CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The MIT List Visual Arts Center is presenting List Projects 27: fields harrington and Nancy Valladares, 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 debuts at the List Center, the exhibition presents sections from Valladaress PHOTO/SYNTHETIC (2021ongoing), 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 (18061894), a Black American chemical engineer and the inventor of the Multiple Effect Evaporator under Vacuum.
List Projects 27: fields harrington and Nancy Valladares is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.
fields harrington (b. 1986, Sacramento, CA) lives and and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has previously exhibited at Y2K Group, New York; Kunstraum, Brooklyn; Parsons School of Design, New York; Automat, Philadelphia; and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. In 2020, harrington was a participant in the Studio Program of the Independent Study Program (ISP) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. harrington received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and BFA from the University of North Texas.
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; 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