Emerson Contemporary

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

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

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

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

Moderated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury

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

Lisa Tang: "Be Whole In Everything" MFA Thesis Show
2025-12-01 12:00 - 2025-12-03 18:00
This work is a non-doctrinal spiritual practice made visible. It draws on prehistoric abstraction, sacred geometry, and the ordinary courage of repetition. Each element invites a small, complete gesture: to strike, to bow, to trace. The videos loop; the stones hang; breath returns. Nothing is illustrated, yet everything is implicated — matter, memory, tide, light.

To be whole in everything is not to be grand. It is to become exact in presence: to place your full attention inside the tiniest coordinate, until the world answers back.

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

Leaning Against The Wall: Photo Practicum Fall 2025
2025-12-08 12:00 - 2025-12-10 18:00
You are cordially invited to attend this year’s Photo Practicum Fall 2025 exhibit

This semester, students in Lucie March’s photography class dove into themes such as identity, the passing of time, and our roots represented through six different personal projects. We invite you to join us for the reception of our show at the Huret & Spector Gallery on December 9th, from 6 pm – 8 pm. We hope to see you there!

Exhibiting artists: Emilie Dumas, Kiki Tobor, Natalie He, Danny Kennedy, Zoë Grandstaff-Gruber, Cooper Rich

A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air
2026-01-21 12:00 - 2026-03-28 18:00
Nelly-Eve Rajotte, Les arbres communiquent entre eux à 220 hertz, 2024. Video installation: 3-channel 4K video, colour, generative sound, 25 min; modular synthesizer, electrodes, and tree. VFX artist and software developer: Codrin-Mihail Tablan Negrei. Courtesy of the artist.

A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air, a four-person exhibition featuring works made through innovative intersections of science, aesthetics, and spirituality.

Artists Margaux Crump, Julia Krupa, Eileen Ryan, and Nelly-Eve Rajotte realize the potential of communicating directly and sharing authorship with the materials they use to make their art. Their artistic practices are intuitive and collaborative, enabling trees, stones, salt, and air, among other materials, to inform the creative process and the resulting potential meanings. Their methods include a cloud chamber, oral history, bio-sonification, LIDAR scanning, fumage, and saining.

The resulting works of art forge stronger interspecies connections and increased empathy and hope for the future. These innovative modes of working also raise questions: do the artists translate on behalf of the materials? How do speculation and anthropomorphism fit into these explorations of restoration, time, and scale? The four immersive installations engage viewers in dynamic aesthetic experiences that may linger beyond the gallery as a shift in perspective.

Curated by Shana Dumont Garr

Exhibition catalogue featuring essays by Shana Dumont Garr, Doctoral Candidate, and Martina Tanga, Ph.D.

SentientLand-Guide-webDownload

Artist Reception, A Sentient Land: Artistic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air
2026-01-21 17:00 - 19:00 | Media Art Gallery
Wednesday, January 21, 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston MA

Celebrate the opening of this groundbreaking four-person exhibition featuring artists Margaux Crump, Julia Krupa, Eileen Ryan, and Nelly-Eve Rajotte, who blur the boundaries between creator and material, science and art, human and more-than-human.

Experience immersive installations that invite direct dialogue with the natural world. Through innovative methods including bio-sonification, cloud chambers, LIDAR scanning, and ancient practices like fumage and saining, these artists share authorship with trees, stones, salt, and air itself.

This is your first opportunity to encounter works that challenge traditional notions of artistic agency and forge new pathways for interspecies connection. Witness how forests communicate at 220 hertz, how materials become collaborators, and how art can shift our relationship with the living world.

Meet the artists and the curator, Shana Dumont Garr, and explore questions that bridge aesthetics, ecology, and empathy: What happens when materials inform their own representation? How do we translate on behalf of the more-than-human?

Light refreshments will be served.

Exhibition runs January 21 – March 28, 2026Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 12–6 PM

Free and open to the public

image: Eileen Ryan

In Conversation: Nelly-Eve Rajotte and Margaux Crump
2026-01-22 12:00 - 13:00
Top: Margaux Crump, bottom: Nelly-Eve Rajotte.

In conjunction with A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air

Thursday, January 22, 2026 | 12–1 PMEmerson Contemporary25 Avery Street, Boston, MA 02111

Join artists Nelly-Eve Rajotte and Margaux Crump for an intimate conversation about their innovative practices of collaboration with the natural world.

