MIT Wiesner Student Art Gallery
A space for students to exhibit their artistic endeavors, both academic and co-curricular
FEEDBACK
Work by Aisha Cheema (MIT M.Arch, ’27) and Zachary Slonsky (Harvard M.Arch, ’26)
With Aisha Cheema and Zachary Slonsky’s installation FEEDBACK, the dialectic between signal and noise plays out across a circular arrangement of six sculptures. Together, these sculptures collaborate to form a transmedial communication network, one in which a spatial audio signal gets translated across audio visualizations, electromagnetic frequencies, fluorescent light responses, security cam footage, a mechanical drawing, and eventual image sonification, completing the FEEDBACK loop.
Audience members are invited to move through the sculptures, creating their own sounds and activating the sculptures to respond. Each vibration inscribes into the day’s durational drawing. In addition to this passive contribution, a series of sonic improvisations are scheduled to activate the sculpture, rendering live dynamics of performance, legibility, and automation.
On Display: February 6–28, 2026 / Open 9:00am–9:00pm daily
Wiesner Student Art Gallery, Stratton Student Center, W20 Room 209, 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
Opening Reception: Friday, February 6, 2026 / 6:00–8:00pm
Free and open to the public; no reservations needed.
Image: Courtesy of the artists.
2025–26
Encoding-Decoding Constellations
Work by Rebecca Lin, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, G’27
Our choice of representation shapes what we can create.
By translating between representations, we gain new vocabularies for reasoning and making. In this exhibition, we reinterpret constellation patterns of Islamic art as mathematical graphs and then return them to geometric designs. Through this process, we revisit classical patterns and uncover new expressive forms.
A collection of mixed-media works, including laser engravings, wood and fabric sculptures, and animated light pieces, explores how mathematical abstraction, computation, and contemporary craft intersect to illuminate the beauty of the source language and reveal a new design vocabulary.
At the core of this work is a method for encoding constellations as graphs and decoding them into interlocking stars using circle packings and classical constructions.
Collaborators: Ben Weiss (MSc Student in MAS, G’27) and Yufeng Zhao (MSc Student in MAS, G’27)
On Display: December 10, 2025–January 25, 2026
Opening Reception: December 10, 2025 / 5:30–7:00pm
Free and open to the public; no reservations needed.
Connecting Gaia
Work by Yitong Tseo, G’27, Computational Systems Biology (CSB) Program
It is now nearly half a century since James Lovelock first put forward his hypothesis that all the living and non-living systems on our blue planet are the combined gut of a single, all-encompassing organism: Gaia.
Since then scientists and poets have batted around follow up questions. How can we understand, even predict Gaia’s internal stirrings? Where do humans fit into Gaia? Can Gaia feel? want? dream? Instead of attempting to answer such big questions, this exhibit is a gesture toward collective beauty and an invitation to connect the many isolated pieces of our world.
On Display: November 10–30, 2025
Opening Reception: November 17, 2025 / 5:00–7:00pm
Free and open to the public; no reservations needed.
Traditions of East Campus: How Culture Unites Us
Work by Ariella Blackman, Course 16, ‘27 (East Campus – Tetazoo); Pari Rajesh, Course 16-ENG, ‘27 (East Campus – Tetazoo); and Ugo Okwuadigbo, Course 10B & 7, ‘26 (East Campus – Floor π)
East Campus is an MIT residence hall comprising two parallel buildings and ten unique halls, each of which have shared customs that create identity, support systems, and a sense of purpose.
This exhibit explores some of East Campus’ traditions, highlighting how they bring the community together. These traditions emphasize the enduring connections between all those who have partaken in them. As East Campus reopens after two years of renovation, these traditions persist, demonstrating their importance to the community they unite. We invite you to learn about the history of East Campus and reflect on how traditions shape your own communities.
On Display: October 7–31, 2025
Opening Reception: October 7, 2025 / 5:00–7:00pm
Free and open to the public; no reservations needed.
Alumni Open House: October 18, 2025
The artists welcome East Campus alums and current students to meet in the space and learn about each others’ experience.
Funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT
Image: East Campus Fort built during REX 2019. Photo: David Bragdon.
Primacy of Shape
Work by Coco Allred, Masters Candidate, Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT
In Primacy of Shape, Coco Allred transforms the MIT Wiesner Student Art Gallery into a printmaking studio and workshop for a growing exhibition of prints, a video animation, and a handmade book. Allred looks at shapes as symbols, inspired by Friedrich Fröbel’s early 20th-century educational geometric toy sets called “Gifts,” in which the sphere, cylinder, and cube symbolize truth, knowledge, and beauty. Inspiration is found in organic objects and their ecological sources—found shapes that connect to the natural places they emerge from.
