At MASS MoCA, “Like Magic” Offers Mystical Resistance

Magic is the articulation of a truth denied access to the authoritative conversation, whether because of who is speaking or because we do not (yet) know how the phenomenon functions. With “Like Magic,” a group show at MASS MoCA, curator Alexandra Foradas offers a megaphone to ten artists giving voice to such truths, encouraging us to enter the fertile undergrowth where magic roots and flourishes.

The show spans much of Building 4.2’s second floor and is bookended by two video works. In its outer reaches, Tourmaline’s Atlantic is a Sea of Bones (2017) and Simone Bailey’s Hometraining (2023) present narratives of identity construction (one personal, one collective) that register but resist the violence passed down by the transatlantic slave trade. By situating these pieces at the farthest boundaries of the show, Foradas designates what lives between them the shipwrecked territories of the Americas. Indeed, much of the art in “Like Magic” responds to legacies of repression that have characterized much of US history, from the literal and historiographical erasure of Native peoples to slavery and its wake to witch trials (and gender/sexual inequality more generally) to the continuing oppression of those who dare to hold beliefs other than the most common Christian doctrines. When themes do creep beyond the country’s borders, they’re presented as dispatches, such as the Iran-bound, US Customs–vandalized packages Gelare Khoshgozaran sent to their mother in U.S. Customs Demands to Know (2013–ongoing) or Rose Salane’s cataloged Confessions (2023), which presents photographs of returned Pompeii loot along with contrite explanations. Even Johanna Hedva’s fairytale Who Listens and Learns (2022)—a recounting of a pandemic-locked Berlin—feels like a message home.

Given MASS MoCA’s labyrinthian layout, there are two ways into the show. The first, more likely entrance deposits you at a Janus threshold. To the left, a long dark gallery stretches away, its velvet blackness dotted with the throbbing lights of Khoshgozaran’s torn packages. To the right, the light glints off of Cate O’Connell-Richards’s witchy paraphernalia in a bright white room. I’m sure it says something about me that I moved immediately into the dark.

This is the largest gallery and its width is used to explore the choreographies of ritual and connection. Along with Khoshgozaran’s maze of violated parcels, Raven Chacon orchestrates musical scores dedicated to Native women artists, and Nate Young constructs reliquaries to honor the horse that bore his great-grandfather, Jackson, away from North Carolina to freedom. To avoid capture, Jackson killed his horse following his escape, an act that left him guilt-ridden. With pieces like Votive Deposit (2019)—a wall-hung, wooden-framed shadow box housing a horse bone and glazed with etched text outlining the role of enslaved horse trainers during the American Revolution—Young’s work reaches back toward the past as if offering absolution.

The room’s darkness renders the work of both artists stark and potent, with Chacon’s graphic tributes blazing from the squares of white-painted walls that house them, and Young’s bones glowing behind engraved glass. Physical movement is implicated in all these works: in Young’s wall-hung pieces and Khoshgozaran’s packages, I feel it as a haunting. The pieces are redolent with the violence of the horse’s tragic death (both the act itself and the heartbreaking reason for it) and the rummaging hands of Customs agents. Conversely, Chacon’s reverent diagrams extend an invitation to joyfully bellow unsung histories. Yet the only work that demands active engagement is Young’s guttural, looming Untitled (2023), a twisting path in a blacked-out hut possessed by sonic breath, both human and animal.

Contained and coiled like a nautilus shell, Untitled is, like all magical mazes, transformative—still, when I’m spit out of it, I’m relieved to enter the airier expanse of the next gallery. Housing only Tourmaline’s video, the room bears witness to a surreal story performed by Egyptt Labeija, who in about seven minutes traverses the entire arc of a fairy tale. In Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, Labeija plunges through her bathwater into a world populated by characters glowing woozily in the electric colors of a tropical aquarium. Titled after the Lucille Clifton poem memorializing the African mothers who chose drowning over enslavement for both themselves and their children, the video charts Labeija’s journey toward self-actualization as she navigates the palpable absence of loved ones lost to the AIDS epidemic. While not a literal retelling, the film is framed with the real-life reminiscences of the renowned drag performer as she gazes down from atop the Whitney Museum toward the pier where she used to live in a hut. Much like its namesake poem, the film is a eulogy to those victimized by the US’s tradition of dehumanization, and a refusal to silence their stories.

