MIT List Visual Arts Center

This month in our Bakalar Gallery – “Images at Work: Solidarity and Form” gathers oblique, abstract approaches to the representationally overdetermined subject of the worker.

The film and video program “Images at Work” is conceived as an offshoot of and appendix to “Performing Conditions”—dependent on the whole, even as it supports it. Each thematic program screens for three weeks in the Bakalar Gallery. The films screen on a loop during gallery hours.

Featured films:
Joyce Wieland, “Solidarity,” 1973. 11 min.
Karimah Ashadu, “Lagos Sand Merchants,” 2013. 10 min.
Kevin Jerome Everson, “Sound That,” 2014. 12 min.
Morgan Quaintance, “Repetitions,” 2022. 24 min.

Pictured: Joyce Wieland, “Solidarity,” 1973 (still). 16mm film, color, sound, 11 minutes. Courtesy Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre

Summer Public Art Tours are back!

Join us throughout June, July and August 2026 for public art walking tours showcasing the MIT public art collection around different areas of campus.

June tours focus across the east side of campus, featuring artworks by renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso, Alicja Kwade and Cai-Guo-Qiang.

Admission is free but register today before limited spots fill up!

REGISTER: https://listart.mit.edu/calendar

Congratulations to the MIT Class of 2026! 🎓

As you embark on this next chapter, we hope that art continues to spark inspiration and remains a meaningful part of your life.

Our galleries are free and open to all everyday this weekend from 12–6 PM. Explore the public artworks around campus and cool off in our galleries with family and friends!

A look at the home as a space of labor, performance, care, and resistance. On view through Sunday, May 31 in our Bakalar Gallery 🎥

“With and Against Housework” presents visions of domestic work from diversely located feminist filmmakers in the 1970s and eighties.

The film and video program “Images at Work” is conceived as an offshoot of and appendix to “Performing Conditions”—dependent on the whole, even as it supports it. Each thematic program screens for three weeks in the Bakalar Gallery. The films screen on a loop during gallery hours.

Featured films:
Margaret Raspé, “The Sadist Whips the Unquestionably Innocent,” 1971. 6 min.
Letícia Parente, “Tarefa I” [Assignment I], 1982. 2 min.
Fronza Woods, “Fannie’s Film,” 1981. 15 min.
Yugantar Film Collective, “Molkarin” [Maid Servant], 1981. 25 min.

Pictured: Fronza Woods, “Fannie’s Film,” 1981 (still). Courtesy Women Make Movies

“When an empire is lurching to a halt at its very end, it might be the moment when it begins, or is forced, to re-imagine its relationship to a national insanity.”
—Mary Walling Blackburn, “XOXO, Insanity, Institution” (2011)

🗓️ Thursday, May 14 @ 6:00–7:30 PM
📍 Carpenter Center Theater, Lower Level

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and MIT List Visual Arts Center co-present a reading of “Cream Psychosis” (Sternberg Press, e-flux Journal, 2026), a collection of essays spanning the 2010s to the present by artist and writer Mary Walling Blackburn, followed by a conversation between Walling Blackburn and artist and writer David Levine.

Copies of the book will be available for sale at the event from the MIT Press Bookstore.

Visit the List Center or Carpenter Center websites to learn more and register.

🗓️ Thursday, May 7 @ 5:30 PM
📍 MIT List Visual Arts Center

Join Léa Miranda, a PhD student in the MIT History, Theory + Criticism of Art and Architecture program, for a conversation around “Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form.”

In this talk, Léa Miranda will discuss the relationships between property, labor, capital, and artistic production, which have long influenced the history of art, through the specific example of photography.

Register: https://listart.mit.edu/calendar/graduate-student-talk-lea-miranda

Headshot courtesy Léa Miranda

A choreography you don’t just watch, you contract into 📄

May 5–10, Sophia Giovannitti presents a new choreography for her series “Contract” (2022 – ), which attempts to antagonize entrenched power dynamics between artists and those who collect, curate, patronize, exploit, and visit them.

Giovannitti will occupy the List Center’s Bakalar Gallery for six days, working within it on her forthcoming book. The gallery will be closed to the public, save for those who pay $1,136.63 to enter a new choreography with her, through which she pursues a legal transfer of risk and an affective experience of “something else.”

To learn more and participate, visit choreography.info

Pictured: “Untitled (deer mauled by coyotes on private land),” 2026. Courtesy the artist

Tomorrow: Join the List Center for a talk with Graduate Student Paul Dai at 5:30 PM!

In this talk, Dai will bring his research in macro-finance into conversation with artworks by Cally Spooner and Cassie Thornton.

Across both projects, the broader question is how financial structures become lived conditions; how they measure performance, allocate exposure, and determine where the weight of adjustment falls.

Register: https://listart.mit.edu/calendar/graduate-student-talk-paul-dai

Pictured: Cally Spooner, “Self Tracking,” 2018 (detail). Photo: Daniel Perez

Final days to catch “Images at Work: Strike and Sabotage” in our Bakalar Gallery on view through May 3 🎥

The film and video program “Images at Work” is conceived as an offshoot of and appendix to “Performing Conditions”—dependent on the whole, even as it supports it. Each thematic program screens for three weeks in the Bakalar Gallery. The films screen on a loop during gallery hours.

“Strike and Sabotage” proposes a shared grammar and common ground for labor struggle and anticolonial struggle.

Featured films:
i) Alanis Obomsawin, “Spudwrench: Kahnawake Man,” 1997. 58 min.
ii) Razan AlSalah, “A Stone’s Throw,” 2024. 40 min.

Pictured: Razan AlSalah, “A Stone’s Throw,” 2024 (still). Courtesy the artist

Next Week: Join Paul Dai, a PhD student in Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, for a conversation around “Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form” on Thursday, April 30 at 5:30 PM.

Dai will discuss how we might treat financial expansion not as a uniform sign of development, but ask when it instead generates asymmetric dependence and fragility.

Learn more and register: https://listart.mit.edu/calendar/graduate-student-talk-paul-dai

Headshot courtesy Paul Dai