Included in the exhibition are three short films by Allred, including Recursive Gardens, an examination of the pedagogical roots of kindergarten and the notion of nurture rather than genius as a predictor of success. The aesthetics of early kindergarten teaching materials became important building blocks of 20th-century art and design in Germany, as well as a touchstone for Allred’s reflections on shape, relationship, nature, and nurture. Read more about this exhibition.
On Display:
September 2–29, 2025
Receptions:
September 16, 2025 / 5:00–7:00pm
September 29, 2025 / 5:00–7:00pm
Alphabet of Shapes Printmaking Workshops
No prior experience is needed; It is free to participate and materials will be provided.
2024–25
Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts
Work by 2025 Schnitzer Prize recipients Vinzenz Aubry (Masters Candidate, Art, Culture and Technology), Cheng Qin (Masters Candidate, Architecture), and Chenyue xdd Dai (Masters Candidate, Architecture)
Cheng Qin, Chenyue “xdd44” Dai, and Vinzenz Aubry are all artists who capture art’s enticing half-lives. Working in media that bridges the stone age with the space age, the three MIT student artists were recently named as winners of the 2025 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts.
The Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts is presented annually to current MIT students for excellence in a body of work in the visual arts and was established in 1996 through the generosity of Harold and Arlene Schnitzer of Portland, Oregon.
On Display: May 27-June 13, 2025
Opening Reception: May 27, 2025 / 6:00–8:00pm
Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Stratton Student Center, W20 Room 209
84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
ROOMS: Forms of Belief, Belief in Forms
Work by artist duo HONMI (Bryan Honting Wong, SMArchS’ 24, Architecture and Namhi Kwun, SMArchS MCP’ 25, Architecture)
Forms serve as agencies where our beliefs take shape, connecting us to the collective, the spiritual, and the commemorative. While rituals traditionally resist modern systems like capitalism and globalization, they now reflect industrial and technological influences. Drawing from Hong Kong’s Ghost Month joss paper practices, where symbolic items like iPhones and luxury goods are burned for ancestors, this exhibition examines the intersection of tradition and modernity. A continuously printing, altar-like machine transforms industrial processes into spiritual acts, extended into a ritualistic shed, inviting meditation and reflection.
Drawing inspiration from the joss paper burning (燒衣紙) practices in Hong Kong during Ghost Month, locals engage in ceremonial incineration to communicate with the deceased. Joss paper, shaped to resemble consumable items like iPhones, Rolexes, or even Mercedes Benz, is sent to the underworld, allowing ancestors to enjoy these modern luxuries. Though this tradition originates from Buddhist and Taoist practices, it is the mass manufactured materials and goods that give form to these beliefs in our contemporary world.
Taking place in the Weisner Gallery over one and a half months, this exhibition critically accounts the intersection of belief and modernity, positioning the viewers within an ambiguous ritual—a continuously printing, yet unreachable, machine housed in an altar. This is drawn specifically to the mass production of joss paper that uses industrial printers to create all forms of symbolic and materialistic worships, by reversing its mechanical nature into a spiritual one instead. This installation invites viewers to project their own beliefs onto the ritual, offering the space for meditation, self-contemplation or collective reflection. Students and faculty in MIT are encouraged to isolate themselves momentarily from life’s constraints, using the space to rediscover oneself, regain confidence, and foster love and solidarity.
Exhibition on Display: March 14 to April 11, 2025 / Open 9:00am–6:00pm daily
Opening Reception: March 14, 2025 / 6:00–8:00pm
Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Stratton Student Center, W20 Room 209
84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
Installation view of HONMI’s ROOMS: Forms of Belief, Belief in Forms, MIT Wiesner Student Art Gallery, 2025. Credit HErickson/MIT.
SILT Magazine: Exhibition and Launch Party
Silt, a student-curated publication focused on creative storytelling about planning and space that is published both in print and online, was founded by Master of City Planning students in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and includes contributions from both within and outside of the MIT community.
Silt Team:
Founders: Lucy Corlett and Olivia Fiol
Editing Director: Lucy Corlett
Editors: Jake Boeri, Web Farabow, Brooke Jin, Mena Mohamed, Kaede Polkinghorne, Mistaya Smith
Design Director: Olivia Fiol
Design: Cale Wagner
Social Media Manager: Anna Savino
Digital: Dylan Roth, Archer Thomas
Volume 2 Contributors:
Sanam Mirzaye Ahmadi, Jake Boeri, Lina Bondarenko, Emma Caviness, Mica Caine, Isaac Gendler, Khadija Ghanizada, Max Gruber, Arezo Hakemy, Mahwish Kahlil, Hannah (Yu Hang) Leung, Daniela Morales, Kaede Polkinghorne, Isbah Premjee, Virginia Sun, Elmo Tumbokon, Archer Thomas, Ananth Udupa, Miquel Rossello Xamena, Manal Zia
Exhibition on Display: February 5-7, 2025 / 9:00am-9:00pm
Launch Party: Please join the Silt Magazine team in launching Silt Volume 2, Entwined: Us & The Land on Friday, February 7th from 6-8pm. Copies of the issue will be available (free of charge) and contributors will read selections from their pieces.
Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Stratton Student Center, W20 Room 209
84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
Beyond the Plot: Negotiating Agents, Boundaries, and Representations
Featuring work by Nasibe Nur Dundar Arifoglu ‘25 and Laura-India Garinois ‘24
Beyond the Plot is a student designed and directed two-week workshop that reimagines a seemingly vacant plot of land as a living system, uncovering its temporal and spatial layers. Sites are often viewed as static, yet they are dynamic environments extending into the sky, soil, and unseen ecosystems. Through collaboration and play, participants will use interactive games to foster dialogue and negotiation. By reframing sites as interconnected environments, the workshop offers an open, exploratory approach to understanding and representing the complexities of place.
Hosted in the MIT Wiesner Student Art Gallery, the workshop concludes with an exhibition of created prototypes, drawings, and multimedia experiments which will be open to the public from 5-7pm on Friday, January 24 and Friday, January 31, 2025.
Exhibition on Display: The workshop will be visible through the windows of the gallery January 20 through 31, 2025, and the gallery will be open to the public from 5-7pm on Friday, January 24 and Friday, January 31, 2025
Closing Reception: Friday, January 31, 2025 / 5:00-7:00pm
BRICK X BRICK: Drawing A Particular Survey
Featuring work by Charles Janson, MArch ‘25; Diana Mykhaylychenko, SMArch Comp ‘25; Jacob Payne, MArch ‘26; Jenna Schnitzler, MArch, SMBT ‘24; Mara Jovanović, MArch, ‘26; S M Kaikobad, SMArch Urb ‘25; and Sloan Aulgur, MArch ‘25.
This exhibition centers on recasting the architectural survey from conveyor of building facts to instrument for building stories. Operating somewhere between the limits of absolute truth and virtual truth, student drawings aim to uncover new ways of engaging architecture’s relationship to vision, documentation, and preservation against the backdrop of racial, economic, and material conditions in the turn-of-the century South. More specifically, the site is Tuskegee University and the legacy of Robert R. Taylor, the first accredited Black architect, MIT graduate, and designer and builder of a significant portion of the campus’s brick buildings.
Exhibition on Display: November 19–December 20, 2024 / Open 9:00am–6:00pm daily
Opening Reception: Friday, November 22, 2024 / 5:00-7:00pm
BRICK X BRICK: Drawing A Particular Survey was supported by MIT Department of Architecture, the Council for the Arts at MIT, The Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Science, and the Tuskegee University Archives.
Image: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library. “At work in the school’s brick-yard” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1904.
Interwoven: The Interdisciplinarity of Sustainability at MIT
Featuring work by Sara Laura Wilson, Mechanical Engineering, PhD student, Ideation Lab; Marwa AlAlawi, Mechanical Engineering, PhD student, Human Computer Interaction Engineering (HCIE) Lab; and Supreetha Krishnan, Art, Culture and Technology, Staff
Sustainability is a collective and interdisciplinary effort. This on-campus exhibition invites all members of the MIT community—across disciplinary and social bounds—to contribute their perspectives on sustainable action in collective art pieces. Sustainable development in academia is hindered by the siloing of like-minded students into rigid disciplinary bounds, which sever interdisciplinary action. This exhibition challenges the structures of academia that reinforce disciplinarity by connecting members of our community based on their interests and priorities, rather than by their discipline. This exhibition is graciously funded by the MindHeartHand Chancellor’s Innovation Fund, the Council for the Arts at MIT Grad Seed Grant, and the Office of Experiential Learning IAP Mini-Grant.
Exhibition on Display: October 9, 2024 / Open 9:00am–6:00pm daily
Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 6, 2024 / 5:00-7:00pm
Join the artists for free boba and art-making at a reception for Interwoven: The Interdisciplinarity of Sustainability at MIT in the Wiesner Student Gallery.
Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Stratton Student Center, W20 Room 209
84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
Damp Skin: The Porous Urbanity and Individual
Featuring work by Cheng-Hsin Chan (SMArchS ‘24), INA Wu (MArch ‘25), and Zhi Ray Wang (SMArchS ‘25)
Damp Skin is a collaborative project exploring the impact of East Asia’s climate on post-modernized cities, focusing on memories, body perception, and everyday cultural phenomena affected by humidity and heat.
