Emerson Contemporary

No-No Boy: Live in Concert
2023-11-04 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | Pao Arts Center, 99 Albany Street Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
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Experience a multimedia musical performance from artist Julian Saporiti, known as No-No Boy, as part of the tour for his latest album Empire Electric. This newest release brings Asian American history to life through a uniquely inventive approach to storytelling. This program is organized by the PAO Art Center and supported by Emerson Contemporary.

Live Performance, Passage (2023) by Patricia Nguyễn and Fiona Ngô
2023-11-14 18:00 - 19:30 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
Still from “Collapse to Expand” by Patricia Nguyen

A work of experimental sound and movement, Passage explores how beauty and creativity emerge in the aftermath of war. The artists meditate upon the various thresholds and movements that happen for displaced peoples across the time and space of memory, everyday encounters of state violence, forced migration, and queer worldmaking.

This event is free and open to the public.

BECAUSE I COME FROM YOU
2023-12-04 08:00 - 2023-12-06 18:00
Maya Seri’s BFA thesis project BECAUSE I COME FROM YOU features photographs, video projection and sculptural installation, a project about home, identity and belonging. Seri’s perception of identity has changed through the making of this work. As she embarks in this period of transition as a 21-year-old, she realizes that she is no longer a girl. Feeling the departure from childhood, the artist can’t help but wonder, “Where is home?” She feels connected to Ohio, where the artist grew up, where she’s from. When in Boston, she feels a loss of identity and have to find herself over and over again. She asks: “Who am I? What am I? I am made of everything. I am made of the experiences I have had, the people I have met, and the places I have been.”

This project began as a journal entry to the artist’s younger self: “I just want to give you a hug. I want to see you smile and laugh. But that’s what I see in the mirror, isn’t it? I just don’t recognize it. You are me? I am you. I’m different, of course. I’m older. ‘Soiled’ by the world, as some would say. But I have you in me. I can be who I want to be because I come from you.”

About the ArtistMaya Seri’23 is a senior at Emerson College, is a passionate storyteller who uses the camera as a tool to connect with others and to understand herself and the world around her more thoroughly. Her work portrays themes of identity, girlhood, nostalgia, home, and connection.

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.

PURPOSEFULLY LOST
2023-12-11 12:00 - 2023-12-15 18:00 | Huret & Spector Gallery; Tufte Building
Presenting the Fall 2023 Photography Practicum: Purposefully Lost, a varied collection of reflections and expressions by Emerson artists in the BFA program.

Featuring exhibits by the following resident artists:Aquaholic by Kyra Badger

Urban Eden by Molly Berard

Shit Show by Maya Bergman

Starring… by Charlene Cheung

Cardboard Reality by Jose Benito Guevera

Concurrent by Yangyang Huang

Second Spine by Yiyi Lu

Double Take by Xiaoke Ma

empathic fluorescence by Mia Moore

Deinstitutionalised by Julia Tweedie

Traces Echo by Yuchun (Emily) Zhou

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.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed: all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext.
2024-01-23 12:00 - 2024-03-23 18:00
Kameelah Janan Rasheed, keeping count, Annotated, animation still, 2021-2023

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? Rasheed incorporates abstract shapes, gestures, and markings that border visual glossolalia and asemics. She presents these work alongside diagrammatic compositions of letters (Latin and Arabic) diacritics, and fragments of annotation.

In this temporary gathering of objects and ideas, Rasheed engages in intervals of self-study to explore her relationship to the widely respected poet Lucille Clifton’s legacy of spirit writing and other “wayward” methods of writing. With particular attention to Clifton’s poem “i was born with twelve fingers,” this exhibition considers the “powerful memories of ghosts” that emerge during these less traditional writing practices. Overall, the project explores writing constraints to generate more feral and intuitive writing. Rasheed writes, “Lucille Clifton’s spirit writing and self-description as a ‘two-headed woman’ piqued my interest in writing as a sacred, trickster, and fugitive ritual.”

