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The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents works by fields harrington and Nancy Valladares (SMACT ’20) in a two-person exhibition that inaugurates a year-long series of three experimental List Projects exhibitions that foreground and support artistic collaborations.
In their respective practices, harrington and Valladares work across disciplines and media including sculpture and installation, text, photography, and the moving image. Both artists center research, and their works and related inquiries take a critical eye to overlooked technological and industrial histories. Each has also employed citizen science to shed light on the enduring toxicity of various colonial projects and the extractive processes that underpin racial and fossil capitalism (the ideas that racialized exploitation and carbon-intensive development directly support capital accumulation). Alongside a jointly authored new commission that will debut at the List Center, the exhibition will present sections from Valladares’s PHOTO/SYNTHETIC (2021—ongoing), which unpacks the environmental and economic impacts of the use of silver in analog photography, and a trio of works by harrington that take on the complicated legacy of Norbert Rillieux (1806–1894), a Black American chemical engineer and the inventor of the Multiple Effect Evaporator under Vacuum.
Nancy Dayanne Valladares (b. 1991, Tegucigalpa, Honduras) lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Ralph Arnold Gallery at Loyola University, Chicago; Stiftung Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany; Sakiya, Palestine; Chuquimarca Projects, Chicago; and Goethe-Institut, Chicago; among others. Recent fellowships and residencies include Triangle Arts Association, the Film Study Center at Harvard University, Transmedia Storytelling Initiative at MIT, and Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. Valladares holds a Master of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology from MIT and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Public program: Lunch and Learn with Artist Nancy Valladares on Friday, September 29 at 12pm. Part of Cambridge Science Fest Lunch and Learn series.
List Projects 27: fields harrington and Nancy Valladares is curated by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.
About The Series: This special series of experimental List Projects programming commemorates the tenth anniversary of the series and is comprised of three exhibitions in the Bakalar Gallery. Each presentation will pair two artists who share a history of conversation and foster their continued collaboration through a joint commission. A closing program featuring all six artists will round out the series, offering an opportunity for the artists to reflect on what it means for institutions to prioritize conversation and collaboration in their exhibition spaces.
