The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to share documentation, video interviews, texts, and virtual programs developed in conjunction with No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake and List Projects 22: Cindy Ji Hye Kim. While our galleries remain closed at least through the end of 2020, we invite you to engage with these materials on our website and to dive deeper with video tours of the exhibitions and interviews with artists about their work.
No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake
No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake is the first museum survey of artist, educator, and curator Nayland Blake since 2003 and marks the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date.
For over 30 years, Blake (b. 1960) has been a crucial 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, their multidisciplinary practice considers the complexities of representation, particularly racial and gender identity. Blake examines the subjects of desire, loss, and power through references to play and fantasy. The artist’s sustained meditation on “passing” and duality as a queer, biracial (African American and white) person is grounded in postminimalist and conceptual approaches made personal though an idiosyncratic array of materials, such as leather, medical equipment, tar, stuffed animals, and food. Throughout their career, Blake has foregrounded intimacy, humor, and play as strategies to address challenging times in our collective history when the personal and private have become heavily politicized―an approach as critical and relevant thirty years ago as it is today.
No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and is curated by Jamillah James, Curator. The List Center presentation is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Video tours and online discussions
Nayland Blake and Jamillah James come together to discuss Blake’s survey exhibition No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake. Watch their conversation here.
Further reading
View installation photography and peruse the exhibition brochure for curatorial insights and views of the exhibition.
List Projects 22: Cindy Ji Hye Kim
New York-based artist Cindy Ji Hye Kim (b. 1990, Incheon, South Korea) works primarily in painting and drawing, as well as sculpture and animation. For her first institutional solo exhibition, Kim presents a focused selection of recent paintings alongside two site-responsive sculptures, a major new painting titled Superego Fortuna (2020), and a mural titled Double-Tongued Citadel (2020), also commissioned for the exhibition. Integrating organic and biological forms like plants, vines, and skeletal fragments into her allegorical compositions, the new works foreground an analogy between painterly support structures and physical and psychic states of confinement.
A family of recurring characters is central to many of her compositions: a child the artist refers to as “The Schoolgirl,” and a duo of maternal and paternal figures called “Madame Earth” and “Mister Capital,” is central to many of her recent compositions. The members of this archetypal trio are usually confined within ominous and restrictive structures like scaffolding, gallows, or theatrical lighting rigs. Rendered in a monochrome palette known as grisaille and often visible on both sides of the canvas, Kim’s sometimes gruesome subjects probe the body’s relationship to architectures of power and articulate formal and conceptual relationships to the technical limitations of two-dimensional figuration.
List Projects 22: Cindy Ji Hye Kim is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Video tours and online discussions
Watch an interview with Cindy Ji Hye Kim for more insights and to take a deeper dive into works presented in the show.
Mark your calendars for a virtual program with the artist on Thursday, February 11, 2021 at 5:30pm EST. Details and registration forthcoming. Visit our events page for updates.
Further reading
To learn more about Kim's practice and the works on view, read an essay by exhibition curator, Selby Nimrod. Download the press packet here.
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 is 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.
