The Visual Arts Program Special Collection contains course materials and records from faculty and students during the VAP’s twenty years of operation in the Department of Architecture. The collection also contains videos from the VAP lecture series, and publications from faculty.
The MIT Visual Arts Program was created in 1989 in the Department of Architecture by Professor Ed Levine. Its initial impetus was to provide instruction in the arts to MIT undergraduates as well as to provide courses for graduate students from the Department of Architecture. Though called ‘a program,’ the VAP was technically one of five discipline groups or “sections” in the Department of Architecture, the others being: Architectural Design (AD), Computation (Comp), History, Theory and Criticism (HTC), and Building Technology (BT). Ute Meta Bauer was appointed director of the Visual Arts Program in the summer of 2005. Under her stewardship, the undergraduate and graduate components grew in size, student labs expanded, and the program organized a highly-visible lecture series.
Visual Arts Program installation, 2009. Photo by Eric Schmiedel.
A portion of collection materials are digitized and available by request. The physical collection may be browsed on request by appointment. See Reading Room and Research Policies page for details. For inquiries on the use of images, video, and other materials, contact ACT’s Project Archivist or email actreference@mit.edu.
