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Commissions

Image during (Be)longing performance at the Moss Arts Center. Performers sit on the Fife stage in a semicircle with music stands in front of them. There are hanging lights coming down from above the stage, there are rocks in a spiral shape on the stage floor.

As one of this country’s leading campus-based arts institutions, the Moss Arts Center has an important responsibility to support the creative efforts of established and emerging artists. Commissioning means supporting the creation of new work—advancing resources to develop a work of art.

In a broad sense, commissioning helps to advance the state of the arts by ensuring that new work is created. And it is one of the many ways we fulfill our mission, to transform lives through exploration and engagement with the arts and creative process.

The Moss Arts Center actively commissions one or more new performance and visual art works each season.

Works commissioned by the Moss Arts Center

  • Mark Morris Dance Group, The Look of Love, 2023-2024 (dance)
  • Book of Mountains and Seas, 2022-2023 (puppetry/theatre)
  • The Tallis Scholars program featuring Antoine Brumel's Earthquake Mass and David Lang's sun-centered, 2021-2022 (music)
  • Conrad Tao, Keyed In, 2021-2022 (music)
  • Indigenous Performance Productions' Welcome to Indian Country, 2021-2022 (music/spoken word)
  • Sheila Pree Bright, New Beginnings, 2021-2022 (visual art)
  • Manual Cinema's Christmas Carol, 2020-2021 (theatre)
  • Jason Middlebrook, Another World, 2020 (visual art)
  • Kaki King, Data Not Found, 2019-2020 (music)
  • Daniel Canogar, Surge, 2019 (visual art)
  • Salaam: Exploring Muslim Cultures, 2017-2018 (multiple genres)
    Jennifer Williams, Blacksburg Unfurled, 2017 (visual art)
  • Byron Au Yong and Aaron Jafferis, (Be)Longing, 2016-2017 (theatre)
  • Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, Real Enemies, 2015-2016 (music)
  • Blair Thomas & Co. Puppet Theater, Moby Dick, 2015-2016 (theatre)
  • Diana Cooper, Highwire, 2016 (visual art)
    Stephen Vitiello, A Scuttering Across the Leaves, 2015 (audio installation)
  • Samita Sinha, Cipher, 2014-2015 (music)
  • The Three Feathers, youth opera, 2014-2015 (theatre)
  • Liz Lerman, Healing Wars, 2014-2015 (dance)
  • Odili Donald Odita, Bridge, 2014 (visual art)
  • Adam Cvijanovic, A Woods I Did Not Know, 2014 (visual art)
Group of VT students performing a drumming piece. The musicians are dressed in all black and stand in a line with hand drums. There is light coming through the drums, illuminating colorful patterns on the drum heads.
Two patrons stand in the lower gallery at the Moss Arts Center admiring Jason Middlebook's commissioned work. The work is a large painting covering an entire wall. One side has colorful honeycomb shapes, the other side is brown, earthy tones with swerving lines that recede into the distance. Shapes in the painting are loosely based on architecture in the Moss Arts Center.
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