Troubling the Space is the pilot installation for Art+Everywhere, an initiative developed through Lesley University’s Center for Human Arts Innovation and the President’s Innovation Challenge. Conceived by MFA alumnae Tracy Hayes (’21) and Deborah Read (’21), the project adopts Donna Haraway’s conceptual frame of “entanglement” to counter purity logics and instead cultivate “lines of kinship” across bodies, materials, and campus publics. In this register, the work positions art-making as a practice of generosity—less a commodity than a relational act that redistributes attention, care, and authorship beyond the confines of the gallery.
Installed in the second-floor atrium of University Hall, the multimedia environment advances Art+Everywhere’s ethos by intervening in circulation spaces and the mental habits attached to them. Hayes and Read employ iterative exchange and co-authorship—passing works back and forth without preset boundaries—so that visual and textual lines interrupt, fold, and reconfigure the site. The result is a generative field that invites dialogue, participation, and ongoing transformation, aligning with the initiative’s aim to meet the university community where it is and to build durable, kinship-based networks of practice.
