The Mask of Prosperity takes shape around the varied meanings of inheritance, offering a look into its integral role in the organization of life across language, memory, morals, traditions, habits, and knowledge. While this subject brings to mind a will, a promise of ownership that ensures the passing down and accumulation of property and capital from one generation to the next, this exhibition approaches its intricacies. Particularly, its capacity to be an agent of transformation.

The featured artists probe the tensions between which legacies we choose to acquire, hold on to, or reject within our cultural imagination and kinship structures. Their engagements with sculpture, film, photography, and mixed media interrogate the uses of inheritance in building a livable or unlivable life. The Mask of Prosperity is a prompt to think through the ways we come into possession of things and their impressions on our sense of self.

Marwa Arsanios, Sonya Clark, cameron clayborn, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Caroline Kent and Nate Young, Bouchra Khalili, Eli Greene, David Palance, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Carmen Winant