History

1959 Catherine (Kay) N. Stratton co-founds the Friends of the Arts (which evolved into the Art Committee in 1960).

1960 The Longview Foundation provides seed funding to establish MIT’s Permanent Art Collection.

1961 MIT’s first public sculpture, Dimitri Hadzi’s Elmo, was commissioned (funded by Samuel Marx, Class of 1907).

1966 Kay Stratton donates a selection of artwork, which sets the stage for what later becomes the Student Lending Art Collection.

1968 MIT establishes a Percent-for-Art Program. Today, this program administered by the List Visual Arts Center allocates up to $500,000 to commission art for each new major renovation or campus building construction project.

1972 With the support of MIT President Jerome Wiesner (1971–1980), the MIT Art Committee formally becomes the MIT Council for the Arts. An advisory committee is named to investigate the possibilities for the establishment of a new arts and media building.

1978 The MIT Committee on the Visual Arts sponsors an exhibition and loan program of framed posters and prints from the List Student Loan Program and the Catherine N. Stratton Collection of Graphic Art. More than one hundred posters and prints are made available for loan to full-time registered MIT students.

I. M. Pei proposes designing one building complex for arts and media-based research. The plan for the future gallery is combined with President Wiesner and Nicholas Negroponte’s fledgling plan to create what John de Monchaux, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, coined as the Media Lab.

1986 Kathy Halbreich is officially named as first director of the List Visual Arts Center, having previously programmed exhibitions and artist residency projects for the Hayden Gallery. Halbreich later went on to serve as director of the Walker Art Center, 1991; associate director at the Museum of Modern Art, 2008; and is currently executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

1987 Katy Kline becomes second director (1987–1998).

1990 The Max Wasserman Forum Contemporary Art is established in memory of Max Wasserman (MIT Class of 1935), a founding member of the Council of the Arts at MIT. This public forum, a biannual symposium on critical issues in contemporary art and culture, features renowned artists, academics, researchers, and arts professionals.

2003 The List Center presented Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am at the United States Pavilion for the 50th Venice Biennale. The exhibition was curated by Kathy Goncharov.

The List Center presented Paul Pfeiffer at the 2003 Cairo Biennale and the Melina Mecouri Center in Athens, Greece, during the 2004 Summer Olympics.

From 2003–10, as MIT’s campus grew, the List Center administered numerous Percent-for-Art projects, commissioning new work by artists such as Dan Graham, Cai Guo-Qiang,  Anish Kapoor,  Sol LeWitt, Matthew Ritchie, Sarah Sze, and Lawrence Weiner.

2013 An online audio guide is developed to provide commentary by artists, architects, scholars, and curators, focusing on sixty-plus works of art and architecture located throughout the Institute’s campus. Leonard Nimoy voices the audio guide introduction.

The List Projects exhibition series is launched to present a focused look at the work of emerging artists. Since its inception, this initiative has featured solo exhibitions by artists Gabriel Abrantes, Farah Al Qasimi, Andrea Crespo, Rami George, Delia Gonzalez, Gordon Hall, Ann Hirsch, Ken Okishi, Kambui Olujimi, and Adam Pendleton, among many others. 

2017 A contemporary art tour guide program led by MIT students is inaugurated. The Student Guide Program provides campus tours of MIT’s Public Art Collection to engage the MIT community and public with art, architecture, and environs.

MIT’s Student Lending Art Program Collection is made available online.

2019 Alicja Kwade is commissioned to create Against the Run, a freestanding clock with a restrained modern design that tells the correct time—but does so in a way that confounds expectations. The work is currently sited on a patch of lawn adjacent to Richard Fleischner’s Upper Courtyard. The sculpture was commissioned through MIT’s Percent-for-Art Program and was on view as part of Alicja Kwade’s exhibition In Between Glances (October 18, 2019–January 5, 2020).

2021 Wasserman Forum goes all virtual for the first time in its history due to COVID-19. The 2021 Max Wasserman Forum: Another World brings together artists, educators, and writers at the forefront of discourses on art in the digital realm to share their deep understandings and perspectives on digital media’s potential for more radical, imaginative, and limitless forms of cyber expressions. The keynote speaker is Berlin-based filmmaker and visual artist Hito Steyerl.

2023 The List Center kicks off a special series of experimental List Projects programming commemorating the tenth anniversary of the series and is comprised of three exhibitions in the Bakalar Gallery. Each presentation pairs two artists who share a history of conversation and fosters their continued collaboration through a joint commission. List Projects 27: fields harrington and Nancy Valladares is the first exhibition of the series.