SPECIAL PROJECTS
In honor of MASS MoCA’s 25th anniversary, the museum has published a limited edition print portfolio featuring silkscreens by eleven artists who represent the institution’s dynamic history. MASS MoCA’s commitment to supporting artists at all stages of their careers and presenting groundbreaking art in all its forms is reflected in the diversity of these prints. Working across disciplines and generations, and representing MASS MoCA’s regional, national, and international network of artists, the contributors include Laylah Ali, Nick Cave, Alex Da Corte, Mark Dion, Cai Guo-Qiang, Ann Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Osman Khan, Mary Lum, Elle Pérez, and Cauleen Smith.
Working in collaboration with master printer Gary Lichtenstein whose studio is located on MASS MoCA’s creative campus, this grouping of artists represents a quarter century of MASS MoCA’s programming, ranging from now well-established and influential artists Laylah Ali and Mona Hatoum, who mounted important shows with MASS MoCA in its early days, to recent exhibiting artists Elle Pérez and Osman Khan, whose works have been part of this anniversary year.
All of the artists have created indelible memories for MASS MoCA visitors over the years. Many are longtime friends of the museum who have returned to work with the institution again and again, including Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton and Mary Lum — whose unique sensibilities and explorations of taxonomies, textiles, and text — are recognizable in their prints. Nick Cave and Alex Da Corte offer glimpses of recent directions; Cave based his silkscreen on new large-scale embroidered works while Da Corte pays homage to fellow Venezuelan-American artist Marisol. Several artists reference MASS MoCA projects, including Cai Guo-Qiang’s sketch for the video Illusion (which was included in his 2004 exhibition Inopportune) and Cauleen Smith’s depiction of the cover of Annie Besant’s book Thought Forms, which grew out of the BLK FMNNST Loaner Library series (from Smith’s 2019 exhibition We Already Have What We Need).
The breadth of artists represented in this portfolio is a reminder of MASS MoCA’s dedication over the past twenty-five years to showcasing the most vital art of our time. The portfolio’s title, 42°42’1”N/73°6’51”W (Coordinates Vol. I), references the geographical coordinates of MASS MoCA, a unique place where a plurality of artists and ideas converge, and creativity thrives unbounded. The suite of prints is curated and published by MASS MoCA and printed by Gary Lichtenstein at MASS MoCA.
It has been a privilege to partner with MASS MoCA on the production of this remarkably important portfolio. Production spanned a little over eight months with some prints requiring as many as thirty different screens. I am honored to have had the chance to meet and work with all of the incredible artists involved and I will count this experience as one of the most memorable of my career. – Gary Lichtenstein
A SUITE OF ELEVEN SILKSCREEN PRINTS PRESENTED IN AN ARCHIVAL PORTFOLIO
SIGNED IN PENCIL BY THE ARTISTS AND NUMBERED IN A LIMITED EDITION OF 25
11 ARTIST’S PROOFS | 2 PRINTER’S PROOFS | 2 MUSEUM PROOFS
PRINTED ON 320 GRAM COVENTRY RAG PAPER | 20 X 26 INCHES AND 26 X 20 INCHES
CURATED AND PUBLISHED BY MASS MoCA
PRINTED BY GARY LICHTENSTEIN EDITIONS AT MASS MoCA
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Untitled portrait, Laylah Ali
Grapht, Nick Cave
Avian Morphology, Mark Dion
as one, Ann Hamilton
Love, Alex Da Corte
The Blues (MM), Mona Hatoum
Scheherazade 2.0, Osman Khan
Sketch for Illusion, Cai Guo-Qiang
that kind of blue, Mary Lum
Hindsight, Elle Pérez
BLK FMNNST Loaner Library: Thought Forms, 2019, Cauleen Smith
Laylah Ali (b. 1968, Buffalo, New York) is an artist based in western Massachusetts.
Her latest solo exhibit Is anything the matter? Drawings by Laylah Ali opened in January 2024 at the SUNY Fredonia Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery and will travel in 2025 to the University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Colby College Museum in Maine.
Ali has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, among others, and her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial. Ali’s works are included in the permanent collections of numerous public institutions, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Seattle Art Museum. Ali has been the recipient of multiple honors including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, United States Artists Fellowship, William H. Johnson Prize, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Artist Prize. Her work and process were highlighted in season 3 of the acclaimed PBS Art21 series. She is currently the Chair of Studio Art and the Alexander Falck Class of 1899 Professor of Art at Williams College, Williamstown, MA.
Nick Cave (b. 1959, Fulton, MO; lives and works in Chicago, IL) is an artist, educator and foremost a messenger, working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. Cave is well known for his Soundsuits, sculptural forms based on the scale of his body, initially created in direct response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991. Soundsuits camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals race, gender and class, forcing the viewer to look without judgment. They serve as a visual embodiment of social justice that represent both brutality and empowerment.