It’s a shock to backtrack into the light. Here, in what is somewhat of a throughway into the museum’s central atrium, we have O’Connell-Richards’s domestic instruments of traditional witchery and associated punishments, with dismembered brooms, frocked scythes and a bronze-belled shame yoke. The tiered plinths in the center of the room provide a 360-degree altar to the artist’s collar, harness, and rings, with the former fur-bound and the latter nestled into tiny mounds of salt. It’s a tricky space, a gallery that is also something of an entryway to many other rooms; still, the bare white walls and simplified presentation felt sterile after the dark drama of the other spaces, robbing the works of some of their wildness. Tucked back to the right, Grace Clark’s bent-wood canes and lunar chapel continue the connection to terrestrial cycles that have informed generations of magical engagement. While it was quiet and darkened during my visit, Clark’s dedicated alcove is dominated by her installation In a new light (Healing Dirt) (2021/2023). Activated only during the new moon, the work encourages visitors to enter the spare, hollowed-out grotto and rub charcoal on their bodies in much the same way pilgrims to New Mexico’s El Santuario de Chimayó do.

The museum’s twenty-one-day staff strike kept me from returning to apply the dirt to my own scars. It was frustrating yet fitting; witchcraft, occult practices, and supernatural ceremonies have offered refuge to disenfranchised populations for centuries. As workers picketed for a living wage, Clark requested that the installation remain off-limits.

Petra Szilagyi’s Bless Your Hard Drive (2021–2023) catapults us from these enduring histories into an AI-generated future. Encircled by curved adobe walls that contain adornments and seating that melds spiritual and cyber practices, the installation aims to harness the cacophony of religious (and areligious) prayer rituals in the US to create a synthesized digital soul. While the wall-painted imperative “Pray However to Whatever” beckons, I was unsure whether it was a literal invitation—could I enter the grassy center and actually engage with the furniture?—so it was with slight relief that I made my way into the library, a space whose uses and etiquette I understand intimately.

Magic is a practice fed by the processual act of learning, so I was delighted to discover that the show’s crowdsourced library was embedded within the show rather than tacked onto an end. Indeed, Hedva’s Who Listens and Learns (2022) is found in the library itself, both in its book form and as an audio recording. A bit farther on, Salane’s photographs document thefts from Pompeii alongside their apologies. These works, as well as the framed collection of rings the artist excavated by way of a metal detector, explore the complex nature of ownership across space and time. What are the trappings of belonging? Who decides what belongs to whom?

These questions attend me as I enter the final room and plunge back into the dark. Here, Simone Bailey’s three-channel installation Hometraining (2023) interrogates how the rites we design to protect ourselves can be twisted by hate to harm others. The work depicts cross burning, a practice originally designed in Scotland as a distress signal. Peopled by Black Americans with Scottish ancestry, the video contends with the terror the custom now evokes as a symbol of racialized violence. While the cross blazes on screen, a Black bagpiper played by Ja’Mir Fletcher bellows a rallying march. Later, Yasmine Emani Hunter sings an aching ballad into the glint of the flame. Written by Bailey in Latin, the song laments the approaching dawn.

In reading the translation, I recognize how often we fail to safeguard the truths that magic supplies. Not everything, it seems to say—the show seems to say—must be wrestled into the light. Instead we can choose to follow a knowing a bit lower in the gut toward a future that embraces all that liberation offers, no matter where it grows.

“Like Magic” is on view at MASS MoCA through August 2025.