Musician Julian Saporiti approaches refugee storytelling with compassion
2023-12-15 08:00 - 2023-12-16 17:00 (America/New_York)
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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The M.F.A Thesis Shows: Christopher Lee & Asma Khoshmehr
2024-12-02 00:00 - 2024-12-05 23:59 | Huret And Spector Gallery, Tufte Building
Emerson’s Master’s in Fine Arts candidates, Christopher Lee and Asma Khoshmehr share deeply personal stories of their family’s past, interpreted through new media.

This exhibition will have a reception on December 5th from 6-8pm.

Memory Lost by Christopher Lee

Memory Lost is a multimedia installation that probes the fragile nature of human memory through the lens of AI generated media. Drawing inspiration from the artist’s personal experience witnessing his grandfather’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease, this work explores the parallels between artificial intelligence and human cognition. The installation revisits formative moments from the artist’s life from childhood through adulthood, using AI to reconstruct and reinterpret these memories.

By highlighting the biases and limitations of both AI and human recollection, the piece invites viewers to contemplate the ephemeral quality of our lived experiences. Memory Lost serves as a poignant meditation on mortality, loss, and the imperfect mechanisms through which we preserve and recall our past, challenging us to consider the essence of what makes us human.

Throughout his artistic journey, Chris has been driven by an innate curiosity to acquire new knowledge, leading him to constantly push the boundaries of his creative toolkit. Early in life he explored drawing and painting before developing a deep affinity for music. By high school Chris had built up a home studio filled with guitars, synthesizers, and other gadgets. As an adult, Chris briefly explored a business career before realizing his true calling lay in creative work.

He enrolled in Emerson College’s Film & Media Art program to work with other artists and to find a personal and professional outlet for his creativity. Since then, Chris has contributed to dozens of student and independent projects, specializing in location sound recording, sound design, and mixing. His personal work leverages diverse digital technologies, reflecting his evolution from a young artist to a versatile multimedia professional adept at integrating multiple artistic disciplines.

Act.No.06: 1001 Nights in Zanzibar by Asma Khoshmehr

Act.No.06: 1001 Nights in Zanzibar is a multimedia installation that uncovers the silenced stories of forced child marriages and political persecution following the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964. The work explores a 1971 presidential decree that allowed officials to forcibly marry underage girls, including many women in the artist’s family. These policies led to deportation, imprisonment, confiscation of family properties, and decades of silence about the trauma endured. Asma, the first in her generation to uncover this hidden history, conducted years of research, discovering the secret stories of many women in her family impacted by these events. She traveled across Tanzania, Kenya, Oman, UAE, and Iran to gather testimonies, family documents, and archival records, piecing together her family’s survival through forced marriages, captivity, and eventual escape.Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights and Scheherazade’s storytelling to transform a vengeful king into a compassionate leader, Asma’s project reflects her hope to mirror Scheherazade’s journey. It combines archival materials, 3D laser scans, virtual reality experiences, and video art, exploring how storytelling can confront power and inspire transformation. By sharing these stories, this project reflects on how Scheherazade used storytelling to change a vengeful king, drawing attention to the tyrants of today who continue to use women’s bodies as tools of revenge in war and revolution.Asma Khoshmehr is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work combines immersive storytelling, documentary filmmaking, and new media. With a BFA in Performing Arts and currently pursuing an MFA with a focus on new media, her practice draws deeply from her East African and Middle Eastern heritage, exploring themes of generational trauma, forced displacement, and political sexual violence.

Asma’s work has earned recognition through prestigious awards and residencies, including the MacDowell Fellowship, the MASS MoCA, Andrew Freedman Home (AFH), and the ON::VIEW Artist Residency. She has also received the Carole Fielding Grant from the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) and the Virgin Unite Grant. Her international journey includes a scholarship to study Beijing Opera at the Shanghai Theater Academy and mythology at Sanskriti Kendra in India.

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

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

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

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

What You Are I Was, What I Am You Will Be
2024-12-09 00:00 - 2024-12-13 23:59 | Huret And Spector Gallery, Tufte Building
The B.F.A Photo Practicum

Emerson’s College presents the Fall 2024 Photo Practicum, What You Are I Was, What I Am You Will Be.

Featuring works by the following artists:Madison BrownTianyun Chen Xinzhu DongMadeleine Feldman Ilana Grollman Elie Largura Arthur Li Rian NelsonBianca Pupo Anna Schoenmann, Willow Torres Madla Walsh

This exhibition will have a reception on December 9th from 6-8pm at the Emerson College Huret & Spector Gallery.

Call for Artists
2025-01-10 08:00 - 2025-02-10 23:59
CALL FOR WORK 2025 Regional Media Art Showcase

This exhibition aims to present a snapshot of current visual art culture, with a focus on innovative media art installation through the work of artists based in New England. Juried by Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Assistant Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr, and Artist and Curator Allison Maria Rodriguez.

DEADLINE for submissions is Monday, February 10, midnight. Selected artists will be notified by April 2, 2025 and will receive a $1,000 artist fee as a stipend and to help offset any exhibition production costs. APPLICATION FORM

﻿DESCRIPTION

New England Regional Media Art Showcase, a group exhibition, will feature screen-reliant and/or lens reliant artwork by artists based throughout New England. Intended to enable practitioners at every stage of their career to exhibit a signiﬁcant aspect of their practice, and/or to expand their existing practice into new media. Drawing upon the gallery’s state-of-the art equipment, specialized media exhibit space and staﬀ expertise, the selections will prioritize varied, emergent and innovative installation and display methodologies.

The exhibition will be on view at the Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA, July 29 – October 4, 2025. Installation dates: July 14-25, 2025.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We are particularly interested in moving image art and art using emergent technologies including, but not limited to, Installations (Interactive and non-interactive), Projections, Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality Environments, Multimedia Performance, Single Channel Video and Animation, and Experimental works.

Artists are welcome to submit up to 3 works of art for consideration. Submission materials could include photos, previous installation views, written descriptions, sketches, mock ups, web links, trailers and/or videos. Gallery has an extensive digital equipment inventory available for use including high resolution projectors, iPads, computers, monitors, screens etc.

SUBMISSION CRITERIA

Artists must currently live in New England (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) and be able to drop off and pick up the selected works and/or specialized equipment to the gallery if needed. Gallery is not able to pay for shipping. Selected artist will receive a $1,000 participation stipend. APPLICATION FORM

**Please note there are no fees required to submit work for consideration or to participate.