Throughout his practice, Cave has created spaces of memorial through combining found historical objects with contemporary dialogues on gun violence and death, underscoring the anxiety of severe trauma brought on by catastrophic loss. The figure remains central as Cave casts his own body in bronze, an extension of the performative work so critical to his oeuvre. Cave reminds us, however, that while there may be despair, there remains space for hope and renewal. From dismembered body parts stem delicate metal flowers, affirming the potential of new growth. Cave encourages a profound and compassionate analysis of violence and its effects as the path towards an ultimate metamorphosis. While Cave’s works are rooted in our current societal moment, when progress on issues of global warming, racism and gun violence (both at the hands of citizens and law enforcement) seem maddeningly stalled, he asks how we may reposition ourselves to recognize the issues, come together on a global scale, instigate change, and ultimately, heal.
Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, NJ) is a Venezuelan-American artist. Institutional exhibition highlights include the 20-year retrospective Mr. Remember at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2022–23) and the video survey Fresh Hell at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2023); the Whitney Biennial Quiet as It’s Kept (2022); the Roof Garden Commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); the Biennale di Venezia May You Live in Interesting Times, Venice (2019); the 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2019); and solo exhibitions at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018); Secession, Vienna (2016); Art + Practice, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2016); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2015); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2014, together with Jayson Musson). Da Corte lives and works in Philadelphia. Recent longform critical writing include catalogue essays for the international touring exhibitions Marisol: A Retrospective and Ellsworth Kelly at 100. In 2026, with the Whitney Museum’s Meg Onli and Scott Rothkopf, Da Corte will co-curate the first Roy Lichtenstein retrospective in New York in more than 30 years. Da Corte was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Mark Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The job of the artist, he says, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention. Appropriating archaeological, field ecology and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (‘rational’) scientific methods and ‘subjective’ (‘irrational’) influences. The artist’s spectacular and often fantastical curiosity cabinets, modeled on Wunderkammen of the 16th and 17th Century, exalt atypical orderings of objects and specimens. Dion also frequently collaborates with museums of natural history, aquariums, zoos and other institutions mandated to produce public knowledge on the topic of nature. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Mark Dion questions the objectivity and authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society, tracking how pseudo-science, social agendas and ideology creep into public discourse and knowledge production.
Mark Dion is dedicated to making prints. He has long been an enthusiastic producer of print editions.
For Mass MoCA, Dion has made a black and white work titled “Avian Morphology”. This print references school charts and blackboard technology, yet it embodies a mischievous relation to didactic information production. Dion’s take on the kinds of anatomical typology charts often found illustrating bird field is playful and even subversive. Rather than describing various parts of a bird, Dion’s chart indicates a history of fanatical, speculative fiction literature. An avid birder and reader, the work is doubtlessly a sly self portrait, while humorously cautioning the viewer to be vigilant regarding the conventions of knowledge production.
Cai Guo-Qiang was born in Quanzhou, Fujian in December 1957. Over the years, Cai has worked with a broad range of creative mediums, from painting, installation, video art, and performance art, to new technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), NFTs, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. Grounded in the conceptual foundations of Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues, his often site-specific artworks interpret and respond to the local culture and history, establishing a dialogue between viewers and the larger universe around them. His famed gunpowder paintings, explosion events, and installations are imbued with a force that transcends the two-dimensional plane to oscillate freely between society and nature.
Major awards he has received include the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999, the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007, and the Fukuoka Prize in 2009. In 2012, he was honored as a Laureate for the Praemium Imperiale. That same year, he was awarded the first U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts. Cai also served as the Director of Visual Effects and Fireworks for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
For over three decades, Cai has had numerous solo exhibitions in major art museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006 and a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008, which travelled to the National Art Museum of China the same year. In 2015, Cai realized the explosion event Sky Ladder in his hometown of Quanzhou. The artwork became the centerpiece of an eponymous documentary directed by Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald, which is globally available on Netflix.
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton’s art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric center of her installations. To enter their liminality is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason and imagination.
Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She represented the United States in the 1991 Sao Paulo Bienal, the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited extensively around the world. Her major commissions include projects for Waterfront Seattle (upcoming); Park Avenue Armory (2013); The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2010); The Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009); Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan (2006); La Maison Rouge Fondation de Antoine Galbert, Paris, France (2005); Historiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2004); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2003); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2003, 1991); The Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002); Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan (2001); The Musee d’art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997); The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1996); The Art Institute of Chicago (1995); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); The Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988).
Mona Hatoum engages with the contradictions of life. Her work often achieves a sense of the ‘uncanny’, that visceral jolt we experience when we encounter a familiar object in an unfamiliar context. Early performance and video-based work gave way in the 1990s to sculpture and installations, but throughout she has retained an interest in the body – its fragility and resilience – and with ideas of displacement and confinement. Haltom’s Hatoum’s major survey exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015); Tate Modern, London (2016); Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2016) and a large US survey initiated by the Menil Collection, Houston (2017) that travelled to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis (2018), drew on thirty-five years of radical thinking combining these political and aesthetic concerns.
