2025 Max Wasserman Forum: Visions of Sustainability

A small body of water with perfectly circular edges sits amid neatly trimmed grass and trees. Inside the water are tall wetland grasses and floating moss. Overlayed text reads "2025 Max Wasserman Forum: Visions of Sustainability. April 5, 2025"

Visual identity: Studio ELLA for the 2025 Max Wasserman Forum; Artwork: Michael Wang, Shanghai Swamp, 2022

The 2025 Max Wasserman Forum: Visions of Sustainability brings together artists, scholars, and curators to discuss climate change within the arts and museum institutions.

There is an ever-growing sense of urgency from across disciplines to respond to the challenges of climate change and the current state of our environmental degradation. The role art plays in this dialogue is not separate from but, rather, in conversation with sustainable futures and climate justice imperatives. Artists have contributed to the climate change dialogue and responded to ecological challenges while questioning human impacts and looking directly at our precarious present to envision a more stable future.

Art not only conceives new ideas but also evokes empathy, provides a space for healing, advocates for community resilience and mobilization, and reframes complex and overwhelming scientific reports. This Forum will focus on rethinking how art and cultural organizations can operate, the disproportionate effects of climate change on those in vulnerable populations, and the transformative role art and artists take. What are the multifaceted impacts of environmental degradation? How can we cope with and understand the precarious present we live in? And how can we creatively reframe and effectively make change in our communities? These overarching drives and questions will be addressed by creative practitioners, expressing their visions of sustainability.

About The Max Wasserman Forum

The Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art was established in memory of Max Wasserman (MIT Class of 1935), a founding member of the Council for the Arts at MIT. This public Forum was endowed through the generosity of the late Jeanne Wasserman and addresses critical issues in contemporary art and culture through the participation of renowned scholars, artists, and arts professionals. The Forum is organized and presented by the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Saturday, April 5, 2025

Panel 1: Human Traces

How have artists navigated landscapes of extraction and ecologies of displacement? The practices represented on this panel consider environmental change within longer histories of colonialism, capitalism, and human effects on our physical environment. Looking at cultural systems and structures, they map the violence of enclosure and dispossession but also propose a renewal of ethical lifeways—paths to reparation, repatriation, and collective survival.

Panelists: Adam Khalil, Nida Sinnokrot, Lan Tuazon
Moderator: Sarah Montross

A group of four people standing in a row on stage in front of a projector screen.

2025 Max Wasserman Forum: Visions of Sustainability at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2025. Photo: Meg Elkinton

Panel 2: Advocacy Work

Hear from artists utilizing social practice and activism to seek out solutions for our changing landscape. These panelists have created multiple artist-run initiatives as a method to work within their communities. This panel will dive deeper into how participatory collaborations can establish new solutions, and how we might find new pathways through dialogue.

Panelists: Lee Pivnik, Jen de los Reyes, Sahar Qawasmi
Moderator: Janelle Knox-Hayes

Four people sitting in a line in bright red chairs on a stage in front of a projector screen. The person closest to the camera is speaking to the panel.

2025 Max Wasserman Forum: Visions of Sustainability at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2025. Photo: Meg Elkinton

Panel 3: Rethinking Cultural Systems

Taking a closer look into collections, cultural production, and cultural sites, these artistic practitioners ask us to reconsider the possible. Disrupting default operating systems and pulling at the threads of sourcing and resource allocation, they will explore provenance research, conservation methods, and collection policies in this panel, as well as museum and artistic practices and how they impact global industries and our planet’s degradation.

Panelists: Amy Balkin, Beatrice Glow, Michael Wang
Moderator: Stefanie Hessler

Four people sitting in a line in bright red chairs on a stage in front of a projector screen. The person furthest from the camera is speaking to the audience.

2025 Max Wasserman Forum: Visions of Sustainability at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2025. Photo: Meg Elkinton

Keynote Address: Torkwase Dyson

Torkwase Dyson (b. 1974, Chicago, Illinois) is a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Examining human geography and the history of Black spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with how space is perceived, imagined, and negotiated, particularly by Black and Brown bodies. Dyson has distilled a vocabulary of poetic forms to address the spaciousness of freedom and question what type of climates are born out of world-building.