This Way
9 Remote Artist-designed Walks and Experiences for Summer 2021
May 12 – September 8, 2021
Participate in artist-designed prompts that can be experienced anywhere and anytime. Prompts will be delivered to your inbox bi-weekly upon registering.
REGISTER HERE
About this Program:
Warmer weather is upon us, vaccine distribution is gradually expanding, and yet after a year of being largely home-bound, many of us may need a little encouragement (or even instruction!) on how to re-emerge into the outside world or perhaps simply re-engage our daily environment. With this in mind, MIT List Visual Arts Center has organized This Way, a series of nine artist-designed walks and experiences that offer us diverse points of entry—some intimate explorations of physical embodiment and sensory experience, others guided modifications of scale, space, and geography, or novel considerations of language, architectures, or landscapes. Borrowing its title from a 1961 series by conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn, while also drawing inspiration from Fluxus and the dérive or “drift” of the Situationists, This Way takes up themes of movement and performance, ritual and meditation, and both abstract and concrete explorations of a range of spaces we occupy.
A new iteration of This Way will be released on the List Center website every other Wednesday, from May 12 to September 8, 2021. Each release will consist of both a written prompt, available as a PDF, and an audio component, recorded by one of the nine invited artists. Participants can choose to engage via the written or audio format, or both, depending on their preference. While each artist’s prompt will consist of a guide or instructions of some kind, the parameters or recommended sites may differ. Some may recommend a partner or joint participation (in person, or simultaneously long-distance), while others may be ideally experienced alone.
Artists creating the series’ prompts include: Morgan Bassichis, Rafael Domenech, Shannon Finnegan, Maria Gaspar, Emilie Gossiaux, Corin Hewitt, David Horvitz, Heather Kapplow, and Xaviera Simmons.
Accessibility
This series will include screen reader enabled PDFs for written components, and transcripts for audio components.
Registration
This event is free and open to our global audience. The archive of prompts will be posted to this page, however we recommend registering to receive a new release of This Way in your inbox every other week throughout the summer.
This Way: Emilie Gossiaux (May 12, 2021)
Emilie Gossiaux
Emilie Gossiaux is a multi-disciplinary artist working in New York City. She received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2014, and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2019. Since losing her vision in 2010, Gossiaux’s altered experience of the world has seen her practice grow—finding inspiration in dreams, memories, sensuality, and non-visual sensory perceptions. Relying solely on her sense of touch and proprioception, she demonstrates a profound sensitivity towards texture, space, and material. Alongside her studio practice, Gossiaux works as a museum educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art with Access and Community programs. She co-teaches a studio class for blind and visually impaired visitors in the Met’s Seeing Through Drawing program and has led gallery tours for general audiences exploring cross-sensory themes with the museum’s permanent collection.
Gossiaux’s work has featured in numerous shows at The Shed, New York; Mother Gallery Beacon, New York; SculptureCenter, New York; False Flag Gallery, New York; The Cooper Hewitt, New York; Pippy Houldsworth, London; and The Smithsonian Institute of Art, Washington, DC; among others. She has won several honors and awards, including The John F. Kennedy Center’s VSA Prize for Excellence in 2013, the Elliot Lash Memorial Prize for Excellence in Sculpture in 2014, a Wynn Newhouse Award in 2018, and attended the Dumfries House Residency in Scotland, selected by the Royal Drawing School, in 2018.
This Way: Morgan Bassichis (May 26, 2021)
Morgan Bassichis
Morgan Bassichis is a comedic performer living in New York whose solo and collaborative works draw on stand-up comedy, music, and historical archives to activate lineages of queer and Jewish radicalism. They have been described as “fiercely hilarious” by The New Yorker and “a tall child, or, well, a big bird” by The Nation. Recent performance projects include Nibbling the Hand that Feeds Me, 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art; Klezmer for Beginners (with Ethan Philbrick), 2019, Abrons Arts Center; More Protest Songs!, 2018, Danspace Project; and The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions: The Musical (with TM Davy, Don Christian Jones, Michi Ilona Osato, Una Aya Osato), 2017, New Museum; all New York. Morgan has released two music projects: a live recording of More Protest Songs! and a yearlong improvisational album with composer Ethan Philbrick, March is for Marches, 2019, Triple Canopy. Morgan edited and wrote the introduction for the republication of Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta’s 1977 The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions (Nightboat Books, 2019). Their book of comedic to-do lists, The Odd Years, was published by Wendy’s Subway in 2020.
This Way: Maria Gaspar (June 9, 2021)
Maria Gaspar
Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance, Gaspar’s practice situates itself within historically marginalized sites and spans multiple formats, scales, and durations to produce liberatory actions.
Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Maria has received the United States Artists Fellowship, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1, New York; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the African American Museum, Philadelphia; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Gaspar holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
This Way: Rafael Domenech (June 23, 2021)
Rafael Domenech
Rafael Domenech is an interdisciplinary artist living between New York and Miami. He explores and employs notions of architecture, urban design, and contemporary material productions to develop and produce different typologies of objects and spaces, such as experimental publications, pavilions, installations, and public programs. Domenech’s spatial interventions intersect publishing methodologies such as cutting, redacting, revising, and circulation as research tactics to amplify his interest in the exhibition model as an active machine for production rather than a repository space. He is currently preparing for a collaborative exhibition at the Bass Museum. His work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; The Bass Museum, Miami Beach; Phillip and Patricia Frost Art Museum, Miami; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Artium Museum, Vitoria, Spain; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; and Hua International Gallery, Berlin, and Beijing. He was the recipient of an award from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and the Cintas Fellowship. He holds an MFA from Columbia University.
This Way: Shannon Finnegan (July 7, 2021)
Shannon Finnegan
Shannon Finnegan is a multidisciplinary artist. Some of their recent work includes Anti-Stairs Club Lounge, an ongoing project that gathers people together who share an aversion to stairs; Alt-Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; and Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches designed for exhibition spaces. Their work has been supported by a 2018 Wynn Newhouse Award, a 2019 residency at Eyebeam, and a 2020 grant from Art Matters Foundation.
This Way: Corin Hewitt (July 21, 2021)
Corin Hewitt
Corin Hewitt’s installations, performances, sculptures, photographs, and videos investigate relationships within architecture and domestic life. Hewitt received his BA from Oberlin College and his MFA from Bard College. Solo exhibitions of Hewitt’s work include Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; MOCA Cleveland; ICA VCU, Richmond, VA; the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center; the Seattle Museum of Art; Laurel Gitlen, New York; Taxter and Spengemann, New York; Motel, New York; and Western Bridge, Seattle. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp; the Memmo Foundation, Rome; the Sao Paolo Biennial, Brazil; the Whitney Museum, New York; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Galerie Perrotin, Paris; Public Art Fund, New York; and the Wanas Foundation, Sweden. Hewitt was a recipient of the 2014–5 American Academy Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2011, and a Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 2010. In 2015, Mousse Publications released a 300-page monograph, entitled Seven Performances featuring six years of work. He is an Associate Professor and Graduate Director of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.
This Way: Heather Kapplow (August 4, 2021)
Heather Kapplow
Heather Kapplow creates participatory experiences that elicit unexpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio, and video. Kapplow has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, and has had work commissioned for galleries, film and performance festivals within the USA and internationally.
As a part of ensemble projects, Kapplow has performed at the AroS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Museo Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; and the Queens Museum, New York; and within works by La Pocha Nostra/Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Paul Ramirez Jonas, and On Kawara. Kapplow is a member of two artist groups that produce work collectively, Flux Factory and Mobius Artists Group, and an artistic affiliate of MetaLAB at Harvard University. In addition to practicing art, Kapplow writes about it for Hyperallergic and others; teaches it at Montserrat College of Art; and has just co-authored an arts-heavy guidebook to Boston for Emons-Verlag GmbH, available May 2021 in the USA.
This Way: David Horvitz (August 18, 2021)
David Horvitz
Playful and poetic, the works of David Horvitz, an ocean romantic, based in Los Angeles, California, meddle with the systems of language, time and networks, hyper-paced Zoom calls, emails, and images transmitted through screens. Eschewing categorization, his expansive nomadic body of work—traversing the forms of photographs, word of mouth and physical movement or distribution, artist books, performances, memes, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, weather, travel, walks, and water-color—is presented through examining questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining, or even erasing this distance. Harnessing image, text, object, and flows which he mobilizes to circulate and operate independently from himself, his works penetrate ever more effectively the intimate sphere. Left face to face with his works—in the postal system, libraries, and airport lost and found services, even engaged into action— our attention to the infinitesimal (to the minute but important details) and to the imaginary comes to the fore. As lullabies imprinted in our head, Horvitz deploys art as both object of contemplation and as viral or systemic tool to effect change on a personal scale. David Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real. Shifting seamlessly pebbles often possess a naturally frosted finish.
This Way: Xaviera Simmons (September 8, 2021)
Xaviera Simmons
Xaviera Simmons engages her sweeping practice of photography, painting, video, sound, sculpture, and installation to explore the construction of landscape, language, and complex histories in the United States and its continuing push at Empire-building on a global scale.
Simmons’ work is exhibited nationally and internationally and belongs to major museum and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Deutsche Bank, New York; UBS, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Agnes Gund Art Collection, New York; The De La Cruz Collection, Miami, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Studio Museum in Harlem; ICA Miami; Perez Art Museum, Miami; The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; The High Museum, Atlanta; among others. Simmons received her BFA from Bard College in 2004 after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She was a visiting lecturer and the inaugural 2019 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University and was awarded The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College in Spring 2020, among many honors. Simmons currently has works on view throughout the United States and Europe.