The MIT List Visual Arts Center, MIT’s contemporary art museum, is pleased to share its upcoming Fall 2019/Winter 2020 exhibitions season. Solo presentations from October 2019 through February 2020 include artists Alicja Kwade, Becca Albee, and Christine Sun Kim. The List Center will also host a traveling presentation of the group exhibition, Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.
Alicja Kwade: In Between Glances
October 18, 2019-January 5, 2020
Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Alicja Kwade (b. 1979 Poland; lives and works in Berlin) explores structures of reality such as time and space, as well as systems of value that determine how we perceive the world and decide what constitutes the real. She is best known for her sculptural works which use common, yet symbolically resonant materials like rocks, lamps, and clocks. The artist’s alchemical treatment of familiar things complicate and, at times, cast suspicion on, our perceptual faculties. Throughout her work, Kwade strategically blurs received distinctions between past and present, fact and fiction, and high and low value. At the List Center, Kwade will realize an ambitious new sculptural commission, presented alongside a focused selection of recent sculptures.
List Projects: Becca Albee
December 12, 2019-February 9, 2020
Becca Albee’s (born United States; lives and works in Brooklyn) photo-based installations emerge from her encounters with historical materials, whether from personal archives, official repositories, or the public realm. Investigating how information is disseminated and filtered through physical materials and print media such as books, newspapers, and photographic negatives, Albee’s work addresses the mechanisms and politics of representation, foregrounding residues that are often left out of grand narratives. Prior to her work as a visual artist, Albee was an original member of Excuse 17, a punk band influential in the Pacific Northwest riot grrrl scene of the early 1990s. Her commitment to feminist politics and activism plays a central role in her studio practice.
Christine Sun Kim: Off the Charts
February 7-April 20, 2020
California-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980) works in sound, performance, drawing, installation, and video. She considers the sonic as a multi-sensory phenomenon, one whose properties are auditory, visual, and spatial, as well as socially determined. Much of her work is invested in uncovering the politics of voice, listening, and language, troubling throughout conceptions of sound as being inextricably tethered to hearing and the implicit authority of spoken over signed language. In the List Center exhibition, the artist presents the recent audio installation one week of lullabies for roux (2018) with a group of new drawings that breakdown the various factors involved in a number of personal decisions (“Why I Do Not Read Lips,” “Why I Work with Sign Language Interpreters”) by relative importance in pie chart form. Simultaneously funny and profound, the works also pivot on the absurdity of capturing complex choices and their cultural, social, and historical underpinnings in diagrammatic shorthand.
Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents
February 7-April 20, 2020
Colored People Time (CPT) offers a profound exploration into how the history of chattel slavery and colonialism in America not only shaped the foundations of our country but exists in our present moment and impacts our future. The group exhibition travels to the List Center from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where it was organized by Assistant Curator Meg Onli. Broken into three distinct chapters—Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, and Banal Presents—CPT’s sequential framework roots itself within this malleable and fluid concept of time and builds new narratives and public discourse around the everyday experiences of black people in the United States. Unexpected connections between contemporary art, historical objects, and archival materials inform and activate each chapter, fostering innovative dialogue between the Penn Museum’s African Collection and a wide range of media and new commissions created by artists Aria Dean, Kevin Jerome Everson, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Carolyn Lazard, Dave McKenzie, Martine Syms, Sable Elyse Smith, and Cameron Rowland. At the List Center, all three chapters are presented simultaneously.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene Demoulas & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Idee German-Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Terry & Rick Stone. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR.
Additional funding for Alicja Kwade: In Between Glances is provided by VIA Art Fund and Deutschlandjahr USA | Year of German-American Friendship. Year of German-American Friendship is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, implemented by the Goethe-Institut, and supported by the Federation of German Industries (BDI). Additional support for the exhibition is generously provided by Fotene Demoulas & Tom Coté; 303 Gallery, New York; König Galerie, Berlin and London; and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
Additional funding for List Projects: Becca Albee is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Original support for Colored People Time was provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia. Additional support has been provided by Arthur Cohen & Daryl Otte, Cheri & Steven Friedman, and Brett & Daniel Sundheim.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
