Work Ethics: Three New England Shows Look at Labor, Capital, and Incarceration
By Katherine Rochester
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In a cultural climate defined by unchecked market influence and unprecedented government interference in the arts, what is the state of experimental practice? Although three exhibitions I visited on a recent tour of New England variously interrogated this question, all chafed against the strictures of capital and power that structure contemporary life.
Tackling the subject head-on was “Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form,” a major group show curated by Natalie Bell and Ramona Ngin at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and coinciding with its fortieth anniversary. Here, investigations of student debt, labor precarity, and worker alienation—often implicating the art institution itself—are pursued through a preponderance of bureaucratic operations. Posted at the entrance to the exhibition, Ghislaine Leung’s Budgets, 2025, is a vinyl spreadsheet detailing the exhibition’s itemized costs, which totaled $271,859. Elsewhere, several projects utilize contractual agreements as prompts for performances or prerequisites for interactions with artworks. Blondell Cummings’s spellbinding video Chicken Soup, 1989, turns to the reproductive and domestic care work of Black women as a source for choreographed movement, while Leung’s Maintenance, 2025, is comprised of a simple prompt: “The exhibition space is left as it is.” The resulting work contains traces of previous shows, including unpatched holes and vinyl shavings untouched by custodial staff and installers—a gesture that draws our attention to the invisible labor of arts workers by accentuating their absence.
Heavily contextualized by dense wall labels, segments of the exhibition risk unfolding like a spatialized bibliography, reducing artworks to citations in a curatorial argument. Yet this tendency is mostly balanced by works emphasizing the affective and interpolative dimensions of labor. See, for instance, Sophia Giovannitti’s Confession Prototype 1, 2025, a racy recorded lecture-performance on the transactional undercurrents of sexual and parasocial art world encounters (which requires that visitors sign an NDA before listening), or Autumn Knight’s IM SORRY MOM, 2026, which underscores the unpayable debt of maternal labor through a hand-stitched plush apology.
With these themes in mind, I ditched the ivory tower and traveled south to the blue-collar city of Fall River, MA to catch “Citadel,” a group exhibition curated by Cory John Scozzari and presented at the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (FRMoCA). Founded and run by artists Brittni Ann Harvey and Harry Gould Harvey IV, both of whom hail from the region, FRMoCA is part artist-run Kunsthalle and part social practice project designed to connect experimental art with working class communities. While “Performing Conditions” thematizes how labor has been outsourced to automated systems and dominated by managerial oversight, the nine-artist group exhibition at FRMoCA tackles similar themes as lived reality in the context of an industrial city. At the center of the gallery crouches Deposits (Toad on Coin), 2025, a giant inflatable sculpture by Emily Jones, which references a feng shui money toad. Several works surround Jones’s amphibian, including Gabriella Torres Ferrer’s green coconut sculptures festooned with miniature screens displaying live financial data. A piece by Joel Dean comprising hundreds of unevenly stacked US pennies lines the gallery windowsill, forming a miniature skyline from the recently discontinued currency. Scattered nearby are Kambel Smith’s architectural models of major landmarks fashioned from painted cardboard, which, alongside Jones’s toad and Dean’s pennies, coalesce as Gulliverian inversions of scale that echo the disorienting circulations of capital that canvas the globe.
From Fall River I headed inland to Providence, where an exhibition at Brown University foregrounding the Israeli-run prison system in Palestine recently collided with our own government’s pro-Zionist funding cuts to academic institutions. On view at the school’s Bell Gallery is “Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom,” a stunning presentation featuring new work by Ramallah- and New York-based artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. The centerpiece of the show, a room-sized video installation highlighting testimonies from former Palestinian political prisoners, was shot on location in Palestine. Expertly installed in the entry gallery are wispy drawings and confessional screenshots layered on metallic sheets that evoke the infrastructures that confine Palestinian life—walls, checkpoints, and barriers. For the artists, such carceral logics permeate the wider world: “The entire globe is imprisoned under the shadow of the capitalist colonial system,” reads a line in their multichannel video. Accept this as a given, and how does one bear witness to a community recognized by international authorities as subject to genocide while honoring the interdependence of global liberation projects?
In “Prisoners of Love,” poetic citation offers a strategy for articulating these radical solidarities without resorting to the nullifying qualities of abstraction. Underscoring such interlocking struggles are lines from “Enemy of the Sun” (1970) by Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim, frequently misattributed to Black Panther George Jackson after a handwritten copy was found in his cell following his 1971 murder by prison guards. In Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s video installation, we follow former Palestinian prisoners as they trek through external worlds once denied them: walking alongside budding flowers, singing songs of protest, and gazing at the horizons of occupied lands.
Bell Gallery curators Kate Kraczon and Thea Quiray Tagle were abruptly terminated shortly before the show opened. The official (and no doubt partially true) reason given was austerity measures following shortfalls in federal funding. But that’s only part of the story. The exhibition that unfolds in the galleries must now be read on multiple registers, including the pernicious silencing of voices for Palestinian liberation and the global menace of increasing censorship on a range of topics once considered the purview of much worthwhile art. With the sacking of the Bell curators, the future of such experimental and politically urgent exhibitions at Brown is now in question. If private donors and federal agencies can continue to silence dissent by withholding funding, then perhaps we are, indeed, also caught in “the shadow of the capitalist colonial system”—albeit under conditions that are variable, elusive, and unequally weaponized.
This article was originally published by Artforum.