, and creativity alongside fellow artists and dreamers. Relax, unwind, and let your imagination run wild! Let’s celebrate the power of art together. Don’t miss it! Also free pizza and hip hop music.

Supported by:Dean Kate Eichhorn, School of the ArtsLeonie Bradbury, Curator-in-ResidenceRobin Danzak, Health & Social Change Major

Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales: Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind
2025-02-04 12:00 - 2025-03-22 18:00 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
New multi-media exhibition explores memory, history, and grief through science fiction and cinematic time travel.

On view in Emerson College’s Media Art Gallery, February 4 – March 22, 2025.

BOSTON, MA (January 15, 2025) – Emerson Contemporary is proud to present Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales, featuring multi-channel films and a dramatic sculptural installation by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. On view in our Media Art Gallery are As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night , an Arabic-language opera on loss, mourning and inherited trauma accompanied by a dramatic sculptural installation and a two-channel science fiction film, In Vitro. A special one-night screening of the science fiction film In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and their latest documentary film Familiar Phantoms (2023) will augment the exhibition.

In much of their practice, Sansour and Lind use fiction as an imaginary mode to speak to the present in a manner that diffracts the highly charged political discourse on the historic and ongoing crisis in the Middle East. By ‘time traveling’ to both a faraway past and fictionalised futures, this exhibition explores how cinematic storytelling can open up new spaces for empathy and understanding of a shared human experience.

This exhibition is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Programming

Film Screening + Artist Conversation

Come view In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and Familiar Phantoms (2023). Filmmakers Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind will be in conversation with Emerson Assistant Professor and Filmmaker Julia Halperin afterwards.

Film screening is co-presented with the RPM Film Festival and the Salem Film Fest.

Date: Tuesday, February 4, 7-9:30pm. Doors open at 6:30pm.

Location: Bright Family Screening Room, 559 Washington St. Boston, Ma, 02111

RSVP required for tickets: EVENTBRITE

Artist Reception + Conversation with Larissa Sansour, Søren Lind and exhibition curator Dr. Leonie Bradbury

Date: Wednesday, February 5, 5-7pm.

Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Ma 02111

About the artists: Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind are an artist duo who have collaborated on various films. They live and work in London. What underscores the significance of their work in the current context is the relationship between memory, trauma and the present to envision a more peaceful future. In 2019 they represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Larissa Sansour studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, KINDL in Berlin, Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark and Dar El-Nimer in Beirut. Soren Lind is a Danish author and director and visual artist with a background in philosophy. Lind wrote books on mind, language, and understanding before turning to art, film, and fiction. Lind screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide.

Film Screening + Artist Conversation
2025-02-04 19:00 - 21:30 | Bright Lights Theater, Paramount Center
Come watch In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and Familiar Phantoms (2023) by filmmakers Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind at Emerson’s Bright Family Screening Room.

Join us after the screening for a conversation with the filmmakers, and Emerson’s Artist in Residence, Julia Halperin.

This screening is co-presented with the RPM Film Festival and the Salem Film Fest, and Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s exhibition at Emerson Contemporary is made possible by the generous funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Date: Tuesday, February 4, 7-9:30pm. Doors open at 6:30pm.

Location: Bright Family Screening Room, 559 Washington St. Boston, Ma, 02111

RSVP required for tickets: EVENTBRITE

This exhibition

Date: Wednesday, February 5, 5-7pm.

Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Ma 02111

About the artists: https://larissasansour.com/ Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind are an artist duo who have collaborated on various films. They live and work in London. What underscores the significance of their work in the current context is the relationship between memory, trauma and the present to envision a more peaceful future. In 2019 they represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Born in East Jerusalem, Larissa Sansour (PS/DK) studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, KINDL in Berlin, Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark and Dar El-Nimer in Beirut. Soren Lind (DK) is a Danish author and director and visual artist with a background in philosophy. Lind wrote books on mind, language, and understanding before turning to art, film, and fiction. Lind screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide.

Mirror Fields: A Series of Art-Led Reflections in the Media Art Gallery
2025-02-11 12:00 - 13:00
Special Gallery Event in Conjunction with Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind exhibition: Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales on view in the Media Art Gallery.

