MIT List Visual Arts Center Presents “List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes”

The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents a focused installment of its List Projects series devoted to artist and writer Every Ocean Hughes (formerly Emily Roysdon). Staged in the Bakalar Gallery, the presentation aligns with the museum’s program of research-driven exhibitions and concentrates on a single moving-image work at a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice.

At the center of the exhibition is One Big Bag, a video installation that examines care, kinship, and the social rituals surrounding death. The work follows a death doula—performed by Lindsay Rico with choreography by Miguel Gutierrez—who unpacks a mobile kit used in end-of-life work. Through measured performance and direct address, the piece maps the material, emotional, and ceremonial dimensions of death care, countering euphemism and foregrounding community-based forms of mourning.

The installation treats death as a lived, sensory reality rather than an abstraction. It reflects Hughes’s broader transdisciplinary practice across performance, film, writing, and pedagogy, where choreography, language, and objecthood intersect to propose pragmatic frameworks for collective memory and public health discourse.

Hughes’s work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Moderna Museet, and Studio Voltaire, with additional presentations at Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, and Secession. These institutional contexts frame the showing of One Big Bag at MIT, drawing a throughline between museum histories of performance and moving image and contemporary debates around care and social ritual.

Curated by Chief Curator Natalie Bell and Curatorial Assistant Zach Ngin, the exhibition positions One Big Bag as both artwork and pedagogical tool. The presentation emphasizes how end-of-life labor can be articulated through rigorous form—measured performance, direct language, and a carefully considered set of objects—within a concise exhibition format designed for focused inquiry.

Venue and dates: Bakalar Gallery, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts — September 18–December 14, 2025.