2025 Max Wasserman Forum: Visions of Sustainability

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. 

Panel 1

Human Traces
April 5, 10:30–11:45 AM

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

Lunch Break

12:00–1:00 PM

Panel 2

Advocacy Work
April 5, 1:00–2:15 PM

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

Panel 3

Rethinking Cultural Systems
April 5, 2:45–4:15 PM

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

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

April 5, 4:30–5:30 PM 
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.

Dyson has had solo exhibitions and installations at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago; Hall Art Foundation, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Germany; Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia; Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont; and the Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine Galleries, London. She has also participated in group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; and Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York. Her work was also presented at the 13th Shanghai Biennale. 

Speakers:

Amy Balkin
Amy Balkin is an artist whose works propose alternatives for conceiving the public domain outside current legal and discursive systems, addressing property relations, environmental justice, and equity in the context of climate change. Her work and collaborations include A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting, a climate-change archive of the future anterior; clean-air park Public Smog; and The Atmosphere, A Guide, which traces some human influences on the sky. Her work has been exhibited in Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; and dOCUMENTA (13); and published in Decolonizing Nature (Sternberg), Materiality (Whitechapel/MIT), and Critical Landscapes (UC Press). She lives in San Francisco.

Beatrice Glow
Beatrice Glow is an American multidisciplinary artist of Taiwanese heritage whose practice includes examinations of archives and collaboration with culture bearers and researchers in the creation of sculpture, installations, textiles, emerging media, and olfactory experiences to envision a more just and thriving world guided by history. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the New York Historical and Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland. Her work has been supported by Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Yale-NUS College, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, the Fulbright Program, and many more.

Stefanie Hessler
Stefanie Hessler is the Director of the Swiss Institute (SI) in New York. Her work centers artists and ideas through new commissions, transdisciplinary collaborations, and experimental formats. At SI, Hessler co-curated Spora, which invited artists to transform the institution through “environmental institutional critique,” solo shows by Raven Chacon, Ali Cherri, and Lap-See Lam, as well as the East Village–wide exhibition Energies. Other recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Elevation 1049: Energies, Gstaad, Switzerland; Counterpublic 2026, St. Louis, Missouri; Parcours, Art Basel; Sex Ecologies, Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway; the 17th Momenta Biennale, Montreal; Rising Tides, Gropius Bau, Berlin; Joan Jonas, Ocean Space, Venice; and the 6th Athens Biennale. Hessler is the author of Prospecting Ocean (MIT Press) and has edited over a dozen volumes. She was named among Apollo’s “40 under 40” and ArtReview’s “Power 100.”

Adam Khalil
Adam Khalil, a member of the Ojibway tribe, is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, whose practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of image-making through humor, relation, and transgression. Khalil is a core contributor to New Red Order and a cofounder of COUSINS Collective. Khalil’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Sundance Film Festival; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; Lincoln Center, New York; Tate Modern, London; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Toronto Biennial 2019; and the Whitney Biennial 2019, among others. Khalil is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, including a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts 2021, Creative Capital Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Cinereach, and the Gates Millennium Scholarship.

Janelle Knox-Hayes
Janelle Knox-Hayes is Professor of Economic Geography and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT, and Director of the Resilient Communities Lab. Her research focuses on the governance of climate mitigation and adaptation and systems to build socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental resilience for communities. Her latest projects examine how community engagement and the integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge can strengthen climate assessments and planning and the effects of compound climate risks on vulnerable and frontline populations within urban centers, and she develops frameworks and toolkits for the community-based co-design of renewable energy systems. Knox-Hayes is particularly interested in understanding how values shape planning and decision-making across a variety of scales. 

Sarah Montross
Sarah Montross is Museum Director and Chief Curator of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, a contemporary sculpture park and museum, which is part of The Trustees, a non-profit land conservation and preservation organization. Montross directs the arts program at deCordova with a focus on environment, land, and climate, and works with curators and artists on land-based commissions across Massachusetts. She is recognized for her exhibitions and publications, including Jeffrey Gibson: INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE (2022) and Visionary New England (2021), and for new commissions and outdoor installations, such as Hugh Hayden’s Huff and A Puff (2023). She earned her Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Art at New York University.