This exhibition, The Porous Urbanity and Individual, presents three works by MIT Taiwanese architects and design researchers. These works include a living archive and historical research of Taiwanese domesticity as it contends with dampness within urban housing, a sculpture series capturing emotional imprints of exhaling skin within Taiwan and Hong Kong’s urban environments, and digital representations of urban life’s permeable, living skin.
Exhibition on Display: September 9 – 29, 2024 / Open 9:00am–6:00pm daily
Reception: Friday, September 13 6:00-7:00pm
Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Stratton Student Center, W20 Room 209
84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
2023–24
Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts Exhibition
Featuring work by the 2024 Schnitzer Prize Recipients: Dexter Callender III (Graduate Student, Media Arts and Sciences), Zhanyi Chen (PhD Candidate, History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art), and HONMI, artist duo Bryan Hon Ting Wong and Namhi Kwun (Graduate Students, Architecture)
The three winners of the 2024 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts work across several media to offer novel sensations and perspectives. Their broad range of subjects include technology, light waves, geopolitics, and unrequited love.
Established in 1996 through the generosity of Harold ’44 and Arlene Schnitzer of Portland Oregon, the Schnitzer Prize is presented annually to current MIT undergraduate and graduate students for excellence in a body of work in the visual arts.
Exhibition on Display: Open 9:00am–6:00pm daily starting May 22, 2024
Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 29, 2024 / 6:00-8:00pm / Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Stratton Student Center, W20 Room 209
84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
Medium Resolution from Amidst Four Works, Wiesner Student Gallery Exhibition, May 2024. Image courtesy of the artists.
Amidst Four Works
Contributors: Maria Gabriela Carucci (SMArchS 24), Laura-India Garinois (SMArchS 24), Mahwish Khalil (SMArchS 24), Gabriel Castro-Andrade (M.Arch 25), Mingjia Chen (M.Arch 25), and Courage Dzidula Kpodo (M.Arch 25)
Editors: Tejumola Bayowa (M.Arch 25), Azania Umoja (M.Arch 25)
The Amidst Four Works exhibition brings together work carried out over the last year by six students in the MIT Department of Architecture. Gabriel Castro-Andrade (M.Arch 25) explores themes of mourning and place, Courage Dzidula Kpodo (M.Arch 25) documents new traditions, Mingjia Chen (M.Arch 25) reflects on professionalism, and Laura-India Garinois (SMArchS 24), Maria Gabriela Carucci (SMArchS 24), and Mahwish Khalil (SMArchS 24) meditate on ecological entities.
Exhibition on Display:
Open 9:00am–6:00pm daily starting May 6, 2024
Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Stratton Student Center, W20 Room 209
84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
Special Event: In Each Other’s Company
A Conversation with Meriam Soltan, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Tuesday, May 7, 2024 / 6:00pm / Wiesner Student Art Gallery
A discussion focused on the collaborative spirit inherent to editorial work that, when embraced, sparks conversation across multiple registers and disciplines. The event invites those who engage it to think through, between, and beyond their work in the company of others, mapping through lines and manifesting potentialities that would otherwise have rarely been realized in isolation.
Supported by the Department of Architecture and the Office of Graduate Education (OGE)
Evan Kramer, MIT Dome with star trails and air traffic in full spectrum, 2021. Ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light is captured in this “full spectrum” image resulting in the unique color balance including the pink-tinted tree leaves. Composite image with 1,600 frames for the night sky and five frames for the foreground from the roof of the McNair Building. Courtesy of the artist.
Celestial City
Work by Evan L. Kramer, PhD Candidate, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics ’25
Celestial City is an exploration of the familiar from a new perspective. Few think of photographing astronomical objects in urban, light polluted environments. However, from the vantage point of MIT campus rooftops above street-level light pollution and with specialized photography equipment, the night skies of Cambridge and Boston can be captured in all their glory. The stars, moon, planets, International Space Station, eclipses, meteors, and nebulae are captured in their choreographed celestial dance over the hustle and bustle of city life. Although central to the photographic process, the night sky is not the only focus of the imagery on display. Known worldwide as the hub of innovation, MIT’s iconic structures and people are featured prominently, from the Dome and Green Building to the graduate students in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department, as fitting foregrounds to this first-of-its-kind exhibit of urban astrophotography.
Exhibition on Display:
March 1 – 31, 2024 / Open 9:00am–6:00pm daily
Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Additional Event:
Gazing Upwards
Saturday, March 2, 2024 / 2:00pm
MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
An afternoon with National Geographic night sky photographer Babak Tafreshi and MIT urban astrophotographer Evan Kramer.
