List Projects 27: fields harrington and Nancy Valladares

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A white walled room with a tan wooden table and four tan wooden chairs in the middle of the room. To the right side of the table there is a wooden pedestal with a gray Plexiglas cube on top. There is a black framed drawing hung on the wall to the left of the pedestal. A row of eight test tubes are hung onto the wall to the left of the drawing.

Exhibition view: List Projects 27: fields harrington and Nancy Valladares, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2023. Photo: Mel Taing

Location
Bakalar Gallery
Featured Artists
fields harrington
Nancy Dayanne Valladares
Explore all artists who have exhibited at the List in our Artist Index.

In July 2023, the MIT List Visual Arts Center presents works by fields harrington and Nancy Valladares 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.

View Artists' Book: On Exhaustive Rifts

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; 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. 

List Projects 27: fields harrington and Nancy Valladares is curated by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.

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.

Sponsors

Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Idee German Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Sara-Ann & Robert Sanders. This exhibition is also supported by generous donors to the 2023 McDermott Award Gala, hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT.

General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Vice Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.  

Images

Three delicate lengths of glass tubing filled with expired film stock and a chlorine bleach solution are fastened to a white wall with metal and rubber clamps that look like standard lab equipment.
A small black-and-white portrait photograph of inventor Norbert Rillieux set in a large mat is overlaid with white text that reads: L=Qm, the equation for latent heat. The framed work has a grey tint from the privacy filter that serves as glass.
An ink drawing of Norbert Rilluex's multiple-effect evaporator pan is drawn on a slightly wrinkled newsprint. The drawing illustrates a frontal view of the multiple-effect evaporator pan and the ink line work is wobbly and inconsistent.
A smoke-grey transparent Plexiglas box with the top open contains the by-product of an exothermic reaction. The by-product is a solid black carbon form that has a serpent-like structure and sits inside an aluminum pie pan with black sand. The box is sitting on a tan wooden pedestal.
A white walled room with a wooden pedestal with a gray Plexiglas cube on top in the middle. To the left of the pedestal there is a black framed drawing hung on the wall. To the right of the pedestal there is a black and white printed image of Norbert Rilliuex behind a privacy filter with black framing.
A white walled room with a tan wooden table is visible with four wooden chairs in the center. A wooden pedestal with a gray Plexiglas cube on top is visible to the left of the table in the middle of the room. To the right of the pedestal there is a black and white printed image of Norbert Rilliuex behind a privacy filter with black framing. To the left of the pedestal there is a black framed drawing hung on the wall. A tan wooden bookshelf is partially visible on the right side of the image.
A white walled room with a tan wooden table and four tan wooden chairs in the middle of the room. To the right side of the table there is a wooden pedestal with a gray Plexiglas cube on top. There is a black framed drawing hung on the wall to the left of the pedestal. A row of eight test tubes are hung onto the wall to the left of the drawing.
A white walled room with a wooden pedestal and a gray Plexiglas box on top of the pedestal is on the right side of the image. A black framed drawing is hung on the wall to the left of the pedestal. A row of eight glass tubes are hung on to the wall to the left of the drawing.
Eight borosilicate glass test tubes are mounted onto a white wall using silver metal brackets. The test tubes all have black stoppers in the top. Reclaimed silver from expired photographic film and paper with sodium hypochlorite can be seen in the test tubes.
Four borosilicate glass tubes are mounted onto a white wall using silver metal brackets. The tubes all have black stoppers in the top. Reclaimed silver from expired photographic film and paper with sodium hypochlorite can be seen in the test tubes.
The corner of a white walled room with a row of three glass jars hung on the back left side wall and a row of eight test tubes that are hung on the right side wall.
Three glass jars with plastic black lids are mounted onto a white wall. Reclaimed silver from expired photographic film and sodium hypochlorite can be seen inside the jars, viewed at an angle from below.
Byproduct of the reaction between reclaimed silver from expired photographic film and sodium hypochlorite embedded into a white wall.
A white walled room with a tan wooden table and four tan wooden chairs in the middle of the room. To the right side of the table there is a wooden pedestal with a gray Plexiglas cube on top. There is a black framed drawing hung on the wall to the left of the pedestal. A row of eight test tubes are hung onto the wall to the left of the drawing.
A white walled room with a tan wooden table and four tan wooden chairs in the middle of the room. There are booklets on the table with text on the front that reads “On fields harrington Exhaustive Nancy Valladares Rifts.” A row of three glass jars is hung on the back wall to the left side of a row of eight test tubes that are hung on to the wall.
A white walled room with a wooden table and four wooden chairs in the middle of the room. To the right side of the table there is a wooden pedestal with a gray vitrine on top. A row of three glass jars is hung on the left side of a row of eight glass tubes that are hung onto the wall. There is a black framed drawing hung on the wall to the right of the test tubes.
A white walled room with a tan wooden table and four tan wooden chairs in the middle of the room. A wooden bookcase displaying seventeen books is against the wall behind the table.
A tan wooden bookcase with four shelves is up against a white wall and displays seventeen books, four on the top shelf, five on the second shelf, five on the third shelf and three on the final bottom shelf.
A white poster that reads “LIST PROJECTS 27: fields harrington and nancy Valladares” with an image of a gray Plexiglas cube is hung next to two glass gallery doors with the same text and beige glowing light.

Events

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List Projects 27: fields harrington and Nancy Valladares

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