Join Rabbi Lisa Eiduson for a contemplative experience inside the newest exhibition Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind: Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales. On view are two films and a dramatic reflecting pool that invite meditations on memory, multigenerational trauma, and sorrow. Participants will be invited to take in a reading and some words of wisdom on the themes brought forth by the artworks and then are invited to share their own experiences, listen to others’ or simply sit in silence. Light refreshments will be served

12:00-1:00 pm on Tuesday, February 11, 2025 Led by Rabbi Eiduson

12:00-1:00 pm on Tuesday, February 25, 2025 Led by Rabbi Eiduson

Currently serving as the Interim Director of Emerson College’s Center of Spiritual Life, Rabbi Eiduson is a member of the clergy team at Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland, MA. There she teaches, leads services, officiates at life-cycle events, preaches, and organizes programming. She believes deeply in education and feels that learning, when applied, is the best avenue for promoting understanding among people.

Mirror Fields: A Series of Art-Led Reflections in the Media Art Gallery
2025-02-25 12:00 - 13:00 | Media Art Gallery
Special Gallery Event in conjunction with the Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind exhibition

Join Rabbi Lisa Eiduson for a contemplative experience inside the newest exhibition Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind: Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales. On view are two films and a dramatic reflecting pool that invite meditations on memory, multigenerational trauma, and sorrow. Participants will be invited to take in a reading and some words of wisdom on the themes brought forth by the artworks and then are invited to share their own experiences, listen to others’ or simply sit in silence.

12:00-1:00 pm on Tuesday, February 25, 2025 Led by Rabbi Eiduson

Currently serving as the Interim Director of Emerson College’s Center of Spiritual Life, Rabbi Eiduson is a member of the clergy team at Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland, MA. There she teaches, leads services, officiates at life-cycle events, preaches, and organizes programming. She believes deeply in education and feels that learning, when applied, is the best avenue for promoting understanding among people.

(Un)Making AI Worlds
2025-03-17 12:00 - 2025-03-22 17:00 | Huret and Spector Gallery, 10 Boylston Pl, Boston, MA 02116, Boston, Massachusetts, 02116, United States
Presenting, “(Un)Making AI Worlds”, curated by Ioana Jucan with Tushar Mathew, and Leonie Bradbury. The exhibition invites audiences to explore artworks emerging from the Data Fluencies Theatre Project team’s critical and creative interrogations of artificial intelligence and AI systems.

Blending theatrical conventions, choreographed movement, poetry, and artistic experiments with machine learning, (Machine) Learning to Be is a participatory, devised, hybrid multimedia performance experience that engages with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and their societal impacts. The performance features an interactive choreographic interface that aims to engage AI as embodiment technologies and human and AI characters that aim to convey the multifaceted nature of AI, its dangers and possibilities for our communities. Rooted in visions of decolonial AI, (Machine) Learning to Be seeks to challenge established systems of control and envision more equitable futures alongside AI technology.

Featuring artists Ioana B. Jucan, Tushar Matthew, David Mesiha, Aidan Nelson, Jae Neal, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Yuguang Zhang, Gavan Cheema, Kite, the exhibition features the following events, activations and performances at Emerson’s Huret and Spector Gallery

March 18, 2025:4-6.30pm: Performance Activations and Artist Panel discussion moderated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, followed by Reception

March 21st, 2025:2:00 pm: Secret Hyena activation

March 22nd, 2025:4:00 pm: Secret Hyena activation

The Data Fluencies Theatre Project (2022-2025) is an artistic research project that mobilizes theatrical performance’s potential to build data fluencies grounded in and honoring embodied experience. The project brings together an interdisciplinary team to develop artworks and co-create a participatory, devised, hybrid multimedia performance. Titled (Machine) Learning to Be, the performance engages with AI and algorithmic systems as it seeks to challenge established systems of control and envision more equitable futures alongside AI technology.

Mirror Fields: A Series of Art-Led Reflections in the Media Art Gallery
2025-03-18 12:00 - 13:00 | Media Art Gallery
October 7, 2025

Special Gallery Event in conjunction with the Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind exhibition

Join Rabbi Lisa Eiduson for a contemplative experience inside the newest exhibition Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind: Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales. On view are two films and a dramatic reflecting pool that invite meditations on memory, multigenerational trauma, and sorrow. Participants will be invited to take in a reading and some words of wisdom on the themes brought forth by the artworks and then are invited to share their own experiences, listen to others’ or simply sit in silence.

12:00-1:00 pm on Tuesday, March 18, 2025 Led by Rabbi Eiduson

Currently serving as the Interim Director of Emerson College’s Center of Spiritual Life, Rabbi Eiduson is a member of the clergy team at Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland, MA. There she teaches, leads services, officiates at life-cycle events, preaches, and organizes programming. She believes deeply in education and feels that learning, when applied, is the best avenue for promoting understanding among people.

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
