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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.
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.
Artist-designed prompts can be experienced anywhere and anytime. Visit the program page to learn more about the series. Register to receive a new release of This Way in your inbox every other week.
Accessibility
This series will include screen reader enabled PDFs for written components, and transcripts for audio components.
About the Artist
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.
