To Acorn
October 24, 2025–March 15, 2026
List Projects 33
September 18–December 14, 2025
Flare-Up
October 24, 2025–March 15, 2026
Cambridge MA 02142
United States
The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce its fall 2025 exhibition and programming schedule. The galleries feature solo exhibitions by Goldin+Senneby, American Artist, and Every Ocean Hughes.
Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up
October 24, 2025–March 15, 2026
Hayden Gallery
Flare-Up brings together artist duo Goldin+Senneby’s recent works exploring illness, ecology, and the shifting metaphors through which both are understood. The exhibition references the experience of living with the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis (MS), which is often described with militaristic language: a body “at war” with itself. Pine resin, a protective toxin critical to trees’ immune systems, is central to their recent works. Crying Pine (2025), for instance, features a loblolly pine that was bioengineered to overproduce resin as a renewable fuel, a modification that has left the tree vulnerable to its own defenses. Across the works in Flare-Up, the immune system is never self-contained. It is always entangled—with technology, with narrative, and with the precarious infrastructures of life.
Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up is organized by Accelerator, Stockholm University, and curated by Richard Julin, Artistic Director, Accelerator. It is produced in partnership with MIT List Visual Arts Center. This presentation is organized by Natalie Bell, Chief Curator, with Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant.
American Artist: To Acorn
October 24, 2025–March 15, 2026
Reference Gallery
American Artist’s multidisciplinary work explores the intersections of technology, race, and knowledge production. 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. 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. 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. American Artist: To Acorn is organized by Natalie Bell, Chief Curator, with Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant.
List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes
September 18–December 14, 2025
Bakalar Gallery
Every Ocean Hughes’s exhibition centers on One Big Bag (2021), the second installment of her trilogy that considers the intimate processes of dying and grieving. In One Big Bag, Hughes stages a monologue by a millennial death doula (performed by Lindsay Rico, with choreography by Miguel Gutierrez). Surrounded by the objects of her mobile “corpse kit,” the doula assuredly explains her tools: tampons for absorbing fluid, scissors for cutting cloth, bowls for washing, ceremonial bells. In her address, the practical matters of dealing with a corpse are balanced with an unencumbered spirit of care for the dead and those around them. At the List Center, One Big Bag is presented alongside the “corpse kit” objects, along with a new photograph that echoes the memento mori tradition within still life painting.
List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes is organized by Natalie Bell, Chief Curator, and Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant.
Related programming
Artist discussion with Every Ocean Hughes
Monday, October 27, 6pm EST
Exhibition tour: Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up and American Artist: To Acorn
Saturday, November 1, 2pm EST
Reading discussion with MIT Science Fiction Society inspired by American Artist: To Acorn
Wednesday, December 3, 5:30pm EST / Wednesday, February 11, 2026, 5:30pm EST
Sponsors
Major support for Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up is provided by Teiger Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee.
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.