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. This exhibition is accompanied by a lecture performance and a reader created under Rasheed’s publishing project Scratch Disks Full.

Exhibition Events:

Satellite workshop, John Hopkins University – If, Then: Technology and Poetics, Friday, January 19, 2024 [zoom] 1:30- 3:30pm. Location: Zoom

Artist Reception,Tuesday, January 23, 2024, 5-7pm. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA.

Writing With Word Games, a text score workshop, Friday, February 24, 2-4pm. Registration required. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA.

Lecture/Performance with Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Tuesday, February 27, 2024 at 6-7:30pm. Registration required. Location: Walker Building, Room 202. 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA.

Book Launch, Tuesday, February 27, 8pm. Attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the Scratch Disk Full publication. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA.

Curator Talk by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Saturday, March 23, 2024, 2-3pm. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA.

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.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed
2024-01-23 17:00 - 2024-03-23 19:00 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
Emerson Contemporary proudly presents our upcoming artist-in-residence, Kameelah Janan Rasheed.

all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language oran invitation to be feral hypertext, a multimedia solo exhibition featuring the visual artist is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from January 23 – March 23, 2024. Exhibition hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm.

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.

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.

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

Rhythm & Art: A Polyvocal Song of Blackness and Being
2024-02-26 12:00 - 2024-02-29 21:00 | Huret and Spector Gallery, 10 Boylston Place, 6th Floor, Boston, Massachusetts, 02116
In this exhibition, Rhythm & Art: A Polyvocal Song of Blackness and Being, local Black artists bring to the fore a wide range of topics: sisterhood, coming of age, nature as a family member, being of a diaspora, and more. Much like Blackness, this exhibition resists the boundaries that labels and language often attempt to enforce. Viewers are encouraged to question what “Black art” is and contemplate how the Black experience may contour and highlight the creative practice.

RECEPTION: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 29, 7-9PM

We hope that this multimedia exhibit pushes at the walls of this space and reaches far beyond them — much like the minds of the brilliant artists who created the work on display. Each artist dutifully crafted lyrical works, commenting on the human condition. On their own, each piece stands powerfully but woven together here the art becomes a Sunday choir singing a polyvocal song.

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
2024-04-12 16:00 - 2024-04-16 20:00
Water Memories

April 12-16, 2024

Zhiyao Ding, Mila Jafarnejad, Alexander Nezam, Nikita Potnis, Marcus Santos, Yangyanyun Tang, Siqi Xiong, Yishu Yu

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.

The works presented are the culminating projects from the Film and Media Arts graduate installation art course “Space, Place, Image, Sound.”

————

Huret and Spector Gallery, Tufte Building, 7th Floor.

Public Hours: Friday, April 12, 4-8pm, Saturday, April 13, 4-8pm, Sunday, April 14, 4-8pm, Monday, closed (holiday), Tuesday April 16, 12-8pm. Reception 5-7pm

Location: Huret and Spector Gallery, Tufte Building, 10 Boylston place. Please enter on the 7th Floor. RSVP required for non-Emerson guests.

SURROUNDING: Anny Dai, Yue Hua, and Tomás Orrego
2024-04-16 12:00 - 2024-05-12 18:00
Composite image from left to right: Anny Dai, Yue Hua and Tomás Orrego

SURROUNDING, an MFA in Film and Media Arts thesis exhibition explores sound, visuality, and touch through compelling multi-channel video and sculptural installations by visual artists and filmmakers Anny Dai ‘24, Yue Hua ‘24, and Tomás Orrego ’24.

SURROUNDING serves as a sensory testament to the lived experiences and reflections of three emerging artists. Dai’s Reveries Echo of Touch is an immersive, multi-sensory installation that challenges viewers to awaken their tactile sense while interacting with the piece. This interactive artwork combines sculptural objects, video projections, live video feed, and soundscapes created by the audience’s participation. Hua’s 16mm film installation Cine-labyrinth works to understand a sense of self through landscape projections and poetry. Mirroring the physical journey through the labyrinth, the entwining 16mm images induce a dream-like trance. In Tolerances of the human face Orrego explores absurdism through a single channel video installation of his film Fever. Entirely shot on a soundstage, the piece utilizes practical effects and a hyper stylized aesthetic that embraces artificiality.

