An important new show opens at the MassArt Art Museum (MAAM) this Thursday, January 23. Curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of the independent consultancy c2-curatorsquared, in collaboration with MAAM’s Director Lisa Tung, Future Fossils brings together the work of 20 international artists representing tremendous diversity of place, material, process, thematic concerns and career stage. The exhibition’s scale and themes make it one of the most important on Boston’s 2025 cultural calendar.

Maureen Gruben, *Fresh Artifacts*, 2017. Cast resin, steel, copper nails, reflective tape, wax. Courtesy of the artist. Gruben’s work honors her father, a legenday Inuvialuk hunter and trapper who was sent to a residential school as a child and stripped of his identity.

According to the curators, Future Fossil’s organizing principle is reframing the present as seen from an imagined future. What might archaeologists find in the year 3000 when they dig up remnants of our 21st century existence? What objects of today will be the relics of tomorrow and why? What can we learn from collectively thinking in the future perfect tense?

As wildfires ravage Los Angeles, the summer of 2024 gets recorded as the hottest in history, and a U.S. president who promises to “drill baby drill” gets sworn into office, shared fears about the repercussions of global polluting and extractive practices, systemic racism, political inaction and corporate greed make this a timely—if unsettling—concept for a traveling exhibition.

MIT Professor and architect Brandon Clifford will be authoring an article for a publication which will accompany later Future Fossils exhibition dates. He has noted:“If an archaeologist looks back at our time, we will be called the mound builders because we’re making enormous landfills all around the world. Those are the things that are going to last. Civilizations will ask, “What were people thinking in the early 2000s, when they were building these colossal mounds?”

The twenty artists included in MAAM’s upcoming show may or may not have been pondering what would be filling those mounds when they made their work. But the curators found, whether in their composition, aesthetics or subject matter, distinct pieces which together create a powerful picture of contemporary artists’ response to the unprecedented time in which we live. It’s high time for an artist-led reckoning.

“Principium” (2020), a towering spiral sculpture composed of stacked bronze cell phones by Polish artist Alicja Kwade was one of the first pieces that got the curators thinking about modern objects as relics. “Principium” didn’t make the show, but it kickstarted the project and ultimately led to the international lineup of artists whose work will be in dialogue at MAAM from January 23 - April 13, 2025. The artists range from mega-famous blue-chip names to exciting up-and-comers. They are: Ai Weiwei (China/Portugal), Sanford Biggers (United States), Izaak Brandt (United Kingdom), Jedediah Caesar (United States/United Kingdom/Germany), Julian Charrière (France/Switzerland/Germany), Tania Pérez Córdova (Mexico), Liz Glynn, (United States), Maureen Gruben (Canada), Matthew Angelo Harrison (United States), William Lamson (United States), James Lewis (United Kingdom/Austria), Jean-Luc Moulène (France), Reynier Leyva Novo (Cuba), Studio Drift (Netherlands), Do Ho Suh (Korea/United Kingdom), Clarissa Tossin (Brazil/United States) Marion Verboom (France), Nari Ward (Jamaica/United States), and Rachel Whiteread (United Kingdom).

Julian Charrière, *Metamorphism XX*, 2016. Artificial lava, molten computer waste, Corian plinth, steel and white glass. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles.

“We’re interested in seeing art as a reflection of current culture, and artists are always the first ones to catch on to things,” Hoos Fox explained. While the exhibition’s organizing principle seems relatively straightforward, the actual experience of seeing these works together evokes a much more complicated and profound response. There is a real urgency to the work which belies the slow natural process of fossilization. In other words, the artworks insist these issues need our focus now, we cannot leave examination to archaeologists of the future.

On the first floor, Julian Charrière’s Metamorphism XX, 2016 looks like nothing more than a volcanic rock inside a glass vitrine, but the object’s chemical makeup is shocking. Charrière, whose dedication to environmental concerns won him, along with Cecilia Vicuña, the inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize from LA MOCA, collects the inner guts of computers and cell phones—motherboards, hard drives, CPUs and RAM—and transforms them back into their elemental nature by burying them in molten lava which he creates. The result are rock-like forms which draw parallels and contrasts between natural and man-made processes and provoke contemplation about the climate impact of our unchecked digital ambitions.

