In Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s film The Great Silence, an endangered Puerto Rican parrot living next to the world’s largest radio telescope asks why humans listen in vain for transmissions from across the universe when there are intelligent species we might learn from right here on Earth. We might take the bird’s advice and wonder: what other kind of transmissions are we missing that we might be able to perceive if only we paid attention? Transmissions: Selections from the Marciano Collection brings together fifty-seven international artists working across a wide range of mediums who each in their own way generate signals into the ether for us to hear.

Whether delving into the realm of abstraction or culling images from the world around us, each of these artists generates a kind of transmission, a signal that is projected out to the viewer in order to ask a wide array of questions. Like Velazquez’sLas Meninas, these are works that look back at us looking at them and, like Allora and Calzadilla’s parrot inThe Great Silence, wonder why we’re looking for remote signs of life when so many forms have been around us all along, asking to begin a conversation.