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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
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.
