MIT Office of the Arts 
(Published in Tech Talk 10/25/1995)
A campaign to raise two million dollars for an endowed chair in the visual arts was among the announcements made at the 23rd annual meeting of the Council for the Arts at MIT, held Thursday and Friday, Oct. 19-20, 1995. This year's annual meeting, which focused on MIT's visual arts programs, also included the presentation of two annual awards established by the Council, one to a Canadian photographer and another to the director of MIT's List Visual Arts Center. In addition, the announcement was made of a gift of three bronze sculptures by artist Jacques Lipchitz which have been on loan to MIT since 1975.
The Council for the Arts is a volunteer group of MIT alumni and friends founded in 1972 to support the arts at MIT. While a Council hallmark has been efforts on behalf of all of MIT's creative and performing arts, its origins lie in the MIT Arts Club, a group formed to purchase works of art for the permanent collection.
A fundraising campaign for a new professorship in the visual arts was announced last Friday morning by John W. Kunstadter 1949, chairman of the Council. While planning for the campaign is still in its preliminary stages, Mr. Kunstadter noted that the initiative has the backing of the School of Architecture and Planning and the School of Humanities and Social Science.
During the Council's two-day meeting, the Eugene McDermott Award was given to Canadian photographer Jeff Wall and the Gyorgy Kepes Fellowship Prize was awarded to Katy Kline, director of the List Visual Arts Center. Mr. Wall was given the $5,000 McDermott Award which recognizes an artist whose creative work the Council believes to be underappreciated outside of the arts discipline. At the end of the 1970s, the 49-year-old native of Vancouver, British Columbia, developed his signature format of large, back- lit photographic transparencies that employ the look, scale and narrative grounding of 18th and 19th century history and genre painting. Mr. Wall is currently associate professor in the Department of Fine Art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. As part of the award stipulation, Mr. Wall will be artist-in-residence at MIT at a date to be determined.
The $2,500 Kepes Prize is given annually to a member of the MIT community "whose creative work reflects the vision and values of Gyorgy Kepes" and who has demonstrated excellence in the creative arts." Professor Kepes, Institute Professor Emeritus and founder of MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, is celebrated internationally for his work exploring the relationship between art and science and art and the environment.
The Kepes Prize Citation called Ms. Kline "a curator and director whose peerless achievement in the visual arts has been not merely to urge us towards discovery but to enrich our understanding." Director of the List Center since 1986, having previously served as curator and coordinator of special projects, Ms. Kline has served as juror in numerous art competitions throughout the United States and frequently serves as a consultant or guest curator. In addition to writing exhibition cataloguesfor the List Center, she contributes articles and critical essays on art and architecture to newspapers and art magazines nationwide. "History has taught me how often artists are misunderstood by their contemporaries but are later understood to have been the real baromemeters of the atmosphere of their times," commented Ms. Kline. "I try not to be so out of touch with today's artists," she said. Ms. Kline will deliver a public lecture at MIT at a date to be announced later in the academic year.
It was also announced at the Council for the Arts meeting that photographer Yulla Lipchitz had made a gift to the Institute of three monumental bronze sculptures by her late husband, renowned 20th century sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. The gift was made in honorof the late MIT President Jerome B. Wiesner, founder of the Council. The three sculptures, Birth of the Muses, Sacrifice III, and Hagar in the Desert have been on extended loan from Mrs. Lipchitz, a former member of the Council and friend of Dr. Wiesner. The works will join another Lipchitz sculpture, The Bather, as objects in the MIT Permanent Collection. All, except for Birth of the Muses, are currently sited in the Building 14 Courtyard outside the Hayden Memorial Library; pending approval, the courtyard wil be named the Lipchitz Courtyard at MIT.
The meeting concluded with a celebration of the List Visual Arts Center's tenth anniversary in the lobby of the Wiesner Building. Birthday cake was served and presentations were made of donated works by five artists -- Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, Sandy Walker, Nancy Burson, and Elizabeth Murray -- who had exhibited at the LVAC during the past ten years. Tom Sokolowski, director of New York University's Grey Art Gallery, presented the works to the List Center staff, acknowledging the positive working relationships that artists have traditionally enjoyed with the List Center. "The List Center tries to integrate artists into the Institute as a whole," he said, adding that "artists really enjoy working here. These gifts," he said, "are one way of thanking the List for all that they've done for artists in the past decade."
Also as part of this year's annual meeting, Council members heard remarks by President Charles M. Vest, Provost Joel E. Moses and outgoing Associate Provost for the Arts Ellen T. Harris. In recognition of the meeting's visual arts focus, they visited the Berenice Abbott Photography Laboratory, the Compton Gallery's The Image of Boston exhibition and the new installation of Frank Stella's Heads or Tails at the Tang Center and viewed portions of the Jerome B. Wiesner CD-ROM Project, A Random Walk through the 20th Century.