MoCA Arlington presents Assembly 2026, the fourth edition of the museum’s national biennial exhibition
Comprising four concurrent exhibitions organized by independent curators, the biennial highlights artists based across the regions that were once the 13 original colonies.
ARLINGTON, VA., August 18, 2026 – Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington announces Assembly 2026, the fourth edition of its national biennial, which will take place from October 3, 2026 to January 24, 2027. 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 is 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. The four exhibitions that comprise Assembly 2026 together feature sixteen artists and explore four distinct regional concerns, all with national and global implications.
Common Wealth, curated by Colleen Foran, features artwork by Beatrice Opokua Atencah, Michael Dela Dika, and Nicholas Malik. The exhibition highlights three Pennsylvania-based artists who excavate the meaning of materials and consider the ways location informs identity.
Dusk in the Dawnland, curated by Aaron Rosen, features artwork by Summer J. Hart, Michael Takeo Magruder, Jan Piribeck, Brian Smith, and Marina Yacoe. The exhibition is grounded in the artistic, Indigenous, and colonial history of Maine’s Penobscot Bay and brings together a diverse group of artists whose work forges a vision for the state’s climate-changed future.
New South, Ground Truth, curated by Karen Comer Lowe, features artwork by Paul Stephen Benjamin, Sheila Pree Bright, Shanequa Gay, and Michi Meko. The exhibition explores the Piedmont South as a region shaped by power, memory, and an unresolved history that shapes our nation to this day.
to eat out their substance, curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone, features artwork by Kamari Carter, Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales, and Julia Weist. Their practices span New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC—the three cities that have served as capitals of the United States. Bringing together artists who gain access to restricted systems, infrastructures, and networks, the exhibition treats bureaucracy not as neutral administration but as a contested terrain for artistic intervention.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS
Common Wealth
Curated by Colleen Foran
Featured Artists: Beatrice Opokua Atencah, Michael Dela Dika, and Nicholas Malik
Common Wealth uses archeology as a metaphor to consider history’s residue, how it surfaces in our present, and how artists excavate meaning from these materials. It includes work by Beatrice Opokua Atencah, Michael Dela Dika, and Nicholas Malik, three artists who were born elsewhere but now call Pennsylvania home. Atencah uses textiles to reflect the ways migration can contort, compress, and reshape identities. Dika’s sculptures combine clay with found objects, including excavated pottery, to draw attention to how identity is constructed. Malik’s work investigates the spiritualities of the Black Diaspora as a means of embedding collective memory for future generations.
Common Wealth considers the commonwealth’s present-day multicultural reality alongside its complicated historical legacy. This legacy, and its ongoing effects, are still contested, evolving, and being updated based, in part, on the excavation of materials from the past. The artists in Common Wealth use their material practices to engage with the collective promise and perils of the United States at its semiquincentennial. This history is our shared inheritance, our common wealth.
Dusk in the Dawnland
Curated by Aaron Rosen
Featured Artists: Summer J. Hart, Michael Takeo Magruder, Jan Piribeck, Brian Smith, and Marina Yacoe
Dusk in the Dawnland brings together five diverse artists with deep connections to Maine, specifically to the state’s coast and the scenic Penobscot Bay. These artists work in sculpture, textiles, video, and photography, utilizing materials that range from found objects to cutting edge technology. They approach their work with a sense of experimentation and resourcefulness that speaks to both Maine’s past and its future.
Penobscot Bay occupies an iconic slice of the Maine coast, with hundreds of islands and more than a thousand miles of rugged, granite coastline. For the Wabanaki, the People of the Dawnland, the region has been a site and subject of creative expression for centuries, including art forms still practiced today. In the nineteenth century, the Maine coast became one of America’s most celebrated destinations for painters, including Winslow Homer, followed in the twentieth century by artists such as Andrew Wyeth and Alex Katz.
Today, Maine artists are not only extending this deep tradition of environmentally-attuned art, they are discovering that the changes and challenges present in Penobscot Bay offer a microcosm of those faced all along America’s eastern seaboard, and well beyond. Together, the artists of Dusk in the Dawnland offer searching, complex, yet ultimately hopeful views of the state’s future in a climate-changed world.
New South, Ground Truth
Curated by Karen Comer Lowe
Featured Artists: Paul Stephen Benjamin, Sheila Pree Bright, Shanequa Gay, and Michi Meko
New South, Ground Truth brings together four Atlanta-based artists, Sheila Pree Bright, Michi Meko, Paul Stephen Benjamin, and Shanequa Gay, in an exhibition that reframes land not as backdrop, but as evidence. Working across photography, abstraction, painting, and installation, these artists examine the Piedmont South as a site shaped by memory, power, and unresolved history.
Grounded in Atlanta, one of the nation’s most historically freighted urban landscapes, the exhibition holds two truths at once: soil marked by Indigenous displacement, plantation violence, and the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement, and soil that has also carried Black communities who built, raised families, and imagined futures on the same ground. New South, Ground Truth positions Atlanta not as a regional footnote but as essential terrain in the national conversation about who gets to claim space in America, and on what terms.
The exhibition unfolds across three interlocking lines of inquiry: the landscape of history, the landscape of the body, and the landscape of imagination. These are not resolved into a single thesis but held together as a chorus: Sheila Pree Bright’s documentary precision, Michi Meko’s gestural cosmologies, Paul Stephen Benjamin’s conceptual rigor, and Shanequa Gay’s mythic figuration in productive dialogue.
to eat out their substance
Curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone
Featured Artists: Kamari Carter, Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales, and Julia Weist
to eat out their substance highlights 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 assert agency through acts of access, misuse, and refusal.
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.
ABOUT ASSEMBLY 2026
Assembly 2026, MoCA Arlington’s national biennial, is organized by Blair Murphy, Senior Curator + Director of Exhibitions and is generously supported by an anonymous donor.
PROGRAMS
Art After Hours
Saturday, October 3, 5pm-8pm
Join MoCA Arlington to celebrate the opening of four new exhibitions. See the new shows and meet exhibiting artists. On the third floor, visit with resident artists in their studios.
About Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington
The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that operates two locations: the main museum in Virginia Square and an Innovation Studio + Store in National Landing.
MoCA Arlington enriches community life by connecting the public with contemporary art and artists through exhibitions, education and public programs, and an artists-in-residence program.
The main museum is located at 3550 Wilson Blvd, Arlington, VA, the museum is open Wednesdays – Sundays 12-5pm. The museum has free on-site parking, is easy to reach by metro and bus, and is accessible. There is no admission fee to visit. For more information about our exhibitions and programming, visit mocaarlington.org. Follow us @mocaarlington.
