2023 Max Wasserman Forum: Altered Access | Contemporary Art Forum
April 21–22
April 5, 2025
10am – 5:30pm
Location: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge, MA 02139
Admission: Free, but registration required.
The 2025 Max Wasserman Forum: Visions of Sustainability, at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, brings together artists, scholars, and curators to discuss climate change within the arts and museum institutions. ACT Associate Professor Nida Sinnokrot will participate in Panel 1: Human Traces.
There is an ever-growing sense of urgency from across disciplines to respond to the challenges of climate change and the current state of our environmental degradation. The role art plays in this dialogue is not separate from but, rather, in conversation with sustainable futures and climate justice imperatives. Artists have contributed to the climate change dialogue and responded to ecological challenges while questioning human impacts and looking directly at our precarious present to envision a more stable future.
Art not only conceives new ideas but also evokes empathy, provides a space for healing, advocates for community resilience and mobilization, and reframes complex and overwhelming scientific reports. This Forum will focus on rethinking how art and cultural organizations can operate, the disproportionate effects of climate change on those in vulnerable populations, and the transformative role art and artists take. What are the multifaceted impacts of environmental degradation? How can we cope with and understand the precarious present we live in? And how can we creatively reframe and effectively make change in our communities? These overarching drives and questions will be addressed by creative practitioners, expressing their visions of sustainability.
Panel 1: Human Traces
10:30–11:45 AM
How have artists navigated landscapes of extraction and ecologies of displacement? The practices represented on this panel consider environmental change within longer histories of colonialism, capitalism, and human effects on our physical environment. Looking at cultural systems and structures, they map the violence of enclosure and dispossession but also propose a renewal of ethical lifeways—paths to reparation, repatriation, and collective survival.
Panelists: Adam Khalil, Nida Sinnokrot, Lan Tuazon
Moderator: Mae-ling Lokko
Lunch Break/Climate Grief Meditation
12:00–1:00 PM
Panel 2: Advocacy Work
1:00–2:15 PM
Hear from artists utilizing social practice and activism to seek out solutions for our changing landscape. These panelists have created multiple artist-run initiatives as a method to work within their communities. This panel will dive deeper into how participatory collaborations can establish new solutions, and how we might find new pathways through dialogue.
Panelists: Lee Pivnik, Jen de los Reyes, Sahar Qawasmi
Moderator: Janelle Knox-Hayes
Panel 3: Rethinking Cultural Systems
2:45–4:15 PM
Taking a closer look into collections, cultural production, and cultural sites, these artistic practitioners ask us to reconsider the possible. Disrupting default operating systems and pulling at the threads of sourcing and resource allocation, they will explore provenance research, conservation methods, and collection policies in this panel, as well as museum and artistic practices and how they impact global industries and our planet’s degradation.
Panelists: Amy Balkin, Beatrice Glow, Michael Wang
Moderator: Stefanie Hessler
Keynote Address: Torkwase Dyson
4:30–5:30 PM
Torkwase Dyson (b. 1974, Chicago, Illinois) is a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Examining human geography and the history of Black spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with how space is perceived, imagined, and negotiated, particularly by Black and Brown bodies. Dyson has distilled a vocabulary of poetic forms to address the spaciousness of freedom and question what type of climates are born out of world-building.
Dyson has had solo exhibitions and installations at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago; Hall Art Foundation, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Germany; Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia; Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont; and the Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine Galleries, London. She has also participated in group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; and Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York. Her work was also presented at the 13th Shanghai Biennale.
