CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The List Visual Arts Center, MIT’s contemporary art museum, will celebrate its fortieth anniversary in 2026, a milestone marked by the announcement of an anonymous $1 million challenge grant designated for the long-term stewardship, conservation, and engagement of the Institute’s Public Art Collection. The List Center also announces the recently established Honorary Board of Advisors, which honors a broad set of visionaries who have shaped the Center’s standing as a premier institution for contemporary art on the global stage over the past four decades. Inaugural Honorary Board Members include artists Sanford Biggers, Joan Jonas, and Christine Sun Kim, and architect J. Meejin Yoon, alongside former List Center directors and other distinguished members.

Also marking the anniversary, the List Center will present a major group exhibition, Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form, and a day of performance and celebration on April 11, 2026. The List Center’s Fortieth Anniversary coincides with a permanent public art commission by artist Sarah Oppenheimer, which will debut in the recently renovated Metropolitan Warehouse (Building 41) in the fall of 2026 as part of MIT’s Percent-for-Art Program. The List Center’s Fortieth Anniversary underscores the dynamic role the List Center plays in threading the visual arts throughout the Institute’s 168-acre campus.

Director Paul C. Ha states, “Our year-long celebration connects our community of students, faculty, artists, and art lovers to forty years of art on campus, with an eye to the next forty.”

PUBLIC ART ENGAGEMENT AND CONSERVATION PROJECT

Marking its fortieth anniversary, the List Center launches a bold new public art engagement and conservation initiative, made possible by an anonymous $1 million challenge grant. Honoring the List’s lasting impact while broadening and energizing its base of individual philanthropy, the 1:1 challenge invites the List’s community of supporters to match the grant with an additional $1 million by October 2027. Together, these investments will sustain the quality, accessibility, and importance of MIT’s world-class Public Art Collection, and ensure the List Center’s next forty years as a hub for artistic innovation, scholarship, and public engagement around contemporary art.

The List Center stewards MIT’s art collections, which include the Student Lending Collection, Campus Lending Collection, and Public Art Collection — the latter of which has grown to encompass more than sixty major works through the Institute’s Percent-for-Art Program. This landmark initiative will provide critical resources for conserving outdoor works of art and improving interpretation and wayfinding for the major public works on campus, positioning MIT’s Public Art Collection as the only free outdoor sculpture park in the Boston area. The project underscores the role of the visual arts on campus and within the broader community, reflecting MIT’s ongoing commitment to the aesthetic, human, and social dimensions of research.

Although MIT’s Percent-for-Art Program was formally instituted in 1968, the artist–architect collaborations that define it began shaping the campus decades earlier: When architect Eero Saarinen designed the MIT Chapel in 1955, sculptor Theodore Roszak created its bell tower, and sculptor Harry Bertoia designed the altar screen. In 1985, architect I. M. Pei collaborated with artists Scott Burton, Kenneth Noland, and Richard Fleischner on Percent-for-Art commissions for the Wiesner Building and plaza, home to the MIT List Visual Arts Center and former Media Laboratory. A timeline and archival exhibition in the List Center atrium will focus on the Wiesner Building’s interdisciplinary collaborations, while new signage and engagement points will be installed across the Public Art Collection. Since 2019, MIT has commissioned major permanent works by Sanford Biggers, Spencer Finch, Julian Charrière, and Agnieszka Kurant.

HONORARY BOARD OF ADVISORS

To commemorate forty years of artistic and civic impact, the List Visual Arts Center has established an Honorary Board of Advisors, recognizing the diversity of perspectives that have shaped the institution’s legacy and strengthened its mission. Members of the Board will help guide and inspire the List Center’s ongoing work. The inaugural members include: Joan Jonas, whose long-standing relationship with MIT as an artist and faculty member has contributed to the List Center’s commitment to experimental media and performance; and exhibiting artists Hans Haacke, Ann Hamilton, Michael Joo, Isaac Julien, Christine Sun Kim, Tavares Strachan, Fred Wilson, and Anicka Yi whose solo exhibitions at the List Center have deepened its engagement with contemporary practices— from expanded cinema and installation to conceptual and performance-based approaches— strengthening the List Center’s role as a platform for experimentation and critical dialogue. Sanford Biggers, Sarah Sze, and architect J. Meejin Yoon are recognized for their contributions to MIT’s Public Art Collection, reflecting the List Center’s commitment to site-responsive works that meaningfully integrate art within the built environment.

