Horizontal Pedagogies and Research-Creation: A Panel on Mobius Artists Group with Marilyn Arsem and Natalie Loveless

Join Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts’ (SMFA) Office of Development and Alumni Engagement for a panel with artist and founder of Mobius Artists Group Marilyn Arsem and Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the University of Alberta, Canada Natalie Loveless, PhD (MA and MFA Tufts), moderated by TUAG Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, and Tufts University PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies and TUAG Graduate Research Fellow, Wenxuan Xue. The panel will center upon Mobius Artists Group’s artist-driven embodied and new media pedagogies and forms of research-creation within and adjacent to institutions such as the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Loveless and Arsem will engage both Arsem’s influential Boston-based and global performance practice and pedagogies in addition to late 20th-century collective models and experimental histories for performance and new media that shaped Mobius Artists Group—a Boston-based collective dedicated to experimental media since c. 1975. The administrative archive of Mobius, Inc. is simultaneously on view alongside commissions and new media works in Tufts University Art Galleries’ exhibition an archive and/or a repertoire. 

Horizontal Pedagogies and Research-Creation: A Panel on Mobius Artists Group History with Marilyn Arsem and Natalie Loveless is programming accompanying an archive and/or a repertoire, on view at TUAG/ Boston, 230 Fenway, through April 20, 2025. The program is generously supported by Tufts University departments of History of Art and Architecture and Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. 

Natalie Loveless (www.loveless.ca) is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory in the Department of Art & Design, and Associate Dean, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the University of Alberta (ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ /Amiskwacîwâskahikan, Treaty Six territory and Métis Region 4), where she directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory and co-leads the Faculty of Arts’ Signature Area in Research-Creation (https://www.spar2c.ca/). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists), the author of How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Duke UP 2019), editor of Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation (University of Alberta Press 2019), co-editor of Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem (Intellect Press 2020), and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Performance Art. 

Marilyn Arsem has been creating and performing live events since 1975 and has presented her work in more than thirty countries around the globe. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally.  

Many of her works are durational in nature, minimal in actions and materials, and have been created in response to specific sites, engaging with the immediate landscape and materiality of the location, its history, use or politics. She incorporates a broad range of media, and often engages all the senses. Her performances are designed to implicate the audience directly in the concerns of the work, to create an experience that is both visceral and intellectual. Sites have included a former Cold War missile base in the United States, a 15th century Turkish bath in North Macedonia, an aluminum factory in Argentina, the grounds of an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium in Poland, the site of the Spanish landing in the Philippines, and a deserted Russian mining outpost in the Arctic Circle. 

Arsem is a member of Mobius Artists Group, an interdisciplinary collaborative of artists, which she founded in 1975. Arsem taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for 27 years from 1987 to 2014, establishing during her tenure one of the most extensive programs internationally in visually-based performance art.  

She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, awards and grants since the 1980s. She was awarded the 2015 Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for which she created 100 Ways to Consider Time.  The work consisted of 100 different six-hour performances by Arsem on the nature of time, performed in 100 consecutive days.  

A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was published in 2020 by Intellect Books of the UK. Her work is featured in Rachel Zerihan’s The Cultural Politics of One-to-One Performance: Strange Duets, which was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2022.