Rajotte will discuss her work with bio-sonification and how she enables trees to generate their own sonic landscapes, including her installation Les arbres communiquent entre eux à 220 hertz, which translates forest communication into immersive audiovisual experience. Crump will share insights into her process of working with materials as co-creators, exploring how stones, beetles, and other elements inform the artistic outcome.

Together, they’ll explore questions at the heart of A Sentient Land: How do we share authorship with non-human collaborators? What does it mean to translate on behalf of materials? How can art deepen our empathy and connection across species?

This conversation offers a rare opportunity to hear directly from two artists reimagining the relationship between maker and material, challenging us to consider the agency of the more-than-human world.

Free and open to the publicNo registration required

In Conversation: Dr. Cher Krause Knight and Dr. Harriet F. Senie on their new book "Memorials Now"
2026-02-04 12:00 - 13:00
Wednesday, February 4, 2026, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

In Conversation: Dr. Cher Krause Knight and Dr. Harriet F. Senie will discuss with attendees 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.

Repair and Renew: A Visible Mending Workshop with Deepika Prakash
2026-03-17 17:30 - 19:30 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Tuesday, March 17, 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

Courtesy Deepika Prakash

Repair and Renew is a hands-on, slow-making workshop that invites participants to explore visible mending and meditative hand-sewing as both a practical skill and a reflective creative practice. Through simple stitches and intentional repair, participants will learn how caring for textiles can deepen our relationship with materials, reduce waste, and encourage a more mindful approach to consumption.

Set within the inspiring environment of the exhibition A Sentient Land, this workshop draws parallels between attention to materials and mending—both acts of care, patience, observation, and renewal. Participants will leave not only with a repaired garment, but with foundational hand-sewing skills and a renewed appreciation for sustainability, imperfection, and craft.

What to bring:

Small scissors

Jeans which need repair

We will provide:

Hand sewing needles and thread

Some sewing supplies to share

Example of Visible Mending Jeans, image Courtesy Deepika Prakash

About the Instructor: Deepika Prakash is a textile educator, community organizer, and founder of PatternReview.com, an international sewing community with over half a million members worldwide. She has taught Repair & Renew workshops for libraries and community organizations across Massachusetts for the past two years, covering topics such as visible and invisible mending, meditative hand-sewing, repairing sweaters and socks, hemming pants, and upcycling through hand embroidery.

Deepika is deeply passionate about sustainability and teaching practical life skills that empower people to extend the life of their belongings and reduce their environmental footprint. Her community work spans over a decade in Acton and Boxborough, including organizing cultural events, mentoring youth programs, and leading inclusive educational initiatives.

She has delivered keynote addresses at national sewing conferences, contributed to sewing publications and podcasts, and is the co-author of 1,000 Clever Sewing Shortcuts & Tips, with all royalties donated to charity. In 2021, she was honored as a Commonwealth Heroine by the State of Massachusetts for her work promoting equality and community engagement.

Messing With Language: A Multimodal Pop-Up Exhibition
2026-03-23 17:00 - 19:00 | Huret & Spector Gallery; Tufte Building
Exhibition Open March 23 – 25

Opening Reception: March 23, 5:00 – 7:00 PM

Mark Hernandez-Motaghy

Jihyun Lee

Gavin Miller

Brooke Toczylowski

Renato Verdugo

kathy wu

Language is deeply tied to culture, history, and our identity. It is a tool of communication and a carrier of meaning that takes infinite forms, functions, and uses. But language also carries implicit politics in how we name, represent, and categorize the world around us.

This exhibition brings together six artists working in the Northeast whose practices critically examine our perceptions of language, and, by extension, of power. Working across projection, sound, installation, translation, and code, their distinct creative processes explore alternative systems of communication and ways of knowing. Through these interventions, Mark Hernandez-Motaghy, Jihyun Lee, Gavin Miller, Brooke Toczylowski, Renato Verdugo and Kathy Wu pick apart linguistic systems, inviting new possibilities for expression.

Curated by Sophie Dodd

*Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP.

Contact contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit.

In Conversation: Julia Krupa and Eileen Ryan
2026-03-26 12:00 - 13:00
Thursday, March 26, 12–1 PM

Join us for a conversation with artists Julia Krupa and Eileen Ryan as they discuss their work in A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air.

Krupa and Ryan will explore their innovative artistic practices that blur the boundaries between creator and material. Through methods, including oral history and specimen collection, forge collaborative relationships with natural elements—inviting beetles and herbs to become active participants in the creative process.

This conversation delves into the intersections of science, aesthetics, and spirituality that shape their work. Together, these artists, who created immersive installations in A Sentient Land, address questions central to the exhibition: How do we translate on behalf of non-human materials? What role do speculation and anthropomorphism play in fostering interspecies connections? How can artistic practice generate greater empathy and hope for our shared future?

View the event here:

A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air is on view through March 28, 2026, at Emerson Contemporary, 25 Avery Street, Boston.

Artist Presention and Mindfulness Exercise with Julia Krupa
2026-03-26 17:30 - 19:15 | Emerson Contemporary
Julia Krupa, Herstory Paintings, installation view.

Artist Julia Krupa creates large-scale paintings with herbs and other plants she forages from rural Poland, where she is based. She is visiting Boston as one of the four artists in A Sentient Land: Artistic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air. Learn how Julia makes dyes with plants, along with her doctoral research informing this process. A fascinating part of her process involves interviewing elder herbalists based in the Carpathian region of Southern Poland. Her field work and research evolve into paintings and innovative, panoramic video documentation, both of which are on view in the space where the workshop takes place.

No prior skills or materials required to attend.

"GATHER"
2026-03-31 12:00 - 2026-04-08 17:00 | Huret & Spector Gallery; Tufte Building
Image Credit: Shannon Johnson, With one look you take me back to everything I used to be, 2025, from the series “Gathering Rosebuds,” archival inkjet print and ink on Rives BFK paper, 29 x 40 inches, courtesy of the artist.

Huret & Spector Gallery

March 31 – April 8, 2026

GATHER, a student-curated exhibition of photographers and lens-based artists exploring meaning, memory, connection, and community at a transformative moment.

Student Lightning Talks: Friday, April 3rd, Noon

Opening Reception: Friday, April 3rd, 5-7 pm

Photography and related media have the power to knit together people, places, and things, both literally and metaphorically. The present moment seems fraught with peril, and systems appear to be unravelling. Yet, at the same time, we have witnessed the power of unity, of people coming together to empower and support each other.From a thematic, regional open call, 14 emerging student-curators selected 14 emerging artists from New England, ranging from undergraduate to graduate students, emerging to more established, and several pieces per person to present a fuller picture. The resulting exhibition GATHER showcases a broad range of media and genres, including portrait and vernacular photography; printing and sewing on fabric; collaborative and woven imagery; video and 16mm film installation; and kinetic and multi-media sculpture — using analog, digital, and historical processes.

In the pieces selected for GATHER, we were delighted to see new themes emerge including communities and collection, identity and queerness, nostalgia and nature — all with an overall meditative and hopeful tone. In addition, the chosen artists represent a wide geographical range, gathering together artists from across Great Boston and New England. GATHER aims to weave these various threads together to make a larger whole and make a difference.

GATHER was curated by upper-level Emerson undergraduate students (listed below) as part of the seminar VM415, “Curating Contemporary Art,” taught and led by Leslie K. Brown, PhD. As a part of the class and the exhibition, students are responsible for all aspects of the exhibition, encompassing graphic designs, loan agreements, object checklists, educational didactics, social media assets, and press materials.

The Artists of GATHER:

“Alchemy of the Unknowns”:Lisa Tang Liu & James David Tabor (Stoughton, MA & Phoenix, AZ)

alina balseiro (Medford, MA)

Douglas Breault (Bridgewater, MA)

Haley Cooper (Abington, MA)

Beth D’Elia (Barnstable, MA)

Porter Gifford (Cambridge, MA)

Monica Hamilton (Salem, MA)

Jessie James (Medford, MA)

Shannon Johnson (Boston, MA)

Lee Kilpatrick (Arlington, MA)

Lisa Tang Liu (Stoughton, MA)

Jordan Marshall (Brookline, MA)

Michelle Schapiro (Roxbury, MA)

Francine Weiss (Newport, RI)

Emerging student-curators of GATHER: Abigail Andrews, Anjali Bakhru, Dylan Boyd, Sophie Dodd, Claire English, Julia Giammarco, Lang Han, Ruyi Huang, Kitty Lei, Daniel Petrylka, Arlo Rader, Jie Sun, Bianca Todini, Maya Wang.The students in Emerson Curatorial Practices represent majors from Media Arts Production (SOF), Writing, Literature & Publishing (WLP), and Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS), with minors as diverse as Art History, Curatorial Practice & Visual Culture, History, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, and Science.

* Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID are required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP. Contact mailto:contemporary@emerson.edu contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit. Hours are Monday through Friday, 12-5 pm.

RSVP for the Lightning Talks

RSVP for the Opening Reception

Student Lightning Talks for "GATHER"
2026-04-03 12:00 - 13:00 | Huret/Spector Gallery
Join us for this unique opportunity to hear student-curators deliver short talks about the artists of GATHER!

GATHER was curated by upper-level Emerson undergraduate students (listed below) as part of the seminar VM415 “Curating Contemporary Art,” taught and led by Leslie K. Brown, PhD. As a part of the class and the exhibition, students are responsible for all aspects of the exhibition, encompassing graphic designs, loan agreements, object checklists, educational didactics, social media assets, and press materials.

Emerging student-curators of GATHER: Abigail Andrews, Anjali Bakhru, Dylan Boyd, Sophie Dodd, Claire English, Julia Giammarco, Lang Han, Ruyi Huang, Kitty Lei, Daniel Petrylka, Arlo Rader, Jie Sun, Bianca Todini, Maya Wang. The students in Emerson Curatorial Practices represent majors from Media Arts Production (SOF), Writing, Literature & Publishing (WLP), and Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS), with minors as diverse as Art History, Curatorial Practice & Visual Culture, History, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, and Science.

RSVP for the Lightning Talks

Image: Beth D’Elia, 45 objects/Mum, 2025, from the series “Holding,” 10 x 8 inch cyanotypes on paper, 50 x 72 inches, courtesy of the artist

Opening Reception for the student-curated exhibition, GATHER
2026-04-03 17:00 - 19:00 | Huret & Spector Gallery; Tufte Building
Lisa Tang Liu, Analog Girl In A Digital World, 2023, from the series “Self-Reconstructed,” cyanotype print woven with inkjet print, 14 x 14 inches, courtesy of the artist

This opening reception celebrates the fourteen artists of GATHER, a photography exhibition curated by students of a seminar, Curating Contemporary Art,” taught by Dr. Leslie Brown.

In the pieces selected for GATHER, new themes emerge, including communities and collection, identity and queerness, nostalgia and nature — all with an overall meditative and hopeful tone. In addition, the chosen artists represent a wide geographical range, gathering together artists from across Great Boston and New England. GATHER aims to weave these various threads together to make a larger whole and make a difference.

* Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID are required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP. Contact mailto:contemporary@emerson.edu contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit. Hours are Monday through Friday, 12-5 pm.

RSVP for the Opening Reception

"Dis-placement / This-placement"
2026-04-16 12:00 - 17:00 | Huret Spector Gallery, Tufte Building
Dis-placement of home. This-placement of identity.

Dis-placement of identity. This-placement of meaning.

Dis-placement of meaning. This-placement of home.

“Dis-placement/This-placement” brings together nine works that explore the inseparable mechanics of loss and emergence. What is displaced does not leave a void; it makes room for what could not have appeared otherwise. The works do not resolve this loop; they inhabit it.

Opening reception: April 16, 5-7:30 pm.

Participating artists:

Bahar Hassani Dorabadi

Douglas Tarnovean

Duo “AlGol” (Aleksandra Borovikova, Gökçe Oraloğlu)

Fadime Icin

Mahdokht Molaei

Rebecca Williams

Yang Han

Yifei Chen

Yinyin Lu

* Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID are required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP. Contact mailto:contemporary@emerson.edu contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit. Hours are Monday through Friday, 12-5 pm.

Public Art Walking Tour with artists Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill, in Collaboration with MAAH
2026-04-18 13:00 - 15:00
Join artists Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill on a special artist-led walking tour of their two public art projects, Glimpses of Glapion and The Black Boston Dream Oracle in the Beacon Hill neighborhood.

Meeting Point: Boston Common Visitor’s Center

Join artists Elisa Hamilton and Clareese Hill on a special artist-led walking tour of their two public art projects Glimpses of Glapion and The Black Boston Dream Oracle, followed by a reception and Q&A with the artists at The Museum of African American History at 46 Joy Street, Boston. The walking tour will begin at Boston Common Visitors Center at 139 Tremont St, Boston, at 1:00pm, with the reception and Q&A at The Museum of African American History beginning at 2:15pm.Emerson Contemporary is thrilled to collaborate with the Museum of African American History (MAAH) for this program. After the walk, an artist Q&A session will take place at the African Meeting House at 46 Joy Street, Boston, MA.

