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MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies receives $40K NEA grant
Funding to support residencies with artists John Malpede and Simon Starling
For Immediate Release: Dec. 12, 2006
Contact:
Mary Haller
Director of Arts Communication
MIT Office of the Arts
20 Ames St., Rm E15-205
Cambridge, MA 02139
e-mail haller@media.mit.edu
(617) 253-4006
Cambridge, MA...The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology has been awarded a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the NEA announced
today. The grant, awarded in the category "Access to Artistic Excellence," will support multi-tiered,
interdisciplinary residency programs with two of the world's most acclaimed contemporary artists, performer
John Malpede and sculptor Simon Starling.
"I am really delighted and gratified," said CAVS Associate Director Larissa Harris. "We've worked hard on
creatively redeveloping the Center over the last two years, and this grant is an unusual acknowledgement of our efforts and our potential."
Directed by Krzysztof Wodiczko, Professor of Visual Arts, and, himself, one of the most important names in
contemporary art, the Center commissions and produces new artworks and artistic research within the context of MIT.
The organization currently invites approximately ten artists per year to MIT to show their work and conduct a site
visit, in order to propose a longer project for the future. Both Malpede and Starling were visiting artists in Spring
2006.
Established in 1967 by Gyorgy Kepes, the Center provided long-term appointments in its first decades to artists
such as Maryanne Amacher, Stan van der Beek, Peter Campus, Nam June Paik, Yvonne Rainer, and others. In 2004, the
Center began a new phase as a curated program that facilitates exchange between internationally known and emerging
contemporary artists and MIT's faculty, students, and staff through public events, support for long-term art projects,
and residencies for MIT students and selected local artists. Since then, the Center has hosted visits by Acconci Studio,
Miranda July, and Seth Price among others, new projects by Michael Smith and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), while
seeding a new art-making community in Greater Boston.
John Malpede is a performance artist/director and founder, in 1984, of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, the
first performance group in the nation comprised primarily of homeless and formerly homeless people creating theater
that grows out of their daily lives. As a visiting artist at the Center in April 2006, Malpede presented documentation
of his project RFK in EKY, 2004, a re-enactment of Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 tour through eight impoverished towns in
southeastern Kentucky performed by local residents and members of the original expedition. Malpede has proposed for the
Center an as-yet-untitled performance based on the ideas behind the free software or open source "movement" and
the larger battle around access to knowledge and information. Some of the most -- if not the most -- important activism and
innovation on these topics came out of, or is going on at, MIT.
Simon Starling, who won the Turner Prize in 2005, is a British-born artist whose sculptures such as a Polish-Italian
Fiat, a reconfigured bicycle and homemade replicas of Eames chairs weave eccentric, transformative stories from familiar
objects, translating them from one state of being to another. By reconstructing objects or transferring them to
different contexts and materials, he questions their original intentions and conditions. Starling presented his work
at the Center in Spring 2006, and is partnering with the Center and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
(MassMOCA) to research and produce tiny autonomous flying sculptures inspired by MassMOCA's giant exhibition space.
This proposed work synthesizes Starling's interests in environmentally sensitive technologies, in the poetic in art
making, and in the histories of place embodied in physical materials.
The Center believes the creative process does not have to be invisible, and the fellows' projects are presented
to the public several times over the course of a residency: as lectures, workshops, participatory events, or other
presentations while the work is in progress; and in culminating exhibitions, performances, or screenings. Audiences
will also be able to follow a project's progress via a regularly updated website.
"These grants and fellowships underscore the NEA's role in bringing the highest quality art to the most people
possible," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia about the Access to Artistic Excellence awards. "From public art works to
professional development opportunities to literary fellowships that foster developing talent, these grants represent
a valuable investment in American art that will serve the American people."
The NEA's Access to Artistic Excellence grants support the creation and presentation of work in the disciplines
of dance, design, folk and traditional arts, literature, media arts, museums, music, musical theater, opera,
presenting, theater, and visual arts. The CAVS grant is one of 848 awards totaling more than $19 million in the
NEA's first round of funding for the fiscal year 2007. Grants totaling $713,500 were awarded to 28 cultural
institutions in Massachusetts. For more information see the NEA's
announcement.
The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) is part of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. For more
information see web site
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