Exhibition view: American Aritst: To Acorn, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2025. Photo: Dario Lasagni
American Artist: To Acorn
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American Artist’s multidisciplinary work considers the intersections of technology, race, and knowledge production.
Since legally changing their name in 2013, they have examined the boundaries and fissures of subject formation under racial capitalism. Their recent projects draw inspiration from Octavia E. Butler’s speculative fiction—what Artist calls “empathetic yet stark narratives about humanity’s perilous patterns and blindspots.” Like Butler, Artist crafts “thought experiments” that stretch and reimagine the terms of the present. Resonances with Butler are thematic as well as personal: Both are among the Black diaspora in Los Angeles (descended from families who fled the racial terror of the Jim Crow South), and both attended the same Pasadena high school.
Several of Artist’s recent works reference Butler’s “Earthseed” novels, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), set in a climate-ravaged, authoritarian America of the 2020s. Butler described them as “if-this-goes-on” stories—cautionary warnings of social, political, and ecological collapse. Artist interprets them as reminders that “when demagogues and oligarchs hold power and oppose everything you value, you’d better have an escape plan.” In the novels, readers follow Lauren Oya Olamina, whose belief system, Earthseed, offers an adaptive vision for survival amid catastrophe. The exhibition title references the community she founded, Acorn, where collectivity, sustainability, and mutual aid form core tenets. Artist’s multiyear study of Butler’s archive at the Huntington Library also surfaces in graphite tracings of her notes. These archival moments—paired with speculative engagements—envision a Southern California, and United States, suspended between past and future, fiction and reality, idealism and cataclysm.
American Artist: To Acorn is organized by Natalie Bell, Chief Curator, with Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant.
American Artist (b. 1989, Altadena, CA) is a New York–based artist who works across sculpture, software, video, and installation. They received an MFA from The New School (2015) and a BFA from California Polytechnic University, Pomona (2011). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and the Queens Museum, New York. Their work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and KADIST Art Foundation, Paris, among others. They are a former resident of Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Red Bull Arts, Detroit; Abrons Art Center, New York; Recess, Brooklyn; EYEBEAM; Pioneer Works; and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. Artist is also a former codirector of the School for Poetic Computation and faculty at Yale University.
Sponsors
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Audrey & James Foster and Cynthia & John Reed.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Executive Vice Provost at MIT, Hashim Sarkis and the MIT School of Architecture + Planning, the Mass Cultural Council, and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Board Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