Clarissa Tossin is a Brazilian artist based in Los Angeles. Her red clay castings of routers, discs, keyboards and plastic water bottles rest on a collection of baskets she made out of salvaged Amazon shipping boxes using a traditional Amazonian weaving technique. Tossin’s work examines destructive manufacturing, shipping, and extraction practices in Brazil’s rainforests, ports and rivers and their impact on indigenous Amazonian life. Vulneravelmente Humano (Vulnerably Human) no. 2, 2022 is also on view by the artist. As the curators have observed, “sprawled out on the floor, this strange human-like form makes us think about the fragility of our species and our destruction of outer space.”

Faced with such a wide range of subject matter and approach, the curators divided the show into four thematic categories: Body Based, Myth Makers, House and Home and Digital Devices. Hoos Fox explained that the themes are permeable, history should be understood as fluid and many works in the show fit into multiple categories. A few of the first floor pieces could fit nicely into a category of skeletal or ghost-like fossils, negatives of their originals:

Do Ho Suh’s Specimen Series: Refrigerator, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2013. London-based Do Ho Suh has said he wanted to build his home so he could carry it with him like a snail. His visually arresting Specimen Series addresses feelings of displacement and longing he experiences living in the United States away from his home in Seoul. By creating phantoms of his domestic spaces—toilets, sinks, rooms, even entire houses, Do Ho Suh’s Specimens address the poetics of personal space and the inability of memory to recreate the real thing.

Izaak Brandt, *Deadstock Archive: The Classics*, 2021. Hand-drawn PLA, white laces, sneaker display case, wall mountable white powder-coated steel frame. Collection Sarabande Foundation, London.

Izaak Brandt’s Deadstock Archive: The Classics, 2021. Izaak Brandt is a London-based breakdancer who performs all over the world. His fascination with materialistic consumer culture valuing brands and status to such an extent that sneakerheads collect shoes they will never wear, is brought to life in this ghost-like white sculpture. Sneakers, due to the enormous carbon footprint of their manufacturing and their synthetic materials, are sure to be found in the future mounds described by Brandon Clifford. Brandt’s work asks us, “Are they worth it?”

Reynier Leyva Novo’s *The Desire to Die for Others*, *(El Deseo de Morir por Otros)* 2012. 8 objects cast in resin from the original objects.

Reynier Leyva Novo’s The Desire to Die for Others, 2012. Eight clear resin casts of the weapons Cuban rulers preferred during their reigns glow in a dark ante-room off the main first floor gallery. Three revolvers, four machetes and one bullet made from the originals seem to vibrate against their black grounds on the dark plum-painted walls. The works are unnervingly beautiful, making it hard to accept that such beauty could be made from something capable of unchecked bloodshed. As one of Cuba’s leading conceptual artists, Leyva Novo mines the past to challenge myths about who has the right to power, influence and violence.

Nari Ward, *Swing Low*, 2015. Bronze, rope. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano.

The most powerful work on the first floor is by the Jamaican-born artist Nari Ward. Bostonians might recall Sun Splashed, Ward’s major mid-career show at the ICA Boston in 2017, organized by the Perez Art Museum, Miami. Swing Low, created in 2015, is a bronze cast made from a 2010 sculpture now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum called Swing. Ward often finds inspiration in the Harlem neighborhood where he lives, and via an intense process of physical assemblage, investigates issues of cultural identity, racist histories, storytelling and community. Swing, composed of shoe tips, car tire, shoe tongues, and rope, evokes a fierce paradoxical response. While tire swings symbolize childhood, innocence and play, this tire hung by a noose, recalls something much darker. The tongues and tips of sneakers, which in other contexts represent roaming, freedom and fashion, here, encased, recall isolation, loss of innocence, even death.

Ward often uses recognizable songs as titles. For his 1993 installation Amazing Grace he amassed as many as 365 baby strollers and heaped them in the shape of a boat (or womb or vagina as he has said in interviews) with an accompanying soundtrack of Mahalia Jackson’s gospel standard of the title song. The mournful spiritual for which Swing Low is named, played in my mind while I toured MAAM’s first floor gallery.

Ai Weiwei, detail, *Study of Perspective in Glass*, 2018. Glass. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

The least successful piece comes from the biggest name. Ai Weiwei is one of China’s most influential living artists, a champion of human rights and free expression within China’s authoritarian regime. Study of Perspective in Glass, a series of the artist’s middle finger flipping off Chinese authorities, is important in its own right, but doesn’t fit Future Fossils’ narrative. It’s political immediacy and pop art execution veer too far from the remorse and yearning present in the show’s other works.

