In Conversation: Clint Baclawski and Iwalani Kaluhiokalani
2025-10-21 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
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: Dr. Cher Krause Knight and Dr. Harriet F. Senie on Memorials Now. **NEW DATE soon
2025-10-28 18:30 - 20:30
**Rescheduled**

In Conversation: Dr. Cher Krause Knight and Dr. Harriet F. Senie will discuss their latest book Memorials Now focused on the present-day challenges of commemorating the past. The authors offer a critical exploration of how varied communities can navigate the complex terrain of commemorative practices. They will provide insights into historical challenges while also encouraging a more inclusive and just memorial landscape for the future.

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

ABOUT THE BOOK: As debates over historical monuments and their meanings unfold, Memorials Now offers a critical exploration of how communities can navigate the complex terrain of commemorative practices. From controversial statues to emerging forms of public memory, the topics covered in this timely volume provide insights into historical challenges while also encouraging a more inclusive and just memorial landscape for the future.

Authors Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie explore evolving narratives of heroes and victims, ethical challenges of memorial design, strategies for promoting inclusivity, and possibilities for alternative forms of commemoration. Memorials Now analyzes case studies from around the world in which communities are rethinking their memorials and creating innovative memorialization projects that reflect shifting cultural values.

Memorials Now is ideal for students and educators in art history, architecture, urban planning, and cultural studies, as well as professionals in fields such as public art, city planning, museum curation, and civic engagement.

This public program is funded by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-monument initiative, supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

Hidden Histories Walking Tour with Curator Shana Dumont Garr
2025-10-29 17:00 - 18:30
Join Hidden Histories Curator Shana Dumont Garr on a special walking tour to view Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Sue Murad, Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill’s new public art projects in and around the Boston Common and Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston, Ma. We’ll see archival materials and ideas gleaned from old books and maps made public in poetic and slyly rebellious ways.

For more about the Hidden Histories exhibition click here.

Location: Meet at the Media Art Gallery, 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.

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. It is a guided, interactive experience that unfolds across the landscape, inviting participants into temporary arrangements shaped by memory, proximity, and shared attention. The project bears witness to the many generations of people who have gathered together for rest and rallies, labor and loitering, play and protest.

Kameelah J. Rasheed’s public poetry project I have Asked Myself:“Can a Sentence be Haunted? And if so by what?” 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.

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: Erik DeLuca, ¡wénrán zhào! and Amber Vistein
2025-11-04 18:00 - 20:00
Tuesday, November 4, Talk from 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 presence. Moderated by Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr.

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

Erik DeLuca is an artist and experimental musician whose projects respond to place and invite people to listen—both literally and metaphorically. Working across performance, installation, text, and community-based learning, he explores how power shapes what weremember and how we communicate. His work has been presented at Kling & Bang, Fieldwork: Marfa, and the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, and broadcast on Montez Press Radio. His writing appears in Public Art Dialogue, The Wire, and Boston Art Review. DeLuca is Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and holds a PhD in Music from the University of Virginia. His ongoing collaborations with the 7ajar School of Creative Research/Resistance in Ramallah continue to shape his practice of listening and learning.

¡wénrán zhào! is a Boston-based artist working with code, language, textiles and technology. Her work augments objects and artifacts with custom software, exploring the textures of technology and revealing its political and cultural relevance to contemporary societies. She holds an MFA in Digital + Media from Rhode Island School of Design, with works presented at ISEA, the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Conference, Taper, and The New River Journal. She is a recipient of NMC Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award, and member of New Inc Year 12.

Amber Vistein (they / them) is a composer and sound artist who delves deeply into the poetics of timbre, texture, and gesture. Their highly tactile approach to composition works to unearth invisible events, networks, and histories by introducing expressive imperfections that expose the submerged complexities of sound, the labor of its production, and its fragility. From 2017-19 Amber was a Composition Fellow with the American Opera Project’s Composers and the Voice program. They have also created numerous site-specific sound installations, including Growth Continuum for the deCordova Museum, and collaborated with film-video artists Justice and Hogan Seidel on the short films Murmur, Landscapes, and Let’s Look at Florida. Amber holds degrees from New College of Florida (BA), Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MFA) and Brown University (MA, PhD).

