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Wodiczko Receives Kepes Prize
For Immediate Release: October 7, 2004
Contact: Mary Haller, MIT Office of the Arts
(617) 253-4006, haller@media.mit.edu
Krzysztof Wodiczko
--photo by Ewa Harabasz
Cambridge, MA.... Krzysztof Wodiczko, professor of visual
arts in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology has been awarded the 2004 Kepes Prize by the Council
for the Arts at MIT. The award will be presented on Thursday Oct.
28, at the Council’s 32nd Annual Meeting. The award, named
for Gyorgy Kepes (1906-2002), founder of the Center for Advanced
Visual Studies, is given annually to a member of the MIT community
whose creative work reflects the vision and values of Kepes, who
was celebrated for his work exploring the relationship between
art and science, and art and the environment.
Wodiczko, who has taught at MIT since 1991 is director of the
Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) and is now head of MIT's
Interrogative Design Group in CAVS. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1943,
Wodiczko emigrated twice, from Poland to Canada and then from Canada
to the United States. Internationally renowned for large-scale
slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments,
he now shares his time between New York where he lives and Cambridge, Mass.
Since 1980, Wodiczko has created over 70 projections on monuments and civic edifices.
Public projections include: The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (1988); The
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989); Arco de la Victoria, Madrid
(1991); City Hall Tower, Krakow (1996); Bunker Hill Monument, Boston (1998);
A-bomb Dome, Hiroshima (1999); El Centro Cultural, Tijuana, Mexico (2001) and
Central Library, Saint Louis (2004).
In 1996, Wodiczko began projecting video images involving sound
and motion. The Hiroshima Projection, a third projection of such
kind, was organized after he was awarded the Hiroshima Art Prize
in 1999 "for his contribution as an artist to world peace." In
the spring of 2005, with participation of groups of new immigrant
residents of Barcelona, Wodiczko will create a large scale public
projection that will use a prominent city monument as a vehicle
for a two-way and a real time communication with the public. This
new type of participatory and interactive public project was staged
for the first time in April 2004 in St. Louis.
Throughout his career, Mr. Wodiczko has also developed a series
of public interventions called Instrumentations, such as "Homeless
Vehicle" (1988-89), "Poliscar" (1991), and "Dis-Armor" (1999-present). "Dis-Armor," which
was first developed for the City of Hiroshima and is a continuing
cultural project, was recently on view in the exhibition "Strangers:
The First International Center of Photography Triennial of Photography
and Video" and is now presented in the exhibition "The
Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere" at the Massachusetts
Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams.
The Council for the Arts at MIT is a volunteer organization of
MIT alumni and friends founded in 1972 to foster and support the
visual, literary and performing arts at the Institute.
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