Private Visits Curated for Impact
Misstropolis is excited to announce a new series of intimate, behind-the-scenes field trips curated in partnership with CoDesign Collaborative.
CoDesign Collaborative (CoDeCo, formerly Design Museum Everywhere) is a nonprofit focused on bringing creative problem solvers together for social impact. They foster connections in the design community through their many channels, including events, publications, and educational programming.
CoDeCo and Misstropolis align on vision and mission: to inspire social change and collective wellbeing through the transformative power of art and design. CoDeCo leans heavily on design, while Misstropolis is immersed in contemporary visual arts: the yin and yang of creative work. Here we'll explore where the disciplines overlap, why that’s important right now, and what we can bring back into our own practices.
Misstropolis x CoDesign Collaborative Field Trips
These bespoke Boston-area visits will take you behind the scenes of the studios, labs, and exhibition spaces where cutting-edge art and design is created, with the people making it. We have curated two visits this fall, and two in the spring of 2027.
Rania Matar, Fawzia (For the Brides of Gaza), Ramlet Al Bayda, Beirut, Lebanon, 2024. Archival pigment print. Courtesy the artist.
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Exhibition Visit with Rania Matar
Time: 12–1pm.
Location: The Project Space, 580 Harrison Avenue, 4th floor, Boston, MA 02116
Registration required. $25/person.
Experience the award-winning work of Lebanese photographer Rania Matar in an intimate group tour led by the artist. Learn about Matar’s photographic exploration of place, identity, and the built environment in her extensive solo exhibition, Where Do I Go?, in Boston’s SoWa district.
Her show inaugurated The Project Space, a new gallery space that was the result of an architectural collaboration between Robert Klein Gallery and SEA-DAR.
Originally trained as an architect, Matar understands the power of built environments, especially when they are subject to ongoing violence. The exhibition’s title Where Do I Go? was scrawled on a damaged wall in her hometown of Beirut, graffiti posing a question that echoes throughout the series. She captured her subjects inside abandoned hotels, aging theaters, fractured apartments, and religious spaces scarred by decades of conflict and political uncertainty. She does not attempt to provide solutions or closure, but rather to invite the viewer to find the beauty and the shared humanity that still exist despite everything. The photographs are her love letters to the women of Lebanon.
Secure your space here.
Matter Design, Walking Assembly. Photo: Matter Design.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Studio Visit with Matter Design at MIT
Time: 12–1pm.
Location: Metropolitan Storage Warehouse, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Registration required. $25/person.
Working across architecture, robotics, product design, and visual arts, Matter Design offers a radically sustainable approach to contemporary construction, collaborating with material scientists, archaeologists, and artists to address the lifespan of materials from extraction to disassembly.
Our visit will explore Matter Design’s research and reframing of the built environment as an evolving process. Learn about their long-view philosophy, drawing on prehistoric construction methods and speculative futures to challenge short-sighted mandates. Hear about Walking Assembly, their project that reverse-engineered the way prehistoric builders moved megaliths without cranes or wheels, and The Cannibal's Cookbook, their recipe manual for ways to take the rubble of buildings that came before and use it to build what comes next.
MIT's Metropolitan Storage Warehouse is the 1895 brick fortress on Vassar Street that reopened last month as the new home of MIT's design programs. “A hulking brick building and local landmark over 500 feet long and five stories high, the Met Warehouse—designed by the architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro—now stands as a new campus hub and a remarkable feat of architecture, engineering, and ‘adaptive reuse’” (MIT). Most people have only seen it from the outside. This visit puts you inside with a small group of like-minded professionals.
Spring visits will be announced at a later date. To weigh in on suggestions for future field trips, write to me at robin@misstropolis.com.
Misstropolis introduces people to contemporary visual art, and to each other.