Scanning of charcoal drawings by Iris Yuting Zeng. Courtesy of the artist.
Moving into the Being Mind: Finding the Grip
Work by Iris Yuting Zeng, M.Arch ’24
No experience or training is required to start drawing. Simply doing the most easy and innate action creates an unexpected transcendental journey for us to move out of the thinking mind and into the being mind. This collection of charcoal and watercolor drawings marks the start of a process that was later recognized as a tool for the materialization of the inner world. The repetition of circular movement drops the burden of cognitive processing, therefore creating a void space between the conscious mind and the awareness. Visitors are invited to experiment with drawing materials provided in the gallery at any time or can sign up to attend a drawing session guided by the artist.
Drawing Sessions with Iris Yuting Zeng
30 minute sessions are available on Wednesdays from 4:30-5:30pm on January 31, February 7, and 14, 2024 or between 5:30-6:30pm on Thursdays, February 1, 8, and 15, 2024. Enjoy the freedom to draw like a kid with no constraints or judgment. No previous experience is needed.
Closing Reception:
Thursday, February 22, 2024 / 5:30-7:00pm
No registration necessary
On Display:
January 27 – February 25, 2024
Wiesner Student Art Gallery, open 9:00am–6:00pm daily
shore/lime/line/light
Work by Aubrie R.M. James, SMACT ‘24
The environment of MIT is not porous; the hard-surfaced landscape conspires to convince us that we are somehow in a place without memory. Using techniques of counter-mapping, projection, ecological and archival research, and material exploration of the land, this show attempts to create and illuminate small fissures in the psychogeographic landscape of MIT.
On Display:
December 1, 2023 through January 14, 2024 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery, open 9:00am–6:00pm daily.
Reception:
December 1, 2023 / 5:00–7:00pm
Additional Event: Shoreline déRive
December 6, 2023 / 1:00pm
Meet outside Dewey Library, MIT Building E53
30 Wadsworth Street, Cambridge, MA
Join the artist for a guided group walk that traces the pre-landmaking river shoreline through the MIT campus.
Come Back And Tell Me Why Things Last
Work by Lauren Gideonse (M.Arch ‘24) and Adriana Giorgis (M.Arch ‘24)
Come Back and Tell Me Why Things Last shares a set of parables, case study buildings, and their stories, towards understanding the factors that affect building lifespan in the United States. The exhibition is the product of two long road trips through the American landscape with the route shaped to collect particularly old and materially significant buildings. At each site, documentation was performed, ephemera was collected, and steward interviews were conducted.
This work has been reinforced by the artists’ ongoing partnership with Boston Building Resources (BBR), a local building material reuse non-profit. All stock components from the show will be donated to BBR after closing in a gesture of support for their important work in maintaining the affordability of materials for housing upkeep and preservation in Roxbury.
On Display:
September 22 through November 9, 2023 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery, open 9:00am–6:00pm daily.
Reception:
October 13, 2023 / 5:00–7:00pm
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2022–23
2023 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts
An exhibition of work by Felix Li (’23, Art and Design), Manar Moursi (PhD Candidate, History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art), Reina Mun (G, Art, Culture, and Technology Program), and Karyn Nakamura (’23, Art and Design).
What happens when technologies fulfill their mission? What happens when they fail, or decay, or when the need for which they were created no longer exists? These are the questions asked by the four student winners of the 2023 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts at MIT. Working across a broad spectrum of media, these four artists explore our intimate relationships with time, with memory and tradition, and with the fleeting nature of meaning. The stories they tell begin where most stories end, in a magical rearview mirror that somehow tells us more about where we are heading than where we have been.
The Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize is presented to current MIT students for excellence in a body of work. Students submit an artistic portfolio for consideration. “Working with a wide range of media, from photography and video to artist books and printed matter, as well as devising technologically sophisticated installations and interactive objects, these remarkable students demonstrate the diversity and excellence of creative work taking place at the Institute,” says Andrea Volpe, Director of the Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT). “All four Schnitzer prize winners reflect on their relationships to memory, time, place, and technology. The council is particularly proud to have previously supported the work of these artists through its grant programs.”
On Display:
The Deep Time Project: Architecture as Planetary Abstraction
An exhibition of work by students of The Deep Time Project taught by Cristina Parreño Alonso: Lara Andra Avram, Simina Marin, Christina Dimitri Battikha, Ekin Bilal, Juan Manuel Chavez, Pa Ramyarupa, Tatiana Victorovna Estrina, and Andrea Sandell.
Exhibition team: Andrea Sandell, Sahil Dharam Mohan, and Christina Battikha.