Artist talks will take place during the Emerson’s Visual Media Art Department “Open House” on Tuesday, April 30 at 6 p.m., which is open to the public.

Please note: after May 2, 2024 gallery will be open by appointment and for special events. Artist talks will take place during the Emerson Visual Media Art Open House on Tuesday, April 30 from 6 – 7 p.m.

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.

Face to Face: Photo Practicum
2024-04-23 12:00 - 2024-04-30 19:00 | Huret And Spector Gallery, Tufte Building
An exhibition featuring student work from the photo practicum course.

TIANYUN CHEN, SOPHIA CHIARAMIDA, YIFAN DU, LIZ FARIAS, ILANA GROLLMAN, PAIGE TRACEY-KAISER, ARTHUR LI, JENNIFER WAI YI SHING, RACHEL TARBY, WILLOW TORRES, DEYI ZENG, YIZHANG ZHANG .

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.

I Thought I Saw You Watching: Emerson's GBFA 2024 Artist's Showcase
2024-08-13 00:00 - 2024-08-17 23:59 | Huret & Spector Gallery; Tufte Building
Emerson College is proud to present a series of installations, crafted by the school’s Global BFA cohort of 2024. Installed in our Huret & Spector gallery space, the show spans one week, and features the following artists with their work:

Still from A recorded conversation between electricity pylons, translated for human understanding by Kelsey Cohn

A recorded conversation between electricity pylons, translated for human understanding

by Kelsey Cohn Three-channel colour projection, HD video, sound, 60 min loop.A recorded conversation between electricity pylons transcodes a conversation between two solitary pylon towers, left standing together in a distant, post-human future. Through their casual musings on life, nature, time, and cosmology, the audience is invited to reﬂect on existence from a structuralist vantage point.

Across three projections, the pylons tower over an empty landscape. Here, they seem more like monuments than infrastructure, their ability to communicate reframing them as angelic messengers rather than utility structures. As the pylons pass the time reﬂecting on ecological curiosities and ancient discoveries, their characterization and banter invites an empathetic humor.

At once spiritual, scientiﬁc, historical, and whimsical, the work invites a universal reﬂection on our origins and place in the ecological sphere. From their divine point of view above the landscape and history, the pylons alone notice the wires that link our lives deeply to the world around us.

The Normandy Tree Tape

by Roz Pederson Single channel display on CRT monitor, 11minCombining documentary and fiction, The Normandy Tree Tape exists in the oft forgotten space between story and history, real and unreal. It challenges our preconceived notions of true and false and allows for a shift in perspective that is rarely considered. Indeed the tension between viewpoints provides the driving force of the piece. It bridges science and mythology, knowable and unknowable.

While clearing land in an old growth forest in Normandy, workers discovered a VHS tape stuck in the roots of a fell tree. When this tape was played back, they discovered a unique alteration to it. The tape originally was a home recording of a TV documentary, but through methods currently being studied by scientists, some of the data on the tape was replaced with narration from the forest. After extensive restoration, Roz Pederson and her team are excited to present the first public exhibition of The Normandy Tree Tape.

This is the myth The Normandy Tree Tape creates, a story somewhere between folklore, scientific discovery, and tourist trap. The installation serves to convince you of this myth. This piece was born from the idea that it is human nature to assume all people to have a set of experiences more or less similar to ours. Through communication, we learn ways in which this is and isn’t the case, and approximate the innate human experience. There may be, however, sensations so human they become difficult or impossible to identify because the opposite has never been known.

The work imagines what exists beyond the limits of modern communication, what the sensory experience of the inhuman may be and stands against the truth and for the complete subjectivity of all things.