Liz Glynn, *Unfinished Business*, 2019. T-shirts, resin, steel armature. Courtesy Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada.

If you haven’t yet visited MAAM’s upstairs renovation, prepare to be wowed. The 37 foot ceiling height allows for plenty of drama and a flood of light, just what this emotionally weighty show requires.

Reigning over the space like a headless specter, Liz Glynn’s Unfinished Business brings souvenirs of modern day resistance movements to bear upon our present political reality. Black t-shirts you’ll recognize from women’s marches, punk bands, and equal rights movements drape the figure in a silhouette recalling 19th century suffragettes. A t-shirt in the front of the skirt bears the word “waiting.” Women are still waiting for the promise of equality and justice to become real, and after the 2024 election, women in the United States and around the world fear the wait will only lengthen. Without a voice or agency, Unfinished Business speaks to the long history of women’s fight for freedom and an uncertain future resting on human’s intrepid capacity for hope.

Sanford Biggers’ BAM! (for Walter) stayed with me long after I left Future Fossils. For his BAM series, Biggers first chooses a figure from his vast collection of wooden African sculptures and drenches it in wax to obscure its unique attributes. He then uses a process he calls “ballistic sculpting,” shooting at it at a firing range. After it has been disfigured by gunshots, he casts the figure in bronze and names each one after after a victim of brutality. An accompanying video shows the figure being shot at; mercilessly the museum installed headphones so the sound of shooting does not infiltrate the gallery.

Marion Verboom, *Achronie* No. 37, 2022. Jesmonite, plaster, concrete. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

Achronie, a term coined by the German sociologist Elisabeth Lenk (among others) means a sense of time outside normal time, or “an interlocking of epochs in which the walls of different times get so close together that they become permeable.” I found French artist Marion Verboom’s soaring surrealist pillar especially illuminating as an embodiment of the show’s curatorial theme because of how successfully it portrays the limits of writing and understanding history. The column is composed of five parts, each a different category or era. A section from a wind instrument rests atop an architectural detail which sits on a section of vertebrae which rests on a mythological or fanciful figurehead. Archaeological sites offer bits and pieces of objects to be studied, but they can be from different time periods and have uses or meanings we can only guess at, like pieces belonging to different puzzles. Robin Frohardt dealt with this theme so well in her “Plastic Bag Store,” most recently installed at Mass MOCA, in which a future explorer pulled plastic trash from the ice and thinking it treasure, displayed it in a museum.

A final highlight of the upstairs exhibition is Slow Thinking, a multipart installation made for the show by Vienna-based artist James Lewis. In notes about the work the artist wrote, “A large aspect of the installation is that it functions like a contract or score—it is an agreement amongst the artist, museum staff and curators to repurpose otherwise discarded material that is used to create partitioned and demarcated space. There’s something in this repurposing and reassembling that echoes the way in which all types of history (social, recent, geological) are re-imagined through a form of salvage.”

Lewis’ work is notoriously enigmatic. He likes to coat familiar, domestic objects like sunflowers and couches in a gray sludge composed of plaster bandage and concrete, giving them the appearance of having been excavated from below ground. Included in this site-specific installation are An evening began (III), a wall mounted shelf from that series made in 2024 and Slow Thinking an HD video of the artist “fossil hunting” in a shopping mall in Vienna, mounted in a in open aluminum stud partition walls taken from the previous exhibition at MAAM.

By confronting the viewer with hard truths about human impact in the anthropocene era, Future Fossils calls us collectively to action. As MAAM Director Lisa Tung told me, “all the things we now think of as old were once contemporary.” Why wait for later generations to denounce our destructive ecological and social practices? In active dialogue with each other, these artworks, for a brief moment, stop time, making it clear that change must happen now if we are to make way for a successful future.

Don’t miss your chance to see this powerful show. The opening this Thursday, January 23, 2025.

Future Fossils Exhibition Schedule:
MassArt Art Museum (MAAM): January 23 - April 13, 2025
Susquehanna Art Museum (SAM): May 24 - November 2, 2025
Torggler Fine Art Center: January 23 - May 17, 2026

Hero Image: Sanford Biggers, BAM (for Walter), 2016. Bronze with black patina, accompanied by an HD video. 16 1/2 x 4 5/8 x 4 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery. Photo: Jason Wyche.