An exhibition of work by the students of The Deep Time Project, a cross-disciplinary course taught by Cristina Parreño Alonso and supported by MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) which was offered in fall 2022 at MIT Architecture. The course was set as an interdisciplinary conversation aiming to expand architectural timescales of perception. In doing so, it situated architecture in a world of entanglements between geological, technological, human, animal, and viral bodies co-producing the environment.
Inspired by a series of weekly readings and conversations with guests—geologists, journalists, anthropologists, historians, and architects—around the notion of deep time, each student explored a different constellation of temporalities and agencies in architecture through “material essays.” Material essays are tools for thought; vehicles for analytic, interpretative, critical views of architecture that transcend the medium of the text. In this exhibition they are a combination of text, moving image, sound, and physical prototypes.
On Display:
January 20 – March 24, 2023 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery, open 9:00am–6:00pm daily.
Reception:
February 17, 2022 / 5:00–7:00pm
Supported with a grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) and the d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education.
Co-presented by CAST and the MIT Architecture Department.
STRAP: STRetch Assembly Performance
An exhibition of work by Technology Overload (M Arch ’23) and Harris Chowdhary (M Arch ’25)
In STRAP, artists Technology Overload (M Arch ’23) and Harris Chowdhary (M Arch ’25) present new works from their distinct explorations of politics, figuration, and control in digital spaces and contemporary cities. Through installation, drawing, text, and documentary practice, the exhibition materializes a conversation between the artists.
Technology Overload uses sculpture and image to explore flesh algorithmically stretched and deformed towards abstraction. Harris Chowdhary takes materials suspended from local waste streams and economies and re-assembles them into installation and text pieces. Both artists reimagine techniques they have learned during their time at MIT. Together, STRetch Assembly Performance asks how we are to respond to the crumbling systems we’ve created, and how they have in turn created us.
On Display:
November 18 – December 23, 2022 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery, open 9:00am–9:00pm daily
Reception:
Friday, November 18, 2022 / 5:00–7:00pm
Reconfiguración
An exhibition of work by Alejandro Medina, Graduate Student in the Art, Culture, and Technology Program at MIT
In Reconfiguración, Alejandro Medina presents five new works produced during his first year as a graduate student at MIT’s program in Art, Culture & Technology. The works were created out of the specific context of being at MIT and are conceived using materials derived from the university’s setting—the scientific research paper becomes the form for a new series of drawings, branches collected throughout the university’s campus are re-engaged with gravity in new structural configurations, and cardboard/paper waste from the Media Lab’s facilities are brought back to life as a 20 foot mural. The work centers around the artist’s preoccupation with climate change, particularly the urgent need to rethink relationships between nature, technology and science in order to build resilience against the challenges of the future.
On Display:
September 9–October 7, 2022 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery, open 9:00am–9:00pm daily
Reception:
September 16, 2022 / 5:00–7:00pm
TAKWIN
An exhibition of work by Ardalan SadeghiKivi, an Iranian artist, writer, and programmer pursuing a Master of Architecture at MIT
In TAKWIN, Ardalan SadeghiKivi summons, captures, and materializes phantom presences in the form of objects and bodies. Ghostly inhabitants of the digital realm impress themselves onto artifacts via the computational interface SadeghiKivi has created, thereby fantasizing about digital flesh and the disposition of natural, artificial, and in-betweens. The programs provoke a more profound and embodied understanding of the invisible processes within meta-media systems and meta-machines.
The exhibition dwells on the spine between the material and immaterial, revealing that they are not separate and opposite, but instead are alternative revelations of the same reality.
On Display:
July 6–August 12, 2022 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery, open 9:00am–9:00pm daily
2021–22
2022 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts Recipients Exhibition
An exhibition of work by Christopher Joshua Benton (Graduate Student in the Program in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT), Kwan Q Li (Graduate Student in the Program in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT, and Irmandy Wicaksono (PhD Candidate in Media Arts and Sciences).
Each year, the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize recognizes excellent student work in the visual arts at MIT. Working across geographies, disciplines, and materials, the artistic practices of the three recipients of the 2022 prize demonstrate the diversity of creative work taking place at the Institute at the highest levels.
On Display:
May 19–June 12, 2022 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery, open 9:00am–9:00pm daily
Reception:
Thursday, May 26, 2022 / 5:30-7:00pm
Lodgers: Friction Between Neighbors
An exhibition of work by Zhicheng Xu (M.Arch ‘22), Mengqi Moon He (SMArchS ‘20), Calvin Zhong (B.S. ‘18, M.Arch ‘24), and Wuyahuang Li (SMArchS ‘21)
The Lodgers are a set of temporary “living” structures to enable symbiotic relationships between the land, humans, and other living things. They are shelters for all inhabitants and temporary guests themselves on the land. They will come, go, or decay, returning to the land as the seasons change.
