The Center for Advanced Visual Studies was established in 1967. Its founder, the artist and MIT professor Gyorgy Kepes, conceived of the Center as a fellowship program for artists.
The Center's initial mission was twofold: to facilitate "cooperative projects aimed at the creation of monumental scale environmental forms" and to support participating fellows in the development of "individual creative pursuits." To achieve these goals, fellows worked collaboratively with each other and with the wider MIT community.
Kepes, who had taught at the New Bauhaus in Chicago prior to joining the faculty of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning in 1946, strongly believed in the social role of the artist. With the founding of the Center he sought to bring about the "absorption of the new technology as an artistic medium; the interaction of artists, scientists, engineers, and industry; the raising of the scale of work to the scale of the urban setting; media geared to all sensory modalities; incorporation of natural processes, such as cloud play, water flow, and the cyclical variations of light and weather; [and] acceptance of the participation of 'spectators' in such a way that art becomes a confluence."
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CenterHistory.pdf
Archive:
The Center has extensive archive of photos, books, posters, documents, films, videos and audio tapes that we are attempting to organize and make available for scholarly research.
To make inquiries about the archive please send and email
here.
You may also
view the Center's poster archives.
