MIT helps students turn dorm walls into galleries

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The Miro prints were gone, stripped from the gallery walls. Someone had walked off with the Marc Chagall lithograph, and the Robert Rauschenberg silkscreen was nowhere in sight.

But Hugo Solis didn't call police. He just walked away, disappointed there wasn't much left for him.

Solis and dozens of other Massachusetts Institute of Technology students had turned up at the university gallery hoping to benefit from an unusual student loan program: Instead of keeping its art locked up, MIT lets students take home original works to hang on their dorm room and apartment walls.

"I don't think there's any book or any lecture or any art historian who can tell you more about a work of art than living with a work of art," said Jane E. Farver, director of MIT's List Visual Arts Center, which runs the program.

All of the more than 300 pieces available for loan at the center are original works, though only a handful are unique -- most are limited editions of prints, silkscreens or lithographs. They are appraised at between $250 to $2,000, and all are insured.

Students sign contracts agreeing to return the art at the end of the year. Aside from bumped or scuffed frames, every piece loaned out since the program's start in the 1960s has been returned in good shape, officials say.

'They all come back'

"Usually every spring, someone gives us a little bit of a scare -- they don't respond to our e-mails, and it turns out they've left campus -- but their roommate has it, and they return it the next day," said David A. Freilach, the program's administrative officer. "They all come back."

MIT's art collection began with a donation in 1966. Since then, the university has been buying about 10 pieces a year.

If the students are allowed to take out art, it's partly because they have a hand in acquiring it. Each year, student fees go toward purchasing new pieces.

If a work's value rises too high for the insurer's liking, it's moved to another collection that isn't available to students, Farver said.

Other schools, including Oberlin College in Ohio, allow students to take home art, sometimes for a fee. But Farver said MIT is unusual because it loans art for free and students can view the collection before they decide what they want.

The program operates by lottery. After viewing the collection, students rank the three works they would like to take home most. This year, more than 1,000 students participated in the draw.

After winners are assigned pieces, they are given two days to pick them up. If they don't, the art is fair game for students who lost out.

Solis was one of them. Having arrived from Mexico three weeks ago, the graduate student had hoped to pick up one of the 15 prints by Spanish surrealist Juan Miro for his "completely empty" apartment.

"I arrived late, because I had class," he said. The Miros were gone.

Jesse Gutowski said he overslept, and by the time he arrived with his girlfriend, Michelle Mechanic, almost everything was gone. But they were delighted to find an overlooked treasure: a sculpture by Michael Joo, whose work has been displayed in New York's Whitney Museum.

The only sculpture in the collection, Small Vitrine, is a figure of a headless person seated in a lotus position, internal organs visible through transparent skin.

It was the best piece in the collection, in Mechanic's estimation.

"I can't believe that was just sitting there," she said.