Inside the Screen by Lisa Siera

Inside the Screen

by Lisa SieraLive video, sculpture, light, sound, 1:40Inside the Screen is a spatial interpretation of the world inside the phone screen. It compares the social design created in the digital world to the physical system of the panopticon jail. After years of experience in front of and behind the camera, the artist examined the intertwined dynamics between cameras, eyes, bodies, and screens. A panopticon originally devised by Jeremy Bentham is a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed.

One-Way Street by Sid Tian Shi

One-Way Street

by Sid Tian Shi Single channel color projection with videos and soundThis project is an interactive video installation where the audiences take a walk and play around the urban landscapes of Paris. During this journey, every anecdote, signs and spectacle of the streets are listed up and collected as an appendix to it.

It consists of one main screen showing the landscapes, and a supplement screen showing the commentary images and texts. Within the screening area, the audience can interact with the pace of this journey by stepping into sections in the space, which will be detected by the monitor camera installed to the ceiling.

The journey starts with a call between two friends living in Paris. A calls B, saying that he is gonna take a walk from his home to B’s. After that call, the audience is on a street with A, traveling through the route from Italy 13 to Pére Lachaise. We have no way of knowing about A’s past or his present life. It’s just that we are viewing the city through his scope. He is curious, loves to observe, and always looking around, instead of finishing this journey which leads us to the city fragments and comments we then see.

The panopticon allows a watchman to observe occupants without the occupants knowing whether or not they are being watched. The installation’s structure is inspired by the guard tower(the central well) and draws attention to how we are illusioned to hold power over our digital selves through our phones, essentially becoming the prisoners while thinking we are the watchmen.

Artist Reception, Monday August 12th, 5-7:30pm.

Location: 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. Please note: visitor registration and ID required for visitors without Emerson Badge.

I have asked myself: "Can a sentence be haunted? And if so, by what?"
2024-09-09 12:00 - 2024-11-30 19:00 | Boston Commons, 139 Tremont St, Boston, MA, Boston, 02111, United States
By Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Emerson Contemporary has commissioned a public art campaign by Kameelah Jana Rasheed where she responds to Boston’s memorial landscape exploring the layered histories of the Boston Common. Rasheed will expand her textual practice by animating the typographical history of this region to create a library of typefaces – fragments (letters, textures) of language. These fragments will be interwoven or sampled into digital designs and animated poems and displayed on digital signage situated around Emerson’s campus.

Kameelah Rasheed

Rasheed studies, documents, annotates, and creates texts. Beyond the content, she is interested in the materiality of text and language across different substrates (or compositional fields), or how text shows up across geological features, physical architecture, and in printed matter.

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.

Emerson Contemporary Awarded $80,000 Grant From The Andy Warhol Foundation
2024-10-22 00:00 - 23:59 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
Emerson Contemporary is excited to have received a generous $80,000 grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in support of our exhibitions and programming over the next two years. This contribution will have a profound impact on the gallery’s ability to present innovative and engaging visual art experiences to our community and fully support the artists we are exhibiting and inviting to our campus.

﻿Over the past five years, under the leadership of Chair of Contemporary Art and Distinguished Curator in Residence, Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Emerson Contemporary has developed a “teaching gallery” with an emphasis on presenting mid-career artists with time-based media practices, including video and performance and those that explore emerging technologies such as augmented, virtual, and extended reality (AR/VR/XR), the only of its kind in New England.

Emerson Contemporary amplifies the voices of living artists who broaden how we understand our present moment and help us reimagine what is possible. We encourage experimentation, commission new works, and support artistic research through technological support and mentorship. In support of this mission, they actively seek to create opportunities for working artists to engage with new technologies, software tools, creative technologists, and the faculty expertise on our campus that are otherwise not accessible.

In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The foundation manages a dynamic grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the foundation has given nearly $300 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations across the country and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.

This grant will enable us to bring a range of exhibitions featuring both emerging and established artists, foster critical dialogue through public programming, and provide valuable educational opportunities for our audience. Says Bradbury, “The Foundation puts visual art and artists at the center of their work. Their commitment to the arts is inspiring, and we are honored to be among the recipients of their support. We look forward to the exciting and impactful work made possible by this grant.”
