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Brazilian artist Ana Maria Tavares to visit MIT

Cambridge, MA... Brazilian artist Ana Maria Tavares, will be the 2007 Ida Ely Rubin Artist-in-Residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), visiting the campus November 12-17, 2007 and March 2-15, 2008.

On Thursday, Nov. 15, she will present a public program titled, "Suspension, Mobility, Displacements and Rotations: Art and Architecture as Still Life" at 7pm, in MIT's Broad Institute Auditorium (NE30, 7 Cambridge Center).

Born in Belo Horzonte, Brazil in 1958, Tavares currently works and lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She attained an MFA degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1986) and a PhD from the University of São Paulo (2000). In 2001 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Grant.

Tavares finds inspiration in the architectural grammar of the modern city. She employs materials such as steel, glass and mirrors to make structures that resemble street furniture or architectural fittings. Recontextualised in her installations, such motifs come to form puzzles or mazes for the visitor to explore. Tavares is interested in the impractical possibilities that are locked inside functional objects and, in this sense, her practice stands at the border of sculpture and design.

Airports and departure lounges are a recurrent theme in her work, places that symbolize exit from everyday life, getting ready to depart, floating, meditating, and de co-existence of the real and the virtual. "Strategies for Enchantment" (2001), which was created by placing a piano, mirror and seats in a glass-walled room, and "Middelburg Airport Lounge with Parede Niemeyer" (2001), in which Tavares used mirrors and video projection to transform De Vleeshal in the Netherlands into a futuristic airport lounge, are examples of how she has transformed sites while making the most of their features.

In "Arte/Cidade," São Paulo, 2002 -- an ambitious project, part group exhibition, part political and social manifesto, featuring numerous site-specific art works scattered in the desperately poor east side of the city -- Tavares presented "Labirinto," a dramatic architectural intervention in a former textile factory that hosted the main part of the exhibition. Her work comprised a complex network of walkways and spiral staircases that passed through floors and ceilings, connecting different areas and three different levels of the building. The structure functioned as a device that offered a radically different way of navigating and looking at the building, while also trapping the viewer in an independent system of circulation around the show.

"I'm very interested in the idea of passage of non-permanence; in other words, in the way we live our lives today," she said. "We are surrounded by places of passage, places that are non-places: shopping malls, bus stations, toll booths. We are bombarded by appeals to us and by excess."

The Ida Ely Rubin Artists-in-Residence Fund was established in 1998 by MIT benefactor Margaret McDermott in honor of art historian, arts consultant and author Ida Ely Rubin, a founding member of MIT’s Council for the Arts and former president of the Americas Foundation. The fund supports Artists-in-Residence programs in the visual arts at MIT.