In Conversation: Artists Margaux Crump and Ash Eliza Williams **on ZOOM**
2025-11-06 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
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

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, Jennifer Hall, Ph.D., and Martina Tanga, Ph.D.

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

Meeting Point: Boston Common Visitor’s Center

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

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