On view at MASS MoCA, the exhibition Like Magic brings together artists who employ technologies of magic to resist systems that attempt to surveil and control people’s lives and stories, often because of their race, ability, sexuality, gender identity, Indigeneity, or immigration status. On view tru August 2025.
Artist Carrie Schneider joins renowned film theorist Laura Mulvey, known for her seminal 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” remotely from the UK to discuss her new book, Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times, and its intersections with Schneider’s exhibition Sphinx.
Robin Frohardt immersive Plastic Bag Store ponders the foreverness of plastic. Petra Szilagyi considers the internet as a sentient being as part of Like Magic. Saodat Ismailova, Alexander Ugay, and Gulnur Mukazhanova explore the conditions of belonging in Central Asia. kellie rae adams visualizes the student debt crisis in Forever in Your Debt. Urban Bush Women use sound, movement, and space to offer the audience an opportunity to remember, reclaim, release, and restore. Michael Oatman combines local history and pulp aeronautics in All Utopias Fell.
kelli rae adams and the Bang on a Can fellows staged this impromptu collaboration in adams' installation "Forever in your Debt".
MASS MoCA's current exhibitions and recent performances include the group shows Like Magic, To See Oneself at a Distance, artists Anne Samat and EJ Hill, and performance collective Urban Bush Women.
