The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce its fall 2020 and spring 2021 exhibitions season. Solo exhibitions feature artists Nayland Blake, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Leslie Thornton, Sreshta Rit Premnath, and Andrew Norman Wilson.
Although our reopening date is pending, we are pleased to announce the following scheduled and rescheduled exhibitions and look forward to welcoming visitors as soon as MIT reopens to the public. Please visit listart.mit.edu for updates.
No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake
October 16, 2020–February 14, 2021
For over 30 years, artist, educator, and curator Nayland Blake (b. 1960, New York, NY) has been a critical figure in American art, working between sculpture, drawing, performance, and video. Heavily inspired by feminist and queer liberation movements, and subcultures ranging from punk to kink, Blake’s multidisciplinary practice considers the complexities of representation, particularly racial and gender identity; play and eroticism; and the subjective experiences of desire, loss, and power. No Wrong Holes marks the most comprehensive survey of Blake’s work to date.
No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and curated by Jamillah James, Curator. The List Center presentation is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
List Projects 22: Cindy Ji Hye Kim
October 29, 2020–March 21, 2021
In Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s (b. 1990, Incheon, South Korea) recent paintings, stylized figures—graphically rendered with bold, illustrative lines—are contained by restrictive or provisional structures like scaffolding, gallows, and theatrical lighting rigs. Referencing a wide range of art and visual culture, from the styles of propaganda posters to early black-and-white animations to painterly representations of biblical narratives, her works exploit the strategies of image making with a critical attention to their conventions.
List Projects 22: Cindy Ji Hye Kim is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Leslie Thornton
March 19–July 25, 2021
In a career spanning nearly five decades, Leslie Thornton (b. 1951, Knoxville, TN) has produced a distinctive body of work in film and video that exposes the limits of language and vision, the flawed but essential components of historical narratives, cultural assumptions, and scientific discourse. In lush and unruly montages, Thornton’s works revel in the accumulation of images and data that technology has yielded, embody the fraught process of knowledge production, and probe the relationship between technology, power, and violence. Thornton’s List Center exhibition will mark the artist’s first US solo museum exhibition.
Thornton’s exhibition is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Sreshta Rit Premnath
March 19–July 25, 2021
Sreshta Rit Premnath (b. 1979, Bangalore, India) creates works in sculpture, video, photography, and installation that draw on the formal legacies of minimalism and conceptualism to think through the politics of boundaries, bodies, and labor. Premnath’s exhibition will take up the theme of waiting, alluding to modes of incarceration, bureaucratic delays, or chronic waiting through works that extend post-minimalist discourse to confront an aesthetics of austerity and dispossession in a strikingly different realm.
Premnath’s exhibition is co-organized by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Amara Antilla, Senior Curator, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati.
List Projects 23: Andrew Norman Wilson
April 7–July 11, 2021
Artist and writer Andrew Norman Wilson (b. 1983, Millis, MA) makes videos and sculptures that develop from his sustained inquiries into how capital and labor intersect with cultural production. Adopting filmic strategies that range from documentary to animation, his videos look to the history of photography and cinema and probe the mechanisms through which technical cinematic images cast the illusion of reality.
List Projects 23: Andrew Norman Wilson is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Support
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Karen & Gregory Arenson, Fotene & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Idee German Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Sara-Ann & Robert Sanders. Additional funding for List Projects exhibitions provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
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. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake is made possible thanks to lead support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous support is provided by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Marieluise Hessel, Linda Janger, Matthew Marks Gallery, and Friends of Nayland Blake: Karyn Kohl, Stephen J. Javaras and Robert A. Collins, and Marla and Jeffrey Michaels.
