The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lecture Series was established to honor the Lavines, two prominent Boston art patrons and longtime supporters of the MIT List Visual Arts Center. This lecture series, featuring distinguished art world speakers and presenters, serves the Boston arts community through its focus on modern and contemporary art.
Lavine Lecture Series
Past Lavine Lectures
2023 - Lavine Lecture: Cyberfeminism Index Book Launch
MIT List Visual Arts Center will host the book launch for designer and editor Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index. The event will feature a performative reading by Seu and conversation with Kendra Albert.
Mindy Seu, CYBERFEMINISM INDEX, 2022. Courtesy of Inventory Press
2019 - Lavine Lecture: Bertoia Backstory on the MIT Chapel Reredos
The List Center is pleased to present Celia Bertoia, daughter of Harry Bertoia and director and founder of the Harry Bertoia Foundation, for the 2019 Lavine Lecture. Celia Bertoia’s lecture Bertoia Backstory on the MIT Chapel Reredos will reflect on the work at MIT, demonstrate how this fit into his body of work and design, and give life to the relationship between Saarinen and Bertoia.
Eerro Saarinen, MIT Chapel, 1954.
The List Center is pleased to present Claudrena N. Harold, Professor of African American and African Studies and History at the University of Virginia, for the 2017 Lavine Lecture. Dr. Harold’s lecture Black Fire: The Struggle for Racial Justice in Charlottesville and Beyond, 1964 to the Present will reflect on the recent tragedy in Charlottesville and the longer history that precedes current struggles for racial justice.
Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold, We Demand (still), 2016. Single-channel, video, sound, 10:19 min. Courtesy the artists and Picture Palace Pictures.
2016 - Lavine Lecture: Nature Is Never Finished: Land Art Conservation in the 21st Century
The 2016 Lavine Lecture presents a discussion between Francesca Esmay and James Nisbet, tackling the complex matter of eroding land forms within the cultural context of shifting categories of nature and culture. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Photo Credit: Katie Sonnenborn, Spiral Jetty research trip organized by Francesca Esmay for Dia Art Foundation & the Getty Research Institute, 2009.
2015 - Lavine Lecture: Surface Tension, Screen Space: A Talk by Giuliana Bruno
Join us for this special talk by Giuliana Bruno, Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. Professor Bruno’s talk “Surface Tension, Screen Space” is presented in conjunction with the List’s current exhibition, Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space. The gallery will be open before the presentation.
Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space. Exhibition Installation view: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2015.
2014 - Lavine Lecture: Joan Jonas: A Meter-Making Argument / A Talk by Gregory Volk
Join us in continuing the celebration of Joan Jonas in the lead-up to the 2015 Venice Bienale through this special Lavine Lecture with art critic and curator Gregory Volk. Joan Jonas, a brilliant practitioner and pioneer of video, performance, and installation art, is among the most significant artists of the past several decades.
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, 2005 Performance at Dia Beacon.
2008 - The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lecture: Light Trap for Dan Flavin a Talk by Jeffrey Weiss
This talk will represent Dan Flavin’s landmark Green Gallery exhibition in 1964 as a dividing point in the development of his work. Focusing on the precise nature of the fluorescent lamp (both the object and the light) as Flavin’s sole medium, it will bracket Flavin in the context of the rise of so-called minimal art, seeking instead to position his early work within a more complex historical narrative centered on the re-emergence of Marcel Duchamp as an art world figure in New York circa 1960.
Dan Flavin, Untitled (for Conor Cruise O’Brien) 5c, 1990. Gift of Dorothy and Roy Lavine. Photo: Charles Mayer Photography