This Way: Heather Kapplow

Every two weeks throughout the summer, MIT List Visual Art Center will release a new artist-led experience. Each program consists of an audio file, and a PDF text. You are welcome to choose either to engage with—they will often be the same content, and are designed to offer different but comparable entry points, depending on whether you prefer to read or listen as you begin your experience or walk. An audio transcript can also be found below, and the PDF is screen-reader enabled.

For this edition of This Way, Heather Kapplow invites us to participate in A Walk in Search of Contradiction. With this prompt, take notice of opposition and conflicts that shape our daily environments. Old and new, rigid and soft, Kapplow’s walk prompts participants to take note of primary characteristics of a place and the elements that undermine them.

About the Artist

Heather Kapplow creates participatory experiences that elicit unexpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio, and video. Kapplow has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, and has had work commissioned for galleries, film and performance festivals within the USA and internationally. 

As a part of ensemble projects, Kapplow has performed at the AroS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (DK), Guggenheim Museum (US), Institute of Contemporary Art (US), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (US), Museo Arte Moderno (MX), Museum of Fine Arts Boston (US), and the Queens Museum (US); and within works by La Pocha Nostra/Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Paul Ramirez Jonas, and On Kawara. Kapplow is a member of two artist-groups that produce work collectively, Flux Factory and Mobius Artists Group, and an artistic affiliate of MetaLAB at Harvard University. 

In addition to practicing art, Kapplow writes about it for Hyperallergic and others; teaches it at Montserrat College of Art; and has just co-authored an arts-heavy guidebook to Boston for Emons-Verlag GmbH, available May 2021 in the USA.

This Way: Heather Kapplow