The exhibition showcases the two-year research on Fly Ranch and reflection on the process of coping with friction. It opens on March 31, followed by a mapping workshop in the second week of April and a closing reception on April 29.
On Display:
March 31–April 29, 2022 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery, open 9:00am–9:00pm daily
The Lodgers exhibition is supported by the Council of the Arts at MIT (CAMIT) and MIT Architecture Department. Special thanks to the Burning Man Project and Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI)
DESIGN:INCLUSIVE
An exhibition of work by Ziyuan Zhu and Sheng-Hung Lee
In DESIGN: INCLUSIVE, designers Sheng-Hung Lee and Ziyuan Zhu share how inclusiveness shapes design humanely and environmentally in the creative process. In this exhibition, they explore two topics: Humanity: Inclusive Footwear for an Aging Population and Design for Environmental(ity): Speculative Circularity.
Life and behavior in this fast-paced society have been rapidly transformed by emerging technology, the political environment, advancing healthcare, social justice issues, climate change, and much more. In the midst of these large, complex, and systemic challenges, DESIGN: INCLUSIVE invites reflection, asking: Whose voice is (and continues to be) missing? Who in our society has been deemed vulnerable or less powerful? Which groups of people are confronting the largest degree of exclusion?
On Display:
February 9–March 12, 2022 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery
ppppress
An exhibition of prints curated by ppppress, a student and alumni-run publishing project within the Art, Culture, and Technology Program at MIT (ACT). ppppress was founded by Chucho Ocampo Aguilar, Emma Yimeng Zhu 朱艺蒙, Aarti Sunder, and Po-Hao Chi.
In an effort to bring printed-media back into the ever-growing presence of the virtual and the screen, ppppress presents a collection of prints created using a risograph, perfect binding machine, guillotine, silkscreen, press, and a digital duplicator (a mimeograph married to a xerox machine with a scanning bed on top).
Dancing between the digital and the analog, high tech and craft, and silkscreen and photocopy, the exhibition features content from the MIT Center for Visual Studies (CAVS) archive and work submitted by scholars, designers, artists, and scientists at the Institute.
In addition to the exhibition of prints in the Weisner Gallery, workshops in book making, printing, and storytelling using the CAVS archives are offered to the MIT community throughout January 2022.
On Display:
December 6, 2021–January 21, 2022 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery
The PPPPRESS exhibition is supported by the MIT Architecture Department; Art, Culture, and Technology Program (ACT); CAVS Special Archive, Council of the Arts at MIT (CAMIT), and the MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative (TSI).
Special thanks to Thera Webb and Graham Yeager.
Unbounded: Transmedia Storytelling @ MIT, 2019-2021
An exhibition of virtual productions by students across MIT engaged with the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative from 2019-21
Celebrating two years of operation (one and a half of them in a global pandemic), the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative (TSI) of the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) presents an exhibition of student work; beginning with the cellphone video made in the first subject taught with TSI curriculum development funds to the latest AR production that engages the dramatic street demonstrations during the Black Lives Matter protests, bringing these events “home” during the pandemic. Spatialized storytelling brings SA+P’s research into architecture and urbanism together with the expanding technologies of virtual production while TSI students push the boundaries of these tools into new directions and urgent current events.
On Display:
October 18–November 23, 2021 in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Virtual exhibition ongoing
Learning from reality: artistic exploration and forming understanding
Wednesday, September 29 at 5:00 EST / Virtual Event
A conversation about the relationship contemporary “media art” has with both the idea and reality of technology. How can artistic work include as well as continuously exclude experience, perception, and connection?
Featuring Karsten Schuhl, MIT Media Lab ’21 and Wiesner Gallery exhibiting artist; Verena Bachl, artist and founder of Studio Verena Bachl; and Benjamin Maus, who operates allesblinkt: a bureau for art and invention in Berlin, Germany.
The superpose project was supported in part by a grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT.
Image: superpose waves, Dyed water, polypropylene, 3D printed mechanisms, painted MDF, aluminum extrusion frame, sound, custom electronics & software, 102 x 55 x 36 inches.
Installation at west lobby at MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, 2021. Photo: Karsten Schuhl.
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2020-21
The 2021 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts
Featuring work by the 2021 award recipients: Po-Hao Chi, ACT; Chucho Ocampo, ACT: Carolyn Tam, Architecture; and Nina Lutz, Media Lab
Each year, the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize recognizes excellent student work in the visual arts at MIT. Portfolios span almost every imaginable medium and theme; many, if not most student artists bridge diverse disciplines and departments, drawing on MIT’s broad knowledge base and its culture of collaboration.
