Joseph Grigely’s MASS MoCA Exhibition Spotlighted by The New Yorker

Professor Joseph Grigely was featured in The New Yorker’s Persons of Interest series, spotlighting his largest exhibition to date, In What Way Wham?, on view at MASS MoCA through March 2024. Through his pieces, Grigely, who has been deaf since the age of 10, seeks to portray “conversation as a kind of still-life,” exploring the politics of disability. The show's centerpieces, two large-scale installations covered in notes, White Noise (polychrome) and White Noise (monochrome), investigate the boundaries of language, rife with jokes, malapropisms, and absurdity.

“He’s built up these extraordinary bodies of work, without compromising, really,” shared Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery. “I actually think he is one of the great artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I don’t think he fits any label.”