Stage is a participatory installation and sound work that draws on the history of the microphone as a tool for protest and public oratory, while recalling the metonymic references to microphones in hip-hop lyrics from the 1980s to the present.

This major exhibition explores the work of artists within US prisons and the centrality of incarceration to contemporary art and culture. Featuring art made by people in prisons and work by nonincarcerated artists concerned with state repression, erasure, and imprisonment, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration highlights more than 35 artists, including American Artist, Tameca Cole, Russell Craig, James “Yaya” Hough, Jesse Krimes, Mark Loughney, Gilberto Rivera, and Sable Elyse Smith. The exhibition has been updated to reflect the growing COVID-19 crisis in US prisons, featuring new works by exhibition artists made in response to this ongoing emergency.

In the second year of a multi-part collaboration, The Studio Museum in Harlem will present its annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition at MoMA PS1. This Longing Vessel will feature new work by the 2019–20 cohort of the Studio Museum’s foundational residency program, artists E. Jane (b. 1990, Bethesda, MD), Naudline Pierre (b. 1989, Leominster, MA), and Elliot Reed (b. 1992, Milwaukee, WI). This Longing Vessel troubles and excites ways of seeing, seeking new language for the building of extraordinary futures.

From the very outset of her career in the 1950s, Niki de Saint Phalle (American and French, 1930–2002) defied artistic conventions, creating works that were overtly feminist, performative, collaborative, and monumental. Her first major US exhibition, Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life features over 200 works that highlight Saint Phalle’s interdisciplinary approach and engagement with pressing social issues. Innovation was key to Saint Phalle’s process: from beginning to end, she envisioned new ways of inhabiting the world.

These lunchtime conversations between Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter and her fellow artists in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, bring a wide range of voices into dialogue to consider how bonds are forged through and around creative practice in the face of state-imposed separation. How does incarceration impact existing relationships, and how can art construct new forms of connection—a “chosen family”—in turn.