Saturday, March 18, 5:30–7pm
RSVP to 413.664.4481 x8112 or [email protected]

Join us for the opening of three exhibitions: Elizabeth King: Radical Small, Tanja Hollander: Are you really my friend?, and Steffani Jemison: Plant You Now, Dig You Later.

Combining half-scale sculptures and immense stop-motion video projection, Radical Small is an ambitious new installation by Virginia-based artist Elizabeth King—her most expansive to date. In one of MASS MoCA’s largest exhibition spaces, King examines the notion of radical smallness. As the artist puts it, “In sculpture, when you represent a body at a size different from its own, metaphor rushes in.”

In 2011, photographer Tanja Hollander began traveling the world to photograph her 626 Facebook friends. While crossing the globe, Hollander discovered the ways in which contemporary friendship and community are defined, and how permission is granted in one’s private—yet also very public—online life. Are you really my friend? is shown in its entirety for the first time at MASS MoCA, with an installation combining photographs, video, data visualization, a travelogue, and an interactive component that asks viewers to define what a real friend means to them.

The poetry of jazz musician Louis Armstrong is among the inspirations for Steffani Jemison’s enigmatic and evocative work that examines the power of language and opacity as a strategy for black resistance. In Plant You Now, Dig You Later, her largest solo exhibition to date, the artist premieres a major new sound work, an excerpt from her new novella, photographs, and paintings on acetate. Jemison engages alternative systems of communication including Hamptonese, the private language of artist James Hampton; and Solresol, a universal language based on the octave developed in the early 1800s.

Principal exhibition for Elizabeth King: Radical Small is supported provided by Pamela K. and William A. Royall, Jr. Major exhibition support is provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Barr Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Principal exhibition support for Tanja Hollander: Are you really my friend? is provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Barr Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Designtex, and Color Services, LLC. Major exhibition support provided by Joey and Ragnar Horn and Caroline Niemczyk. Additional support is from Joyce Bernstein and Lawrence Rosenthal.

Major exhibition support for Steffani Jemison: Plant You Now, Dig You Later is provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Barr Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.