The MIT List Visual Arts Center, MIT’s contemporary art museum, is pleased to share its upcoming roster of exhibitions. Artists presented September 2018 through July 2019 include Delia Gonzalez, Tony Conrad, Mary Helena Clark, Kapwani Kiwanga, Kathleen Ryan, and Ericka Beckman.
Student Lending Art Program Exhibition and Lottery
September 4-16, 2018
This annual exhibition features over 600 works of art from the List Center’s Student Lending Collection, a program that provides MIT students the opportunity to borrow, appreciate, and live with a museum quality work of original art for the academic year. Although only MIT students are allowed to borrow artwork, the exhibition is open to the general public. Recent acquisitions to the collection include work by such artists as Edgar Arceneaux, Rosa Barba, Nicole Eisenman, Cerith Wyn Evans, Annette Kelm, Eva Koťátková’, Steve Locke, Barry McGee, Charlotte Moth, Albrecht Schnider, Myron Stout, and Rosemarie Trockel.
List Projects: Delia Gonzalez
On view through September 30, 2018
Miami-born, Athens-based artist Delia Gonzalez works in drawing, sculpture, music, film, dance, and performance. She draws inspiration from a broad range of sources including surrealism, Greek mythology, and different mystical traditions. In her most recent project, The Last Days of Pompeii (2017), the destruction of the titular ancient city serves as a vehicle for a fantastical reflection on a post-apocalyptic future conceived against the backdrop of the contemporary political landscapes of her native country and her recently adopted place of residence (earlier, Gonzalez lived in Berlin for a decade). The exhibition at the List Center draws from this body of work and presents a series of intricate drawings, as well as a light sculpture, an architectural intervention, and a sound work.
Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective
October 18, 2018–January 6, 2019
Hayden, Reference, and Bakalar Galleries
Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective, the first large-scale museum survey devoted to artworks Conrad presented in museum and gallery settings, is part of an ongoing reappraisal of his creative achievement. Inspired by the spoken, written, and performed introductions Conrad regularly used to help frame screenings and presentations of his works, it shows Conrad to be an unparalleled innovator in the mediums of painting, sculpture, film, video, performance, and installation.
Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective is organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. The exhibition has been made possible through the generosity of Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, and Greene Naftali, New York.
The Cambridge presentation is organized by Henriette Huldisch, Director of Exhibitions & Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. The exhibition is also on view at the Carpenter Center (October 18–December 30, 2018).
List Projects: Mary Helena Clark
January 8–February 10, 2019
Bakalar Gallery
Mary Helena Clark (b 1983, South Carolina, United States) works in film, video, and installation, manipulating traditional narrative conventions in cinema to render dissociative states and surreal environments. Her work uses the language of collage to explore ideas around disembodiment, hybridity, and sensation. Her films shift seamlessly between perspectives, both implicating and keeping the viewer off balance. Clark uses a poetics that can feel foreboding, a product of balancing affect and reason, hinting at a deeper coded logic.
Kapwani Kiwanga
February 8-April 21, 2019
Kapwani Kiwanga (b 1978, Hamilton, Canada) is a Paris-based artist who traces historical narratives, excavating and considering the global impact of colonialism and how it permeates contemporary culture. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalized or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Materiality and the economics of material production is a recurring element in Kiwanga’s work, pointing to exploitation and how it manifests between politics and culture.
Kathleen Ryan
February 8–April 21, 2019
Reference Gallery
Kathleen Ryan (b. 1984, Santa Monica) lives and works in New York. Her work in sculpture is distinguished by her virtuosic grasp of materials, ranging from poured concrete, cast iron, carved marble, and precious stones, to found objects such as granite machine-mount blocks or bowling balls. Ryan engages with formal sculptural concerns such as volume, weight, pressure, balance, and line, while subtly alluding to the materials’ historical and economic underpinnings, along with frequent references to the human body and classical motifs. Many of her recent works were cast at a nearly defunct iron foundry in Pennsylvania, and in part engage with a declining manufacturing industry that has shaped the economic and social trajectory of communities across the United States. The List Center exhibition is her North American institutional premiere and will include a number of new works.
Ericka Beckman
May 24—July 28, 2019
Hayden and Reference Galleries
Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman has forged a signature visual language in film, video, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous backdrops, her moving image works are structured according to the logic of child’s play, games, folklore, or fairy tales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colors. Throughout her work, Beckman engages profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power and control. Emerging out of the fertile environment of CalArts in the 1970s, Beckman developed the cornerstones of her vocabulary in her early Super-8 films, which are distinguished by their energetic pacing, the performers’ repetitive, ritualistic actions, deceptively simple special effects, and chanted and percussive soundtracks. The List Center exhibition will include selected works spanning thirty years of Beckman’s career, providing the first opportunity to more fully survey her contribution in a US museum.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene Demoulas & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Jane & Neil Pappalardo, Cynthia & John Reed, and Terry & Rick Stone. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR. Additional funding for List Projects was also provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Council for the Arts at MIT, Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT, the MIT School of Architecture + Planning, the Mass Cultural Council, and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