Lee Pivnik
Lee Pivnik is an artist living in Miami, Florida. In 2018, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Sculpture. Working across disciplines, he takes inspiration from living systems and other species to imagine a future based on mutualistic relationships instead of extractive economies. His sculptures, drawings, and installations create a visual language for ecological entanglement, referencing fungal networks, epiphytic plants, and emergent animal architectures that inhabit South Florida. Pivnik founded and co-directs the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), a collaborative organism that has worked with over 150 different artists to produce artworks and interdisciplinary programming. 

Pivnik has presented solo exhibitions with Dalé Zine, Miami; Biosphere 2, Oracle, Arizona; YoungArts, Miami; and Hi-Lo Press, Atlanta, Georgia. He has been awarded the Knight Arts Challenge Awards in 2019 and 2021. At IQECO, Pivnik has presented projects with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the United Nations – ART 2030, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau, Germany; the Medellín Museum of Modern Art, Colombia; Prairie, Chicago, Illinois; and Bas Fisher Invitational, Miami, among others. 

Sahar Qawasmi 
Sahar Qawasmi is an architect, restorer, cultural organizer, and forager, committed to the conservation of land, restoration of architectural heritage, and preservation of Palestine's cultural histories as testaments of creative collective resilience. Sahar cofounded Sakiya – Art | Science | Agriculture with Nida Sinnokrot; a progressive academy located on a hillside of deep architectural and natural histories in Ein Qiniya, Ramallah, Palestine, where artists, farmers, activists, community members, and students rethink political and social agency and the space of the commons. There, through collective unlearning and experimentation, they explore architectural and cultural practices outside of capitalist, national, and institutional structures to reimagine collective liberation. 

Jen de los Reyes
Jen de los Reyes is an artist, educator, writer, and community arts organizer. With roots in the Riot grrrl and DIY music scenes, her practice incorporates pedagogical, ecological, and organizational methodologies. She founded and directed Open Engagement, an international conference on socially engaged art that was active from 2007 until 2019. She worked within Portland State University from 2008 to 2014 to establish the Art and Social Practice MFA program with a curriculum focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. Following that, Reyes was the Associate Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she taught in the departments of Art and Museum and Exhibition Studies. 

Her collaborative work and practice has been situated at institutions including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Queens Museum, New York; Oakland Museum of California; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Portland Museum of Art, Oregon. She is also the author of several books—most recently, Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire. She is currently Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Diversity and Equity at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. She splits her time between Chicago, where she founded Garbage Hill Farm, and Ithaca, New York.

Nida Sinnokrot 
Nida Sinnokrot is an artist and Associate Professor in the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) at MIT. His work critically interrogates the embedded power structures within dominant narrative frameworks and articulations of time and space. Working across film, video, photography, sculpture, installation, and agriculture, he employs mechanical systems and artisanal techniques to expose and subvert technologies of control. His practice challenges modernist paradigms, from cinematic perception to industrial agriculture, revealing the violence of monoculture and the dissonance between productivity and ecological harmony. A recipient of the Open Society Foundations’ Soros Arts Fellowship, Sinnokrot is the co-founder of Sakiya – Art | Science | Agriculture, an alternative pedagogical platform integrating indigenous ecological knowledge with contemporary art, fostering decolonial approaches to sustainability and cultural memory. His work is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide.

Lan Tuazon 
Lan Tuazon is a sculptor who creates tools and installation test sites for climate futures. Tuazon was the 2024 Rome Prize Fellow in the Terra Foundation Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and has had residencies at Civitella Ranieri in Italy and the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany. She has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Visual Arts Center, Richmond, Virginia; and Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. Group exhibitions of Tuazon’s work have taken place at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Bucharest Biennale, Romania; SculptureCenter, New York; and Artist Space, New York, among others. She is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA from Yale University and a BA from Cooper Union.

Michael Wang
Michael Wang is an artist based in New York. His practice uses systems that operate at both planetary and regional scales as media for art, addressing climate change, species distribution, resource allocation, and the global economy. Wang’s work was the subject of solo exhibitions at Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai; LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island, New York (curated by the Swiss Institute); and the Fondazione Prada, Milan. His work has also been included in Elevation 1049 in Gstaad, Switzerland; the 13th Shanghai Biennale; Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Italy; and the 20th Bienal de Arquitectura y Urbanismo in Valparaíso, Chile. In 2017, he was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. 

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.

The List Visual Arts Center

The List Visual Arts Center, MIT’s contemporary art museum, collects, commissions, and presents rigorous, provocative, and artist-centric projects that engage MIT and the global art community. The List is a creative laboratory that provides artists with a space to freely experiment and push existing boundaries.