Assembly 2026: to eat out their substance
FEATURED ARTISTS: Kamari Carter, Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Julia Weist
GUEST CURATOR: Jesse Bandler Firestone
to eat out their substance brings together artists who intersect with municipal, civic, and technological infrastructures as the basis of their practice. Working across performance, photography, sculpture, video, sound, and conceptual intervention, these artists are authorized, unauthorized, surveilled, or otherwise entangled in the strange theater of civic life.
The exhibition title borrows from the charged rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, which articulates civic grievances through vivid references to extraction and depletion. Reframed here, the phrase links the nation’s founding rhetoric to contemporary systems of administrative power, positioning artists as interventionists who reclaim agency through acts of access, misuse, and refusal. The exhibition considers a strain of conceptual art and institutional critique that is administratively fluent and deeply attuned to questions of permission, visibility, and power: Who is allowed in? Who is watching? Who can request information, interpret records, or intervene?
Focusing on artists working across New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC—the three cities that have served as the capital of the United States—the exhibition traces a civic corridor where bureaucracy, political spectacle, surveillance, and public infrastructure converge. Julia Weist infiltrates restricted surveillance systems through her work as a licensed private investigator; Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales reveal municipal waste as a site of labor, care, and the democratic exchange of hopes and shattered dreams; and Kamari Carter uses megaphones to relay police radio transmissions from the capital district in DC, revealing communication networks in an act of disobedience and surveillance.
Rather than treating infrastructure as neutral, to eat out their substance reveals it as lived, uneven, and performative. The exhibition asks what becomes visible when artists enter the very systems that govern participation in public life.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Jesse Bandler Firestone is a curator whose practice operates as an ongoing experiment in exhibition-making—one in which standards of display, methods of interpretation, artist agency, and public trust are continuously renegotiated. Firestone has organized more than 60 exhibitions, commissions, and interdisciplinary programs across museums, university galleries, public gardens, artist-run spaces, and civic contexts. His curatorial practice frequently centers on conceptual and transgressive artistic practices while commissioning new projects with artists.
Firestone is currently Associate Curator of the 2027 RAY Triennial of Photography and has collaborated with institutions including Wave Hill, Montclair State University Galleries, The Shed, BRIC, Harvard University, and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. His writing has appeared in Document Journal, Sculpture Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail, and exhibitions he has organized have been mentioned in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, ArtNet, ItsNiceThat, Another Magazine, Vogue Scandinavia, Galerie Magazine, and WideWalls.
In addition to his institutional work, Firestone runs J. Firestone Arts LLC, an independent curatorial consultancy through which he supports artists, nonprofits, and cultural partners with exhibition development, writing, professional stewardship, and strategic planning. His practice emphasizes process-driven, socially engaged approaches and sustained collaboration particularly with LGBTQ+, BIPOC, disabled, and emerging artists
ABOUT ASSEMBLY 2026
to eat out their substance is curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone and takes place as part of Assembly 2026, MoCA Arlington’s national biennial exhibition. With an eye towards the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, MoCA Arlington’s 2026 biennial comprises four separate, concurrent exhibitions. Each exhibition is curated by an independent curator and grounded in a specific geography within the regions that made up the original thirteen colonies. This curatorial framework provides a new lens for exploring current material and conceptual trends within contemporary art while highlighting artists and curatorial voices from across the United States.
Assembly 2026 is organized by Blair Murphy, MoCA Arlington Senior Curator + Director of Exhibitions and is generously supported by an anonymous donor.
RELATED EXHIBITIONS
Assembly 2026: Dusk in the Dawnland
Assembly 2026: Common Wealth
Assembly 2026: New South, Ground Truth
RELATED PROGRAMS
Art After Hours
Saturday / October 3 / 5pm-8pm
EXHIBITION CATALOG
View the Assembly 2026 catalog
