Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Maya Gurantz: The Plague Archives will be on view during gallery hours till June 14, 2025

The de Saisset Museum presents the interdisciplinary research-based practice of artist Maya Gurantz

Maya Gurantz’s interdisciplinary research-based practice incorporates dance, video, performance, text, and installation, which she deploys to examine constructions of race, gender, and class in relation to shared myths, public rituals, and private desires. At the de Saisset Museum, these ideas are manifested in The Plague Archives, a site-specific installation comprising multiple video projections; a dense collection of archival material on the social, cultural, and political histories of epidemics and outbreaks; and an interactive Tracing Board encouraging viewers to map images from the Plague Archives onto the surface. Ephemeral in nature, these tracings dissolve in the process of being drawn, underscoring our historical tendency for collective amnesia—as witnessed by the AIDS crisis, and more recently, our post COVID condition. Predominantly spanning the tenth through the twenty-first century, The Plague Archives presents a multi-layered transhistorical and intercultural discourse on the shifting attitudes and definitions of disease.