MIT List Visual Arts Center

Purpose: Supporting Lifelong Learning In its project "Beyond 20 Ames Street," the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) will take a multifaceted approach to using Web-based technology to reach new audiences and engage current audiences more deeply. This effort to increase online projects to enhance public interaction parallels MIt's extensive Open Course Ware program, through which virtually all MIT course content is to be distributed online, and is an integral part of the LVAC's mission. The project's centerpiece will be an interactive online guide to the collection of late twentieth-century art on campus, including works by Calder, Moore, Picasso, Nevelson, Stalla, and Lichtenstein, as well as by lesser known artists. A new, readily accessible online guide will feature video tours of buildings and art projects that allow the viewer to move through rooms or around a sculpture and to view public works, such as Alvar Aalto's dormitory, and private ones, such as Frank Stella's Loohooloo, which is located in a conference room not generally open to the public. The Web guide will contain extensive links to artist/architect biographies, as well as essays by important critics and curators. The project will allow for Web streaming and archiving of the LVAC's extensive public programming, including talks by emerging and internationally known artists, curators, and critics, and it will complement exhibition materials already online with exhibition tours and walkthroughs and interviews with artists and curators.