Legacy
The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT
The Center for Advanced Visual Studies was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967 by Professor Gyorgy Kepes to bring artists from around the world to collaborate with MIT’s community of scientists and engineers, to produce works using new directions in technological approach that would rise to interaction with the broader community at the urban or civic scale.
Otto Piene was the first Fellow appointed to CAVS (1968 to 1971), and he became the second director of CAVS in 1974 until retiring in 1993. Elizabeth Goldring was Exhibits and Project Director and the interim Co-Director of CAVS.
“Sky art has emerged as ‘flying messages’, migrant apparitions and temporary artwork appearing in the urban sky space between our buildings, above our heads-colors by day, lights by night- traveling from deep inside ourselves to the invisible tips of invisible stars, art in orbit.
In 1969, Otto Piene coined the term ‘sky art’, using it in three places: in his Sky Art Portfolio, a suite of 25 lithographs of imaginary and future sky art projects; in his book More Sky; and in his article ‘Sky Art: A Notebook for a Book’, a discussion of past and future sky projects.”