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.
