News
Spatial Poems by Cecilia Vicuña, Sam Frésquez, and Lola Ayisha Ogbara
Opening May 23rd at MASS MoCA
Spatial Poems is a communal exhibition in three concurrent parts developed by CEI Fellow Marissa Del Toro in collaboration with guest curators Ninabah Winton and Jamillah Hinson, who aim to disrupt the art world’s usual curatorial structures. Together, the projects can be understood as a score or spatial poem, created by curators and artists working in a euphonious rhythm. Spatial Poems inspires a dialogue on care, social relations, and the organization of new forms of being and processes as an act of refusal to the current precaritization of the art world.
scars insist on being remembered...
Curated by Jamillah Hinson in collaboration with Marissa Del Toro
Lola Ayisha Ogbara: Scars Insist on Being Remembered is an exercise in care that explores Black movement, veneration, and sonic experimentation, presented through imagined geographies and naturally forming archives rooted in the artistic and cultural traditions of post-structuralism in Black American and African diasporic communities. With a conceptual practice standing at the intersection of non-Western epistemologies and bodily topographies, Ogbara explores the philosophical poetics of the scar as both a visual language of fugitivity and an imprint of resistance through material and compositional investigations.
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Screening & Talk | 4×4: Contemporary Art in Chicago
About the Event:
Season 1 — Jenn Freeman | Po’ Chop, Errol Ortiz, Deb Sokolow, Bernard Williams
The MCA is proud to host Pentimenti Productions for the premiere of 4×4: Contemporary Art in Chicago, an annual series of four short documentary films about practicing local artists, each directed by a Chicago-based filmmaker. The series profiles a diverse array of artists working in different mediums, based in distinct neighborhoods, and at varying stages of their careers. Each film is a collaborative process between the artists and filmmakers, resulting in four stylistically unique works, unified by a quintessentially Chicago sensibility.
The series aims to capture Chicago’s rich and vibrant contemporary arts scene in a way that reflects the creativity and iconoclasm of the artists and filmmakers involved. Season 1 filmmakers include: cai thomas, Erin Babbin & Michael Sullivan, Alex Morelli, and Kevin Shaw. This premiere screening is followed by a talkback featuring the artists and filmmakers moderated by curator Lola Ayisha Ogbara.
Design by Span. Finishing services by Nolo Digital Film and Ben Kruse. Archival Footage Partner: Media Burn Archive.
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FADE
Opening May 1st thru September 6, 2026, at Studio Museum of Harlem
Working amid a turbulent era in US history shaped by widespread social and political change, the seventeen artists in Fade embrace spirituality, surrealism, and nonlinear conceptions of time to locate spaces of possibility.
Many of the artists gathered here make work informed by a relationship to place, drawing on ancestral lineages and collective stories, and tracing continuities between past and present. Some engage the built environment—architecture, infrastructure, and the land—as a repository for memories. Others center a relationship to the body and spirit, using materials and installation methods that register a presence.
The word “fade” carries many meanings: a cinematic transition, a type of haircut, or a skillful basketball move. “Fade” is both a departure and an adaptation, or something receding or slipping in and out of view. Here, “fade” becomes a framework for understanding how artists complicate the idea of determinacy by revisiting histories through abstracted forms, reshaping materials into unique compositions, and making work rooted in reverence and feeling.
Fade is the sixth edition of the “F” shows, a series of group exhibitions that began in 2001 with Freestyle, a landmark in defining contemporary Black art. The “F” shows that followed—Frequency (2005–06), Flow (2008), Fore (2012–13), and Fictions (2017–18)—all featured work by emerging artists of African descent and advanced innovative and groundbreaking dialogues within contemporary art.
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