Every two weeks throughout the summer, MIT List Visual Art Center will release a new artist-led experience. Each program consists of an audio file, and a PDF text. You are welcome to choose either to engage with—they will often be the same content, and are designed to offer different but comparable entry points, depending on whether you prefer to read or listen as you begin your experience or walk. An audio transcript can also be found below, and the PDF is screen-reader enabled.
In this week’s prompt, A Score for Adam, Maria Gaspar narrates a scene from a community memorial and vigil honoring the life of Adam Toledo, a 13-year old Latino boy who was shot and killed by Chicago police on March 29, 2021.
About the Artist
Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance, Gaspar’s practice situates itself within historically marginalized sites and spans multiple formats, scales, and durations to produce liberatory actions.
Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Maria has received the United States Artists Fellowship, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1, New York; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the African American Museum, Philadelphia; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Gaspar holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
