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

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