On Display:
Virtual exhibition ongoing
Trapped
Work by Elaheh Ahmadi ‘20, MEng ‘21
Elaheh Ahmadi is a visual and performance artist and computer engineer from Tehran, Iran, currently based in Boston. She utilizes photography, performance, and writing to raise awareness of contemporary social issues, particularly problems of women’s rights, voices and identities around the world. She is currently studying in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, while independently developing her artistic practice and finding her creative voice.
In 2020, Ahmadi received a Bachelor of Science from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a concentration in Photography and Visual Arts. Her research area is mainly focused on robotics and autonomous vehicles. Ahmadi’s mission is to provide a space in which everyone, especially women, feel comfortable expressing different dimensions of their personality.
Botanical Ghosts
Work by Nancy Valladares, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology ’20
Botanical Ghosts traces the transatlantic voyage of the ackee tree (Blighia Sapida), and its encounter with British botanist Dorothy Popenoe in Honduras. This project stages a fictional exchange between Dorothy, the ackee fruit and the artist, as they pull on a thread that unravels the history of Lancetilla Botanical Experimental Station. This website collects a film, fictions, letters, photographs, and documents into a speculative archive that reanimates the specters behind Lancetilla and the worlds that emerged from this site. Please note, the exhibition remains open virtually.
The Loss of Green: Imaging Vegetal Worlds
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
A cross-disciplinary conversation where botanical exchanges, medicinal practices and culinary history intersect to unearth the legacies of our ecological present.
Featuring Nancy Valladares, ACT ‘20 and Wiesner Exhibiting Artist; Shireen Hamza, PHD student in History of Science at Harvard and a filmmaker; and Semine Long Callesen, MIT HTC ‘20 and part of the MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative.
Misalignments
Work by Dalma Földesi, M.Arch 2020 and Jung In Seo, M.Arch 2020
Misalignments resists the urge to optimize, orthogonalize, mathematize, and discipline matter. Instead, the hybrid ceramic fabrication processes explored in the galleries apply precision to the design of tools and actions. The artifacts emerge from this new approach to shaping clay. Here, the material is the performer; its qualities result from a balancing act between geometric specification and physical behavior. Controlled moments of instability play from an open score that allows different manifestations. Hands and machines equally involved, this process reintroduces authorship and foregrounds labor in an increasingly automated process. It is a risky endeavor. Please note, the exhibition remains open virtually.
2019–20
2020 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts Exhibition
May 27–June 30, 2020
Featuring work by the 2020 award recipients: Nicole L’Huillier, Media Lab; Rae Yuping Hsu, ACT; Jonathan Zong, CSAIL; Elaheh Ahmadi ’20, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Siranush Babakhanova ’20, Physics
Each year, the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize highlights student work in the visual arts at MIT. Portfolios span almost every imaginable medium and theme; many, if not most student artists bridge diverse disciplines and departments, drawing on MIT’s broad knowledge base and its culture of collaboration. Please note, the exhibition remains open virtually.
BODY TEXT
January 15–February 27, 2020
Featuring work by Jonathan Zong, Ph.D. Computer Science, MIT
BODY TEXT is reading as gazing as reading as writing; is a contest of control; is an imperfect way of rendering people and systems legible to each other.
Additional Past Exhibitions
The Jerome B. Wiesner Student Art Gallery was established as a gift from the MIT Class of 1983 to honor the former president of MIT, Jerome Wiesner, for his support of the arts at the Institute. Since then, the gallery space located on the second floor of the MIT Stratton Student Center has exhibited a wide range of both academic and co-curricular artwork by MIT students.
The MIT Wiesner Student Art Gallery hosts month-long exhibitions of art and design projects created by current students. Students complete all aspects of the exhibition with the support of the gallery curator.
Applications are accepted annually in the spring for the following academic year. All current MIT students, both undergraduate and graduate, are eligible to apply as an individual or a group.
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MIT Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Stratton Student Center (W20-209)
MIT Building W20, Second floor
84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
Open 9:00am to 9:00pm daily; Hours for general public may be restricted.
Contact: Sarah Hirzel, Gallery Coordinator, shirzel@mit.edu
Established as a gift from the MIT Class of 1983, the Wiesner Gallery honors the former president of MIT, Jerome Wiesner, for his support of the arts at the Institute. The gallery was fully renovated in fall 2016, thanks in part to the generosity of Harold (’44) and Arlene Schnitzer and the Council for the Arts at MIT, and now also serves as a central meeting space for MIT Student Arts Programming including the START Studio, Creative Arts Competition, Student Arts Advisory Board, and Arts Scholars.
Funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT)