This Way: Xaviera Simmons

Every two weeks throughout the summer, MIT List Visual Art Center has released a new artist-led experience. Each program consisted of an audio file, and a PDF text. You are welcome to choose either to engage with—they have often be the same content, and were 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 final edition of This Way, Xaviera Simmons prompts participants to picture and deconstruct their ideas of property. She asks participants to imagine themselves as property owners while probing us to reevaluate desires for ownership and attachments.

About the Artist

Xaviera Simmons engages her sweeping practice of photography, painting, video, sound, sculpture, and installation to explore the construction of landscape, language, and complex histories in the United States and its continuing push at Empire building on a global scale. Simmons’ work is exhibited nationally and internationally and belongs to major museum and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Deutsche Bank, New York; UBS, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York;The Agnes Gund Art Collection, New York; The De La Cruz Collection, Miami,The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Studio Museum in Harlem; ICAMiami; Perez Art Museum Miami; The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham; The High Museum, Atlanta; among others. Simmons received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She was a visiting lecturer and the inaugural 2019 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University and was awarded The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College in Spring 2020, among many honors. Simmons currently has works on view throughout the United States and Europe.

This Way: Xaviera Simmons Audio