The Honorary Board also includes former directors whose visionary leadership defined and advanced the List Center’s mission: Wayne Andersen (Hayden Gallery and chairman of MIT’s Committee on the Visual Arts: 1965–77), who helped launch one of the nation’s first Percent-for-Art programs; Kathy Halbreich (Hayden Gallery: 1976–85; inaugural director in 1986), who established the museum’s foundational vision and guided landmark public art commissions that integrated art and architecture across campus; Katy Kline (1987–98), whose work with artists and residencies, acclaimed publications, and international exhibitions— including the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale — expanded the List Center’s reach and

reputation; and Jane Farver (1999–2011; in memoriam), who strengthened the List Center’s national and international presence, championed influential artists, and oversaw major public art installations while positioning the museum on the global stage through presentations at the Venice and Cairo biennials.

Together, these advisors represent the dynamic history of the List Center and affirm its continued role as a catalyst for public art, interdisciplinary dialogue, and contemporary inquiry.

PERFORMING CONDITIONS: ARTISTIC LABOR AND DEPENDENCY AS FORM

The List Center’s Fortieth Anniversary coincides with Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form, on view April 10 to July 26, 2026. Building on the List Center’s tradition of group exhibitions that contribute to emerging cultural and political conversations, the exhibition examines artistic practices that refuse the notion of art’s autonomy and instead dramatize its vexed networks of labor, debt, and dependency. Just as a contract requires a cosignatory to exert its force, and a score relies on a performer for its realization, many of the artworks in the exhibition are incomplete on their own. They are delegated and contractually composed performances, historically charged readymades and reproductions, reenactments of the past, and rehearsals for the future.

Drawing on legacies of institutional critique, Performing Conditions looks inward with artworks that reflexively perform their own conditions of production, circulation, and display. At the same time, it looks beyond art’s specialized sphere by understanding these conditions as symptomatic of a larger structure: namely, racial capitalism’s planetary appropriation of human creativity and enclosure of social life.

Performing Conditions queries the ways that art and art workers are put to work (or made to perform, or bound to appear) under racial capitalism. Rather than disavow our debts and dependencies, this exhibition makes them visible as formal aesthetic strategies, elaborating a rich language of heteronomy, contingency, service, support, and need. “Performance” in this context refers not only to cultural

disciplines like theater and dance, but also to the performance of a venture, a financial instrument, or an individual worker. And “artistic labor” indicates not just the individualized output of those we call artists but also the total field of social activity, an ongoing and endless rehearsal.

Organized by Natalie Bell and Zach Ngin, Performing Conditions will be accompanied by a program of live performances, a film and video screening room, an archival display examining a local history of strikes and refusal, and a hybrid catalogue/reader publication.

FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY ARCHIVE AND COMMUNITY CELEBRATION

On Saturday, April 11, 2026, the List Center will present a Fortieth Anniversary celebration featuring performances by artists who have exhibited at the List Center, including Gordon Hall and Autumn Knight, whose work will be on view in Performing Conditions. Performances will be followed by a reception with creative direction for food and drinks overseen by Nayland Blake, free and open to all attendees. “This event celebrates the forty years of the List Center at MIT, which is grounded in the spirit of experimentation, interdisciplinarity, and accessibility,” states Kristen Wawruck, Associate Director.

In addition, a newly commissioned digital timeline highlights forty key milestones in the List’s history, launched on October 1, 2025, offering a dynamic, accessible record of the institution’s legacy. A physical timeline will be installed in the List Center lobby, alongside a presentation of archival and rarely seen materials relating to the founding of the Wiesner Building and the List Center in 1985.

PERCENT-FOR-ART COMMISSION BY SARAH OPPENHEIMER

The List Center oversees MIT’s Percent-for-Art Program and will collaborate with artist Sarah Oppenheimer on a new work to be unveiled at the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (Met Warehouse) on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street this fall. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Met Warehouse will serve as a new home for many of the School of Architecture and Planning’s departments and research centers, including Architecture, Urban Studies and Planning, the Morningside Academy for Design, the Center for Real Estate, and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Hashim Sarkis, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, states, “Sarah Oppenheimer’s work challenges how we perceive and construct space. Her commission at the Met Warehouse will inspire students and faculty to make the built environment a site of inquiry, exchange, and imagination.”