Exhibition Highlights

Photo of a black and white video projection and three chairs. Projection features a still of two children that appear to fall away from one another.

Leslie Thornton, Peggy & Fred in Hell: Folding, 1983–2015. 16mm film and video transferred to HD video, black and white, color, sound, 95 min. Installation view: Leslie Thornton: Begin Again, Again at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2021. Photo by Julia Featheringill.

This fiscal year, we reopened our doors to the public and presented seven exhibitions.

Student Lending Art Program Exhibition and Lottery

August 27–September 5, 2021

Two visitors look at artwork in frames during the Student Lending Art Program at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

List Projects 23: Andrew Norman Wilson

October 22, 2021–February 13, 2022

“Drawing techniques from documentary, montage, animation, and big-budget Hollywood, the works [in List Projects 23: Andrew Norman Wilson] operate in a cinematic idiom that in length and sensory overload feel vaguely hostile to the traditional gallery setting, but their understated criticality profits from the framing the venue provides.”  —Jared Quinton for Art Agenda Reviews

A dimly lit gallery space includes two video screens, one closer to the forefront on the left and one in the back right wall. A projector and a bench are also shown.

Leslie Thornton: Begin Again, Again

October 22, 2021–February 13, 2022

“This solo exhibition traces Leslie Thornoton’s work from some of her earliest pieces in the mid 1970’s up until the present day. One of the defining features of Leslie’s work is her use of montage and her way of treating some of her own footage as though it were found footage and the effect is one that is often characterized as alienation.”
—Curator Natalie Bell

Publication

From left to right, a television set featuring a woman in black and white, a monitor featuring a young girl with lipstick smeared over her lips, and a projector and projection screen with black and white bedsheets.

Sreshta Rit Premnath: Grave/Grove

October 22, 2021–February 13, 2022

“We immigrants often inhabit the periphery of society and are unable to actively participate in the political process, yet we make lives and livelihoods in these margins, and from that vantage reimagine what our newly adopted home can be. Grave/Grove is a way of thinking these two ideas—social death and political possibility—together."  
—Sreshta Rit Premnath as told to Murtaza Vali in Artforum

A gallery at the MIT List Visual Arts Center features sculptures consisting of white plaster slumps, aluminum sheets, weeds, and red glowing signs on the walls.

List Projects 24: Sharona Franklin

March 25–June 5, 2022

“This poetic, powerful gesture, like the exhibition as a whole, considers the paradoxical cycles of harm and healing that institutions proffer, pondering the principles of so-called advancement." —Leah Triplett Harrington for Hyperallergic

Two white church pews with text on sides and backs frame a sculpture of a wicker casket cast in gelatin. Tan hospital curtains wrap the interior of the gallery and two small sculptures hang on the wall where curtains part.

Matthew Angelo Harrison: Robota

March 25–July 24, 2022

“Harrison’s material response, unmistakably deadening, is elegant critique, beating [Constantin] Brancusi at his own chilly formalist game. Not content to let it lie, the artist has carved into the block with a mechanical router, gouging so deep in spots as to expose raw wood. I wondered if this was gilding the lily. The gesture cranks somber, implicit disdain—at colonial violence, and the blithe display of its plunder—into explicit rage.” —Murray Whyte for the Boston Globe

Publication

A sculpture of a wooden head in side a block of clear resin on a metal stand with other sculptures in the background.

Raymond Boisjoly: The Explanatory Void

March 25–July 24, 2022

“My interest in text really came from trying to figure out ways in which works could somehow articulate their own premises so wanting works that somehow spoke to their reason for being. I wanted something that was deliberately convoluted and oblique and sort of confusing.” —Raymond Boisjoly

Installation view featuring three inkjet prints on vinyl staggered on top of each other on the left and two prints staggered side by side on the right.