Free Third Thursday

Join us for an evening at MOCA with galleries open late, live music by KXCI Community Radio, food by Reservation Sensation, and drinks by Brick Box Brewery! Don’t miss this lively time to gather with friends and family around art, music, and drinks; all ages are welcome!

No Desert Data Center Coalition will present their work protecting water, desert, and community from the Project Blue data center and other extractive industries. They will also share information about the water pollution that results from data centers.

About the Exhibitions

we need to talk is a large-scale installation by artist Natalie Brewster Nguyen that combines weather balloons, text, and audio to explore division and repair; celebration and excess; and the emotional and ecological impacts of human behavior. Situated in MOCA’s Great Hall, a field of weather balloons drift through space with fragments of text shifting in meaning with each interaction and over time.

On view in the East Wing Galleries is Living With Injury, an exhibition centering the environmental justice movement led by Mexican American community members in their fight against defense industry pollution that caused widespread illness in the southside of Tucson in the 1980s. Featuring archival materials, and the work of local artists, journalists, researchers, and community members, the project reflects on the power of community organizing, disability justice, and collective healing in the face of environmental racism.

Light as Resistance is an exhibition of paintings, drawings, video, and a site-specific wall painting by Hilma’s Ghost, an artist collective formed by Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray. Influenced by spiritual and esoteric knowledge systems, histories of abstraction, and research recovering the legacies of overlooked women artists, their name pays homage to the Swedish mystic and painter Hilma af Klint, who is now recognized as one of the first abstract artists in Western art history. Working collaboratively—with one another, with spiritual practitioners, and with unseen energies—the collective incorporates practices like ritual, divination, automatic drawing, and color magic into their artmaking process.

 

Monthly Free Thursdays are presented in collaboration with KXCI Community Radio.