If you’ve visited MIT’s Building E52 in the past year, you probably walked beneath a brilliant art installation that flits and flickers in an ever-changing light-emitting-diode (LED) display. “Light Matrix (MIT),” a project by New York-based artist Leo Villareal, was commissioned for MIT’s Public Art Collection as a Percent-for-Art program in conjunction with the renovation of the Morris and Sophie Chang Building, which houses both the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Department of Economics within the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
“Working with light is so primal,” Villareal says. “Light is a very seductive material, so people are drawn to it; we as humans have this very deep response to it. I’m interested in the hypnotic qualities — you know, when you’re staring into a campfire, tapping into that, I think, is very powerful.”
The MIT List Visual Arts Center curates, manages, and administers MIT’s Percent-for-Art program, which allocates a percentage of building funds to commission internationally known artists, architects, and designers to create site-specific work for each new major renovation or building project on MIT’s campus. Previous commissions have included works by artists such as Anish Kapoor, Kenneth Noland, Sol LeWitt, Matthew Ritchie, Dan Graham, Jackie Ferrara, Louise Nevelson, Cai Guo-Qiang, Sarah Sze, and Antony Gormley, among many others.
Submitted by: Leah Talatinian/Arts at MIT | Video by: List Visual Arts Center | 2 min, 37 sec