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

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

What Distance Holds: An MFA Thesis Exhibition Featuring video installations by Sarasa Kikuchi and Rui Shen
2026-04-21 12:00 - 2026-05-10 18:00 | Media Art Gallery
Sarasa Kikuchi, 13 Hours Ahead, video stills, 2026

Sarasa Kikuchi and Rui Shen invite viewers into the contemplative textures of fluid identity, invisible labor, and immigrant guilt, exploring what remains amid absence with innovative aesthetics and immersive strategies that invite viewers to linger and feel.

View the trailer

Sarasa Kikuchi — 13 Hours Ahead

Six-channel spatial cinema

Thirteen hours separate a mother in Japan from her daughter in the US. In Kikuchi’s immersive six-channel installation, that gap becomes something one can feel in their body: two lives unfolding in parallel, connected, yet never quite touching. Through quiet domestic scenes, layered soundscapes, and a fractured screen arrangement, 13 Hours Ahead asks what it means to love someone you can only reach across time zones. It holds space not only for the immigrant who left, but for the parent left behind — a perspective rarely given its full weight.

Rui Shen, Elsewhere, installation view, 2026

Rui Shen – Elsewhere

Video Installation

Shen considers the continuous becoming of identity. The moment one tries to answer who they are, something shifts. Shen’s installation uses a single word, I, — the most personal word in any language — to meditate on the essence of becoming.

A fan stirs the suspended surface of horizontal screens upon which projections of “I” form and dissolve. They gather, briefly cohere, then scatter again. The quiet circuit demonstrates how alive it is, always moving, always just beyond the labels we reach for.

What Distance Holds Opening reception: April 22, 2026, 5 – 7 PM at 25 Avery Street, Boston

On view April 21 – May 10 · Tuesday through Sunday, 11am – 6pm

Free and open to the public.

Second Nature: A Photo Exhibition Presented by the Spring 2026 Photo Practicum Class
2026-04-27 12:00 - 2026-04-29 18:00 | Huret and Spector Gallery
This exhibition features photography by students in the Photo Practicum course who spent their semester working on one specific project. The resulting works encounter themes of time, growth, exploration, and a sense of self. Each project uniquely asks questions about the world we live in and how we occupy it. Students worked with analog and digital photography, along with bookmaking and mixed media, to create their various projects.Presented by Doris (Leping) Cao, Kaileigh Clark, Natalie He, Andrés Herrera, Yixin Hu, Danny Kennedy, Lilli Drescher, Grace Kinney, Ela Moss, Hammond (Shi) Qi, Kiki Tobor, Maya Wang, and Wendi Zhang.Opening reception: April 27, 6-9 PM.The exhibition can also be seen during gallery hours from 12-6 PM, April 27-April 29.

* Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID are required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP. Contact mailto:contemporary@emerson.edu contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit. Hours are Monday through Friday, 12-5 pm.

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

September 15 – December 12, 2026

Emerson Contemporary, Media Art Gallery, Boston, MA

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keiken
2027-01-26 12:00 - 2027-03-27 18:00
Keiken (経験), meaning “experience” in Japanese, is an artist collective that pioneers a collaborative approach to creating immersive worlds through embodied, empathetic technologies, and deep world-building. In using speculative and participatory storytelling, they blend science fiction, consciousness research, gaming, and emerging technologies to create experiences where the digital and physical merge, and where audiences step inside alternative realities.

Through these experiences, visitors encounter contemporary Japanese perspectives on some of the most pressing questions facing societies today. In their first U.S. presentation, Keiken’s artistic practice explores lived experience, perception, and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital and post-human era. Rather than accepting dominant narratives about the future, the collective creates immersive environments that allow audiences to role-play alternative forms of existence, test new social structures, and imagine different relationships between technology, ecology, and community.

Internationally recognized for their innovative artistic practice, Keiken received the Chanel Next Prize in 2021 and the Lumen Prize in 2024. Their work has been presented at major international venues including the Venice Architecture Biennale, MUNCH in Oslo, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, and the collective has served as artist-in-residence at Somerset House in London.
