Exhibits

New York Times Style Magazine reporter Susan Dominus spotlights the “maximalist, category-defying work” of MIT Prof. Emerita Joan Jonas, who is being honored with a retrospective at the MoMA. “Perception is something that really is an important part of my thinking,” Jonas explains. “How does the audience perceive my work? How does my work change their perception?” Michael Rakowitz SMVisS ’98 notes that Jonas, “is a foundational and transformative figure not just in the realm of video and performance and feminist art but in art that moves away from anthropocentrism.”

Popular Science spotlights a sampling of the winning pictures from this year’s MIT Koch Institute Image Awards, an annual competition showcasing some of the images produced as part of life science and biomedical research at MIT. “Today, high-magnification images can help design new medical tools, enrich our understanding of diseases, and explain how embryos develop. And, as shown by the 2023 winners from the MIT Koch Institute Image Awards, they can be works of art, too.”

Stir World reporter Sunena Maju spotlights “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere,” an exhibit at the MIT List Visual Arts Center that explores the “collaborative potential of living materials.” Maju writes that the exhibit “brings a new perspective to marrying science and art,” and “invites people to reexamine human relationships to the planet’s biosphere, through the lens of symbiosis.” 

Artist Matthew Angelo Harrison’s solo exhibition “Robota” is on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center through July 24. The exhibition “positions organized labor and workers’ rights as entombed relics, victims of post-industrial economy,” writes Murray Whyte for The Boston Globe.

Sculptor Matthew Angelo Harrison and artist Raymond Boisjoly will both have art installations on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center this upcoming spring, reports Pamela Reynolds for WBUR. Reynolds notes that Boisjoly’s “latest work continues the artist’s practice of working with text, photography and images in consideration of how language, culture and ideas can be framed and transmitted.” Harrison, “has frozen union organizing artifacts into chunks of resin,” writes Reynolds. 

WBUR reporter Pamela Reynolds spotlights a new exhibit of Sharona Franklin’s work, which will be on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center this coming February. “Franklin presents a new installation combining the themes of chronic illness with bioethics, environmental harm and holistic approaches to healthcare,” writes Reynolds.

The Boston Globe highlights three new exhibits on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. New installations include “Andrew Norman’s two video pieces ‘Impersonator’ (2021) and ‘Kodak’ (2019); Sreshta Rit Premnath’s sculpture show ‘Grave/Grove’; and, in this era of stops and starts as we lurch from lockdown to reopening, the serendipitously named ‘Begin Again, Again,’ by the pioneering video artist Leslie Thornton.”

Boston Globe reporter Mark Feeney spotlights how the MIT Museum is offering a virtual installment of “The Polaroid Project, Part II.” The show, which also includes a display of cameras, documents and other objects, features a “stellar array of photographers. Among them are Ansel Adams, Chuck Close, Marie Cosindas, Elsa Dorfman, Gisèle Freund, Philippe Halsman, David Hockney, [and] the actor Dennis Hopper.”

Reporting for WBUR, Pamela Reynolds spotlights some of the MIT List Visual Arts Center’s virtual offerings. Reynolds notes that through one of their series, the List will be addressing “all the time we’ve got on our hands, with a series of online Zoom talks focused on experiences of waiting.”

Boston Globe reporter Cate McQuaid spotlights the Ericka Beckman exhibit at the List Visual Arts Center. “Beckman models her incantatory, hallucinogenic films on the ritualistic repetitions of games and hard labor,” writes McQuaid. She draws on fairy tales and uses percussive, throbbing music. Woven together, these structures offer a desperate, frenzied model of life in a society driven by work, production, and the almighty dollar.”

Greek artist Takis, who worked on electromagnetism at MIT as a visiting researcher in the 1960s, is the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at London’s Tate Modern museum. Early in his career, the now 93-year-old Takis, “became interested in electromagnetism, and in the challenge of making art about invisible forces,” writes Peter Aspden for the Financial Times.

WGBH reporter Jared Bowen spotlights the Ericka Beckman exhibition at the List Visual Arts Center. Henriette Huldisch, director of exhibitions and curator at the List, explains that Beckman employed, “bright primary colors, she used toy-like props and she structured her films very deliberately around games and gaming rather than following traditional dramatic structure or narrative.”

Reporting for WBUR, Pamela Reynolds spotlights “Ericka Beckman: Double Reverse,” on display at the List Visual Arts Center. Reynolds writes that through the exhibit Beckman explores “connections between games and gambling, the larger structures of capital, as well as the gamification of a culture which has given itself over to scores, challenges, tokens and rewards as a means of control.”

WBUR reporter Pamela Reynolds highlights graduate student Joy Buolamwini’s piece, “The Coded Gaze,” which is currently on display as part of the “Avatars//Futures” exhibit at the Nave Gallery. Reynolds writes that Buolamwini’s piece “questions the inherent bias of coding in artificial intelligence, which has resulted in facial recognition technology unable to recognize black faces.”

WBUR reporter Pamela Reynolds spotlights the Rose Salane exhibit at the List Visual Arts Center, which examines the lost collection at the World Trade Center’s Port Authority Library. “In a suggestive display, Salane unravels a tapestry of seemingly disconnected events to trace the unfolding of history,” writes Reynolds.