The Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT was established in 1974 by the Council for the Arts at MIT and Margaret McDermott in honor of her husband, a co-founder of Texas Instruments. The first recipient was artist and MIT professor György Kepes. The award reflects MIT’s commitment to risk-taking, problem solving and to the idea of connecting creative minds across disciplines. The award may be given to an artist working in any field or cross-disciplinary activity and is considered an investment in the recipient’s future creative work, rather than a prize for a particular project or lifetime of achievement.
2016 McDermott Award recipient David Adjaye made three visits to MIT in the Spring 2016 semester, each focusing upon a different facet of his work: libraries, the university campus and museums.
For more information, contact
mcdermott-award@mit.edu
In the MIT Museum’s popular conversation series, Olafur Eliasson and Harald Quintus-Bosz, Vice President of Engineering at Cooper Perkins, discussed product design in the developing world. Also featuring MIT scientists and designers Evelyn Wang, Jeffrey Grossman, Sheila Kennedy, and Karen … Continued
March 14, 2014
Through a general introduction to his wide-ranging work, Olafur Eliasson addressed the question of where an idea begins and the process of an idea becoming embodied in the world. For Eliasson, art is a reality machine. Creativity is not located … Continued
March 13, 2014
Olafur Eliasson and Frederik Ottesen, Co-founders of Little Sun, discussed their art and social entrepreneurship venture with Fellows from the Tata Center for Technology and Design. The discussion was moderated by Chintan Vaishnav, Senior Lecturer at the Sloan School of … Continued
March 12, 2014
As part of Studio Olafur Eliasson’s engagement with the MIT community, Little Sun co-founder and engineer Frederik Ottesen worked with MIT faculty and students on the development of new ideas to expand the Little Sun project. His visit culminated with … Continued
October 18, 2013
In fall 2013, Little Sun was featured as a challenge in the first annual festival and hackathon, Hacking Arts, where Little Sun CEO Felix Hallwachs was on hand to present the project and mentor attendees. At Hacking Arts, 253 attendees … Continued
September 28 – 29, 2013