October 4, 2022
MCLA Arts & Culture (MAC) will showcase a new solo exhibition at Gallery 51, “To Know A Veil” by Nathaniel Donnett on October 7.
The opening reception will run from 5-7 p.m. and the exhibition will be on display until January 27, 2023.
To Know A Veil consists of wall works, sculptures, an installation, and sounds that investigate concerns about fragmentation, memory, erasure, the self, and interiority. The exhibition borrows its title from W. E. B. Du Bois's classic book The Souls of Black Folk. In that work, the Veil signifies racism and the accompanying moral perception of Black America. Donnett also draws on Fred Moten's notion of enclosure—a psychological entrapment caused by social precarity. In the context of this exhibition, Donnett questions how individuals navigate enclosures that frame groups of people as reductive, noncomplex categories instead of plural, complex beings.
During the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts Artist Lab Residency, Donnett invited students from Berkshire County's Pine Cobble School, Berkshire Arts and Technology Charter Public School, and MCLA to participate in this exhibition. They collaborated on a backpack exchange during which the students were given new backpacks in exchange for their old bags. The students also recorded interviews with Donnett that he then used to create an experimental sound piece.
To Know A Veil communicates the power of imagination as an intermediary, catalyst, and portal that occupies spaces between being and becoming, continuously challenging modern-day ideologies, which stem from our past and impact our future. There is no definitive beginning or end when imagining possibilities, complex positions, or solutions—only human conditions embedded between moments of learning, reflecting, and doing.
About Nathaniel Donnett
Donnett is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner born in Houston, Texas. His
practice holds metaphysical and phenomenological spaces that explore space/time, history,
notions of being, the in/exterior, and race. Black aesthetic traditions, music, refusal,
fractal theory, incompleteness, and sacred geometry are strategies and systems he
uses to challenge conventional timeline narratives and Western frameworks. Donnett
fuses immaterial and material worlds to expand the meaning and understanding around
sociopolitical concerns and liminal spaces that impact underrepresented people and
overlooked conditions.
About MAC
MCLA Arts and Culture (MAC) is MCLA’s newly expanded arts programming arm. MAC serves
as the nexus for internal and external partnerships to create engaging and equity-focused
projects that encourage public arts participation, as well as the investigation of
arts-based pedagogy that can reshape institutional practices. MAC (formerly known
as BCRC, the Berkshire Cultural Resource Center) functions as a hub that supports
interdisciplinary approaches to education, social justice, and academic research across
MCLA’s campus. MAC supports the expansion of MCLA programming to include: faculty
opportunities for interdisciplinary curriculum development; interdisciplinary faculty
and student social justice research; arts and culture symposia and workshops; internships
for underrepresented student communities; and the development of an open-access archive
that includes documented community arts projects and support tools that other college
campuses and communities can use and apply to fit their needs.
About MCLA
At MCLA, we’re here for all — and focused on each — of our students. Classes are taught
by educators who care deeply about teaching, and about seeing their students thrive
on every level of their lives. In nearly every way possible, the experience at MCLA
is designed to elevate our students as individuals, leaders, and communicators, fully
empowered to make their impressions on the world. In addition to our 128-year commitment
to public education, we have fortified our commitment to equitable academic excellence.
For 10 of the last 12 years, MCLA has been named a Top Ten College by U.S. News and
World Report. MCLA also appears on the organization’s list of top National Public
Liberal Arts Colleges. Since the list was created, MCLA has risen to #33 as a Top
Performer on Social Mobility and ranks first among all Massachusetts liberal arts
schools, which measures how well schools graduate students who receive Federal Pell
Grants. Learn more at www.mcla.edu.