In Conversation: Artists Margaux Crump and Ash Eliza Williams **on ZOOM**
2025-11-06 12:00 - 13:00
Thursday, November 6 *On ZOOM* 12:00 – 1:00 PM

In Conversation: Learn how artists Margaux Crump and Ash Eliza Williams collaborate with non-human beings to create artwork. Meeting LINK .

Ash and Margaux consider the natural world an active contributor of aesthetic meaning. They will each describe their current art-making ideas and processes and discuss ideas raised by the exhibitions in which they are showing.

This is a joint program between Emerson Contemporary and Sala 1, Rome, Italy. Ash Eliza Williams is a visual artist showing in Learning with Trees, an exhibition at Sala 1 curated by Martina Tanga. Margaux Crump is a visual artist showing in a sentient land; artistic alliances with forests, beetles, salt, and air, curated by Shana Dumont Garr and opening at Emerson Contemporary, Media Art Gallery in January 2026.

Margaux Crump, photo by Feast Day / @FeastDayStudio

Margaux Crump is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher exploring the entanglements between magic, ecology, and the spiritual Imagination. Born in Houston, TX, she spent her childhood playing in gardens where she was steeped in ancestral fairy lore. These experiences wove quietly through the background of her work, until she returned to Houston after earning her MFA in studio art from Washington University in St. Louis. With a renewed interest in the folklore and myths she grew up with, she immersed herself in the study of esotericism and ecology. She is currently investigating the phenomena of the unseen, from the microscopic to the mythic worlds that surround us. Taking form primarily through sculpture, photography, painting, and ritual, her work traces threads of the mythic, magical, and imaginal across disciplines and histories in search of how they inhabit and trouble the present.

Ash Eliza Williams

Ash Eliza Williams grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in SW Virginia. Ash is a painter and multidisciplinary artist making work about interspecies communication, non-human language, and more vibrant methods of connection. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, the Anderson Museum, and the Chautauqua Institute. Ash often works with scientists, including as an artist-in-residence at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Mountain Lake Biological Station as a Lucille Walton Fellow. Ash is currently a 2025 – 2026 Roswell Foundation Artist-in-Residence.

In Conversation: Sue Murad and Shana Dumont Garr
2025-11-18 18:00 - 20:00
Tuesday, November 18 from 6:30 – 7:30pm, 6pm doors open

Artist Sue Murad shares about her ASSEMBLE walking tour with Curator Shana Dumont Garr. 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. Murad created a series of prompts to celebrate the right to peacefully assemble and create a temporal micro-culture for each group during the tour.

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

Sue Murad, ASSEMBLE, Reimagined Historic Walking Tours in Boston Common, 2025.

Shana Dumont Garr is a contemporary art curator, writer, and educator based in Greater Boston. She is a curator at Emerson Contemporary and a professor in the Department of Visual & Media Arts at Emerson College. She is also curating the independent project NO SLEEPING, a nomadic, participatory series of performances by Sue Murad and Deb Todd Wheeler at select historic houses in Massachusetts. Garr is a doctoral student at the Institute of Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She earned her MA in Art History from Boston University and her BA in Creative Writing and Art from Colby College in Waterville, ME.

Sue Murad responds to culture through an intuitive, sensory engagement with everyday objects, often in the public or private places they inhabit. Through a combination of attention, study, and play, she may alter, arrange, and choreograph a subject, or set up situations where change and chance happen without direct contact, such as a subject melting, falling, or sliding. She is drawn to both semblance and difference, and the strange and surreal synthesis that can occur with comparison and contrast. Disregarding notions of usefulness, common meaning, and prescribed narratives, these formal and philosophical explorations feed her interdisciplinary practice of performance, installation, sculpture, collage, and film.

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

Art Party, End of Semester Celebration
2025-12-04 18:00 - 20:00
Thursday, December 4, 6-8 PM

Art Party 2024, Zine-making table.

Get ready for Emerson Contemporary’s 2nd ‘Come Make Your Own Art Party! Let’s celebrate the power of art together. Join us for an evening of zines, buttons, paint-by-numbers, and of course, pizza. Relax, unwind, and let your imagination run wild alongside fellow artists and dreamers.

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

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

Meeting Point: Boston Common Visitor’s Center

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

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