Image: Laura Stayton (MFA ’26 LowRes)
JANUARY COLLOQUIUM
Every January, students in MassArt’s MFA: Fine Arts Low Residency program gather virtually for a colloquium that includes programming and academic reviews. Each colloquium is organized around a theme and features guest speakers and visiting artists. Topics are grounded in contemporary studio practice, art history, art theory, and expanded fields of study (audience, landscape, empathy, identity), and provide a lens for discussion. The colloquium concludes with academic reviews of student work by program faculty and guest critics. Students present their work, participate in discussions, and provide feedback for their peers.
JANUARY 7 – 11, 2026 COLLOQUIUM
Materiality and the Immaterial
“Material,” “immaterial”: these words can refer to the tangible and intangible. They can also refer to what matters and what doesn’t.
As artists, we make work with materials amid a firehose of immateriality. Mediated narratives have a great deal to do with real conditions, material concerns, but are also deeply entangled with the noisy, the irrelevant, the overwhelming, the undermining, the distracting. We live on and with screens, but have to selectively screen them out.
This virtual colloquium will bring us together (intangibly) to talk about materials and stakes in a context of immateriality. How can we think clearly about artistic attention and intention in conflicted, multidimensional terms? How can working with materials resist the logics of the immaterial and assert what matters in new forms?
2026 COLLOQUIUM PROGRAMMING
GORDON HALL: ON WAITING AND WRITING
WEDNESDAY | January 7 | 6:30pm ET
Gordon Hall will lead a participatory writing workshop exploring waiting as both subject and method, then present on their recent sculptural and performance work and participate in an open-ended conversation.
Gordon Hall is an artist whose work encompasses sculpture, performance, and writing. Their sculptures emerge from the world of furniture, and are often put to use by performing bodies who test out possible uses for Hall’s ambiguously functional objects. Hall has had solo presentations at The Kitchen, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Renaissance Society, EMPAC, and Temple Contemporary, among other venues. Hall is represented by DOCUMENT in North America and Hua International in Europe and Asia, and is Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Image Courtesy G. Hall
PHILLIP DAVID STEARNS and HAENA CHU:
ON TIME AND ATTENTIONAL PHENOMENA
FRIDAY | January 9 | 6:30pm ET
Phillip David Stearns will present on his installation work enacting sites of study for anthropoclastic geology: layers and artifacts of discarded plastic sediment preserved in the long-term geologic record. Haena Chu from the Strother School of Radical Attention will join us to discuss the School, its mission in context of art and curation, and approaching artworks as “attentional vessels” which sustain and release attention like gravity fields.
Phillip David Stearns is a Denver based artist whose conceptually grounded, process based practice grapples with significant social and political issues of our time through music and sound art, expanded photography, installation art, textile art, new media and digital art. His work has been exhibited internationally by institutions including the Zhongzhou Art Museum, Haus der Elektronischen Künste Basel, Park Avenue Armory, ELEKTRA-BIAN, Tate Britain, Transmediale, Anyang Public Art Project, FILE, and Transitio MX. Phillip has taught as an adjunct professor at University of Denver’s Emergent Digital Practices, Parsons School of Design’s Design + Technology, New York University Integrated Design & Media, New York Institute of Technology Department of Digital Art and Design, and led a seminar on the Digital Dark Age at Hochschule Düsseldorf.
Haena Chu (she/her, pronounced Hannah like “Hannah Montana”) is a Korean-born, New York-based contemporary art worker who seeks convergence between curatorial and pedagogical practices, with interest in alternative relationships to art that counter the logic of exhibiting and viewing. She holds a BA in Art History and Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and an MA in Museum Studies from NYU, and has coordinated exhibitions and artist programs at Art Center Nabi, Seoul; the Rubin Museum, New York; and Gallery Hyundai New York Project Space. At SoRA, Haena organizes exhibitions and workshops for the school’s Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO as well as collaborative attentional practices in partnership with fellow cultural organizations.
Images Courtesy P. D. Stearns and H. Chu
ISSAC ENDO, NIEN TZU WENG & ANNA MARTINE WHITEHEAD:
ON STAKES, PRESENCE, AND PERFORMANCE
SATURDAY | January 10 | 5:00pm ET
Nien Tzu Weng and Issac Endo will perform a short Zoom piece linking the material and immaterial across time and space. Anna Martine Whitehead will talk about new work they are developing in relation to the 2023 Montgomery Riverfront brawl. Together all three will discuss their practices, which engage charged contexts of care and community.
Issac Endo (née Koji) is a réalisateur working in the arts. Trained as an interpreter of circus and dance, they were invited to become the National Circus School of Montreal’s first student of direction and dramaturgy under the guidance of Howard Richard, graduating in 2019. Their work focuses on environmental/scenic realization: through props, costumes, scenography, and apparatuses, Issac investigates ways to inform and shape how people interact with, inhabit, and blur distinctions between performer/spectator and object/subject.
Nien Tzu Weng is a Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary dance artist based in Montreal. In 2008, she immigrated to Canada to continue her artistic practice. She aims to build bridges between disciplines, pursuing an experimental approach to contemporary dance. Her projects have been shared in Node Digital Festival (Frankfurt, DE), Biennale Némo (Paris, FR), Ars Electronica (Linz, AUT), Les Percéides (Percé, QC), SummerWorks (Toronto, ON), 1-act SHIFT Theatre (Vancouver, BC) as well as in Montreal, OFFTA (Fonderie Darling), Elektra (SAT), Akousma (Usine C), Tangente Danse and Studio 303. Weng is one of the recipients of the James Saya Award, Undergraduate Research Award and The Contemporary Dance Prize at Concordia University.
Anna Martine Whitehead does performance. Their work considers embodied epistemologies of Black queer time and their expressions in liminal sites like prisons, attics, and churches. Their solo and collaborative work has been presented by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; Chicago Symphony Orchestra; the Museum of Modern Art; San José Museum of Art; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. They are a 2022-23 Vera List Center Fellow, 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant recipient, 2020 Graham Foundation Fellow, and an awardee of MAP Fund grants in 2020 and 2021. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, frieze, Art Practical and Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017); and is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).
Images Courtesy I. Endo, N.T Weng and A.M. Whitehead
LEAD FACULTY / PANEL MODERATOR
Ian Hatcher (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist who uses language, sound, code, and performance to probe technological power.
His work has been presented at Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Poetry Project, Artists Space, Chicago Cultural Center, Palais de Tokyo, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Festival Actoral, ISEA, in public libraries in Denmark and Norway, live on Russian TV, and in a host of bookstores, bars, and basements. He is the author of a collection of print/sound poetry, Prosthesis, as well as assorted chapbooks, records, apps, and kinetic poems. He performs with the collective Lucky Pierre, collaborates with Issac Endo as c:able, and plays synth in the band SLZY MYLFS.
Ian holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Brown University. He has taught art and writing courses at Brown, NYU, NJIT, Rutgers, as a Digital Studies Fellow, and the University of Bergen, as a Fulbright Scholar to Norway. He is currently a PhD candidate at CU Boulder, where his research focuses on claims, comedy, and corporatism.