Hatoum is acutely sensitive to the specificity of place and fascinated by the materials and craft skills of the many countries she has visited and worked in. Over the years, residencies have taken the artist from the heightened political atmosphere of Jerusalem to the domesticity of the last Shaker community in Maine. Yet what is striking in Hatoum’s work is how personal experience is always made universal.
She has participated in numerous important group exhibitions including the Turner Prize (1995), Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), Documenta, Kassel (2002 and 2017), Biennale of Sydney (2006), the Istanbul Biennial (1995 and 2011) and The Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013). In January 2018, Hatoum received the Whitechapel Art Icon Award. In 2019, Hatoum received the Praemium Imperiale Award, presented by the Japan Art Association, for her lifetime achievement in sculpture.
Osman Khan is a Detroit-based artist interested in constructing artifacts and experiences for social criticism and aesthetic expression. His work plays and subverts the materiality behind themes of identity, home/land, social and public space through participatory & performative installations and site-specific interventions. He is currently a Professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.
Khan’s work has been shown at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA); the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MoCAD); the Shanghai Biennale; the Zero1 Festival, San Jose; Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Ars Electronica Center, Linz; Socrates Sculpture Park, NYC; Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids (as part of ArtPrize 2014); Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea, Rome; among others.
He is a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, an Art Matters grant, Ars Electronica’s Prix Ars Award of Distinction, and an Arctic Circle 2009 Residency. Articles about his work have appeared in numerous publications including Hyperallergic, Artforum, Art in America, I.D., LA Times, and the NY Times, among others.
Mary Lum creates intricate collages, installations, and photographs that use the urban environment to explore geometric abstraction, perspectival space, and color field. She is interested in the margins of city life - overlooked details that she photographs in isolation and recombines within her work. Stairwells, signage and storefronts are fragmented and dislocated from their original context, only to be repositioned within Lum’s layered arrangements of color. Through juxtaposing disparate elements within her work, the artist aims to construct new meanings from the familiar and mundane.
Influenced by Cubism and Russian Constructivism, Lum is perhaps most interested in the concept of psychogeography, as practiced by members of the Situationist International movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. Referring to the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behavior of the individual, one may see Lum’s interdisciplinary practice as a physical manifestation of this phenomenon. Derived from her experience of wandering the streets of Paris, London, Berlin, and New York, Lum combines fragments from advertising posters, her own photographs, and planes of bright color, alluding to the multilayered, transitory state of urban space. The city is presented as both a metaphorical and literal collage, composed of constantly shifting elements.
Lum’s work has been exhibited in numerous institutions internationally including MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; The Drawing Center, New York; Kunstmuseum fur Geganwartskunst, Basel; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; and Beijing Academy of Fine Arts. Lum has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the Radcliffe Fellowship for Advanced Study (2004-2005), and a McDowell Colony Fellowship (2012), among others.
Elle Pérez is an artist from the Bronx, New York, who lives and works in New York City. Pérez primarily works in photography and moving image, depicting intimate moments, emotional exchanges, and visceral details within their portraits, landscapes, and films.
Their work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, and has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at MASS MoCA (2023); the Baltimore Museum of Art (2022); the Carnegie Museum of Art (2021); Public Art Fund (2019); and MoMA PS1 (2018). They were included in the 59th International Venice Biennale (2022), the Whitney Biennial (2019), and have been featured in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2022), Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2022), Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); Barbican Centre, London (2020); and the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2019).
They have been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, Lightwork and a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2023, Pérez was the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Pérez is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the Yale School of Art. They have previously held appointments in the Art, Film, and Visual Studies department of Harvard University, Williams College, The Cooper Union, and taught photography at the Educational Alliance Art School in New York City. They were a Dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture from 2016 to 2021.
Pérez’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others.
Cauleen Smith (born Riverside, California, 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants.
Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (2017), Prospect 4, New Orleans (2017), Studio Museum Harlem; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the New Museum, New York; and BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. She has had solo exhibitions at MASS MoCA; the Art Institute of Chicago; Institute for Contemporary Art Pennsylvania; the Museum of Contemporary, Chicago; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and a two person exhibition with Theaster Gates at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the 2022 Heinz Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2020 Wein Artist Prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem, the inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2016, the 2016 Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video, Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film /Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, a Rauschenberg Residency in 2015 and recently in 2019, Smith was an artist in residence at Artpace. Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. Smith earned a B.A in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 1991 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998. Smith studied with Trinh T. Minh Ha, Angela Davis, and Lynn Hershman-Leeson at San Francisco State University. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Smith lives in Los Angeles and is a Professor at CalArts School of Art.