MASS MoCA is pleased to announce some updates to its 25th Anniversary programming. Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad will now open August 24, 2024 to allow additional time for MASS MoCA’s creative team to build and prepare elements of this major, new commission in collaboration with the artist. Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham? (White Noise and Other Works, 1996-2023) will be extended through June 30, 2024, and we welcome the return of alumni artist Chris Doyle with a new video animation opening June 8, 2024 titled The Coast of Industry which runs nearly 300 feet along one wall of Building 5.
In Road to Hybridabad–his first solo museum exhibition–Detroit-based artist Osman Khan re-reads the magical and fantastical figures found in folktales and lore, with a particular focus on those from South Asia, the Middle East, and other Muslim and immigrant traditions. Khan interprets these figures through contemporary technologies through a new body of multimedia work that includes a ten-foot-tall animatronic djinn head, a forest of telephone poles with djinns atop them, drone-powered flying carpets, a boundary wall-destroying sound system, a fountain of endlessly flowing honey, and a robot-like sculpture that is in fact a storytelling “Scheherazade AI.” The sprawling exhibition invites visitors on a journey across borders, through time, and between legend and history, encouraging reconsideration and rewriting of narratives around identity, difference, and power reflected in the tales we tell ourselves.
In-process work by Osman Khan for Road to Hybridabad, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (On view beginning August 24, 2024).
Photo: PD Rearick
MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the group exhibition Like Magic, opening October 28, 2023. Like Magic addresses contemporary artists’ relationships to technologies associated with magic—including devices, talismans, rituals, incantations—and invites visitors to explore the points where technology and magic converge.
Installation view of Like Magic at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (on view beginning October 29, 2023)
Foreground: Gelare Khoshgozaran, “U.S. Customs Demands to Know“, ongoing. LED lit packages (corrugated plastic). Courtesy of the artist.
Background, left-right: Raven Chacon, Compass, 2021. Score, painted on wall. Courtesy of the artist.
Raven Chacon, For Zitkála-Šá, 2017–2020. 13 scores and instructions, drawn on wall by the artist. Courtesy of the artist.
Photo: Kaelan Burkett.
Beginning July 22, 2023, MASS MoCA will present Elle Pérez: Intimacies, an exhibition of photographs by the acclaimed Bronx-born, Puerto Rican photographer. The show will be on view in B6: The Robert Wilson Building, through June 2024.
This selection of works is an expanded presentation of a body of work titled Devotions shown in part in Pérez’s recent exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum and at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The exhibition also features photographs Pérez made for the 2022 Venice Biennale and includes a total of 27 photographs made between 2018 and 2023, in addition to a video work, “Wednesday, Friday” (2022).
MASS MoCA announces Joseph Grigely’s exhibition In What Way Wham? (White Noise and Other Works, 1996-2023), opening May 28, 2023. The exhibition will occupy MASS MoCA’s ground-floor galleries and will debut a new, monumental, installation consisting of two intersecting oval rooms that surround the viewer with thousands of handwritten conversation papers passed between the artist and friends and colleagues over the course of three decades.
MASS MoCA presents to see oneself at a distance, on view beginning March 25, 2023. This exhibition highlights the works of four contemporary artist-researchers who employ rigorous, long-term archival investigations to create their work. Together, they explore decolonization and national liberation not as event horizons, but as a series of gestures, ruptures, and fragments that might ripple across time and space.
Beginning March 11, MASS MoCA will present a suite of new works made by artist Carrie Schneider. Three series of photographs and a 16mm film—all made over the past 2½ years––play with the camera’s imaginative potential and the image’s fraught relationship to power, authorship, and the feminine.
This February, MASS MoCA is delighted to present Daniel Giordano’s first solo museum exhibition, Love From Vicki Island, which will fill one of the museum’s third floor gallery spaces beginning February 4, 2023. Grappling with a culture in transition, the works in this exhibition speak simultaneously to a family, a city, and a country trying to reconcile the past with the present while envisioning a new image – new forms – that contains the complexities of both.
MASS MoCA announces the upcoming opening of Black Stars: Writing in the Dark, an installation bringing together works on paper and mixed-media STAGED sculptures by pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran. On view in B6: The Robert W. Wilson Building through 2024, the exhibition – curated by Alexandra Foradas – visualizes the embodied experiences of making and listening to live music and explores the residues and memories that music-making leaves behind.
MASS MoCA has announced Defining Moments, featuring the work of Shaun Leonardo and Bruno Miguel, on view in Kidspace, the museum’s child-centered gallery, and hands-on studio, beginning June 26. The exhibition explores how memories are formed, recalled, and visualized. Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Shaun Leonardo and Brazilian pop artist Bruno Miguel share their individual and cultural memories, expressed in a range of mediums from paintings and wall drawings, to mixed media sculpture and collages. Their work delves into the mythic aspects of generational storytelling, the formative role of nostalgia, and the fallibility of collective memory. Defining Moments will be on view through May 2023.