The Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art was established in memory of Max Wasserman (MIT Class of 1935), a founding member of the Council for the Arts at MIT. This public forum was endowed through the generosity of the late Jeanne Wasserman and addresses critical issues in contemporary art and culture through the participation of renowned scholars, artists, and arts professionals. The Forum is organized and presented by the MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Max Wasserman Forum
2023 Max Wasserman Forum: Altered Access
The 2023 Max Wasserman Forum: Altered Access brings together artists, educators, and curators to discuss current disability discourse within the arts and museum institutions. This year’s Wasserman Forum will consist of two days of hybrid programming including a virtual keynote address, and three hybrid panel discussion. Registration is available for individual programs with options for tuning in via live stream.
2021 Max Wasserman Forum: Another World
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.
2018 Wasserman Forum: Future Genders
Artists and cultural practitioners are at the forefront of critically analyzing and reimagining how we think about, experience, and represent gender.
2015 Wasserman Forum: Public Art and the Commons
Public art has emerged as a crucial issue over the past decade. In response to conditions of intensifying economic and political precarity, artists have renewed a dialogue on those social and cultural resources held in common, including media, education, language, the environment, and housing.
2013 Wasserman Forum: Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte
The 2013 Wasserman Forum focuses on the life and work of renowned artist and filmmaker Chris Marker (1921–2012).
2011 Wasserman Forum: Present Past: Contemporary Art and the Uses of History
This year’s Forum, Present Past: Contemporary Art and the Uses of History, concerns how artists working with historical subject matter engage theories and methods of historical research.
2010 Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art: Parody, Politics, and Performativity
The MIT List Visual Arts Center has gathered together several practicing artists and experts on performative practices to participate in the 2010 Wasserman Forum.
2008 Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art: Eastern Europe Today and the Role of Art in Times of Change
Eastern Europe Today and the Role of Art in Times of Change will begin with an evening screening of recent video works from and about Eastern Europe.
Image of panel at the 2008 Wasserman Forum.
2006 Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art: The Scholarly and Artistic Contributions of Jeanne Wasserman
A special Wasserman Forum devoted to Jeanne Wasserman’s achievement and continuing influence as an art historian, writer, curator, and educator.
2006 Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art: A Matter of Time: Fedback and Immersion in Video Installation Art
“Feedback” and “immersion” are two poles of expression in video art. Early in the medium, closed-circuit video feeds were used as an electronic mirror, instantaneously reflecting whatever came into the camera’s gaze.
2004 Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art: The University as Patron of Cutting-Edge Architecture
The Wasserman Forum at MIT will explore this phenomenon and investigate how architecture can make a difference within the university culture.
2003 Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art: Post-revolutionary Sex + the Future of Visual Desire
In the late eighties and early nineties, the imperative within cutting-edge culture to push the boundaries in terms of eroticism and taste was clear, or at least clearer.
2001 Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art: Losing the Revolution: On the Loss of Seditious Potential when Avant-Garde Art and Music Stopped Sleeping in the Same Bed
A panel of leading theorists and practitioners will discuss the phenomenon of YOKO ONO and John Lennon from the perspective of 2001.
2000 Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art: Stopping Time: Performance and the Archive
The artists will express their thoughts about curators’ and critics’ abilities to keep the performative and ephemeral aspects of their work available for critical inquiry.
