Martine Syms: Grio College opens tomorrow, Saturday, June 25th. ⁠ ⁠ A reception will be held from 2pm-5pm. For a seat on the free roundtrip chartered bus from New York City for the opening please email [email protected]. Reservations are required for the bus.⁠ ⁠ The heart of higher education is traditionally understood to beat through its curriculum: an immersive experience largely framed by courses, tied to a required number of credits, that crystallizes a student’s broader interests into a degree. Martine Syms’s “Grio College,” on the other hand, expands the notion of a “curriculum” into something far more manifold: a ceaseless and itinerant education that encompasses our whole intellectual life, one built from the theories, thinkers, culture, music, ideas, and teachers that influence us, formally and informally, over time. Grio College is the fictional school in Syms’s feature film The African Desperate (2022), in which an artist attends a heady and heated MFA program in a pastoral setting (much like Syms did herself). Lending this exhibition its title, Grio College here serves as the context for this staging of the artist’s work from the past five years (2017–2022), a prolific period of activity and development.⁠ ⁠ The practice of Martine Syms (born 1988, Los Angeles) is distinguished by its boundlessness: her subjects flow across media—print and web publishing, film and video, photography, installation, AI, software—dissolving the lines between them. One of the most insightful and important artists to show how digital media operates and shapes our culture, Syms consistently explores representations of Blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought and radical traditions.⁠ ⁠ Also opening on Saturday are the exhibitions Dara Birnbaum: Reaction and Black Melancholia. Details on all three exhibitions are on our website. ⁠ ⁠ Image: Martine Syms, Ugly Plymouths, 2020, three-channel video (color, sound), 8:00 minute loop. ©Martine Syms and Sadie Coles, courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York City.