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Rotch Library Exhibit

Rotch Library Exhibit Archives: 2010-2013

January 29, 2010 - December 20, 2013


Photographs of Boston by Richard Yee

November 22 – December 20, 2013

Richard Yee is an award-winning local photographer who has had several one-man exhibitions and whose work has been published in “China: Fifty Years Inside the People’s Republic,” Aperture, 2000. His photographs are in several museum collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Seattle Art Museum.


streets_of_hong_kong-lg

Streets in Hong Kong: Paintings and drawings by Alex Lui

September 18 – November 18, 2013
Reception: October 1, 2013 at 6:30 pm, Room 9-450 A-B


The Extreme Sport of Painting: the icy edition: Paintings by Carol Schweigert and Kathy Rubado

August 4 – September 13, 2013
Reception: September 13, 4:30-8:00 pm

Carol and Kathy add a frosty challenge to the art of plein air* painting, facing the frigid elements of winter. Armed with duffle bags of thermal gloves and hats, hand and feet warmers, and thermoses of warm beverages, they brave the elements to create winter plein air landscapes at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and sites around Massachusetts. Who knew that painting can be an extreme sport?

They also paint in the fairer months, frequently at The Arnold Arboretum which will display their work in summer of 2014. That show is titled 2 Looking @ 4.

*Plein air – A painting done outside rather than in a studio. The term comes from the French en plein air, meaning ‘in the open air’. Most of these paintings were completed on site in a 1.5 – 4 hour time slot.


Cambridge Open Archives: Learning with Visual Architecture Collections
Highlights from Rotch Digital Collections

June 20 – August 1, 2013
Library tour, June 20: 3:00-5:30 pm

This exhibit showcases items from three collections located at Rotch Library which offer opportunities for learning about technologies for illustrating and conveying ideas, design process, and aspects of our built environment in honor of Cambridge Open Archives week.
The collections at Rotch have a long tradition of supporting and enhancing the research and curriculum development of the School of Architecture and Planning and aim to contribute to its vision of sustaining and improving the quality of the human environment at all scales, from the personal to the global. The library hosts significant collections of resources in art, architecture, and urban design and planning and works to connect our communities to these resources.
Rotch Library hosts AKDC@MIT, Visual Collections, and the Rotch Limited Access rare books room, which house unique tangible collections. MIT Libraries provides access to many of these materials as well as thousands of other digital resources through:

ArchNet Digital Libary: AKDC@MIT curates the ArchNet Digital Library as part of ArchNet, an international online community for architects, planners, designers, conservationists, and scholars with a focus on Muslim cultures and civilizations. The ArchNet Digital Library provides open access to visual and textual materials.

Dome: MIT’s institutional repository which provides access to digital content from across the Libraries’ special collections, visual resources, archives, and scholarship including over 100,000 images, maps, documents, and other digital files.


The Human Cost of India’s Race for Development
Photographs by Priyanka Borpujari

January 3 – February 5, 2013

While India is perceived as an emerging market, the stories of the plundering of natural resources and the systematic annihilation of the indigenous peoples go unheard. In this race to make India a superpower, and a growing media industry that champions this idea, social inequality has reached its zenith, and easily gets pushed aside. What, then, is the future of the people who grow food with their hands; who have long been guarding forests and rivers – even before climate change could touch them? Why does the media shy away from reporting about the majority of its populace, even while they silently die from landmines and malaria alike? Reporting on the ‘hidden civil war in India,’ Priyanka Borpujari, an independent journalist based in Mumbai, reports and photographs from the dark territories of mineral-rich India, which are rife with violence and disease, which are only silenced.

Funded in part by the Council of the Arts at MIT.
Council for the Arts at MIT logo


Synergy: An Experiment in Communicating Science through Art

October 1-November 29, 2012

synergy logo

Eight Boston and Cape Cod professional artists have been paired with MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists to render complex scientific concepts accessible to the viewer. Both artists and scientists must dynamically translate across disciplines, yielding a heightened clarity for the broader impact of scientific research. The outcome of these collaborations will be an exhibition at the Museum of Science, Boston, 2013 that invites the general public to explore oceanography through compelling art. In anticipation for this show, preliminary works by the artists and original artwork by the scientists are on display at the Rotch Gallery on MIT campus.

This program is made possible in part by the Grants Program of the Council for the Arts at MIT and the Graduate Student Life Grants.

To learn more, visit the Synergy site. (Logo design created by Sandra Mays)


Infinite Urban Landscapes: A Journey Through Cambridge, Massachusetts
Leah Brunetto

June 1-July 31, 2012

Leah Brunettto watercolor


Bookish: Artist Books from the Collection of Rotch Library of Architecture and Planning, 1960-Present
Guest curator: Samuel Ray Jacobson

April 20-June 10, 2012

Various printed materials on a table
Executed in conjunction with the symposium “Unbound: Speculations on the Future of the Book,” Bookish explores the means and methods through which artist books challenge the book as traditionally conceived. By their selective, intentional performance and denial of normative aspects of book design – durability, flatness, narrative structure, boundedness, order, and pagination – these limited-edition, artist-conceived objects negate such norms while sustaining their worth and continuing relevance. At once a study in object interpellation and post-structural anti-essentialism, these 20 items selected from the Rotch Library Limited Access Collection push the limits of book form during a time when the viability of the book has come to seem increasingly untenable.

About the Guest Curator: Samuel Ray Jacobson (MIT SMArchS ’13, History Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art) graduated with a BA in Architecture from Rice University in 2010.

For more information visit: “Unbound: Speculation on the Future of the Book”


Tsunami
Camila Chaves Cortes

April 6 – May 31, 2012
Opening reception: April 26, 5:00-7:00 pm

A 5-mural panel collage which plots the coast of Japan after the 2011 disaster.
Each panel is made with plastic, chip design boards, cars and boats made with numerical control machines, metal, copper, machine tool debris, screws, nuts, washers, bolts, wood, sawdust, metal dust, electronic copper paper, acrylics, oils, and watercolor.

Collage depicting the 2011 Japan disaster

Artist Statement
On March 11 of 2011 an extremely powerful earthquake – with a magnitude of 8.9 – struck the northeast coast of Japan, triggering one of the worst catastrophes of our times. Both the earthquake and tsunami reduced towns to piles of rubble. Buildings, cars and ships were swept away by waves of water. The Japanese National Police Agency confirmed 15,850 deaths, 6,011 injuries and 3,287 people missing across eighteen prefectures, as well as over 125,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. The tsunami resulted in over 340,000 displaced people in the Tohoku region alone.

Most terrifyingly, the Fukushima Nuclear Plant declared a state of emergency due to excessive pressure in the plant, ongoing melt-downs and fear of nuclear radiation to the people living nearby. Furthermore, during the unfolding disaster Japan did not keep records of disaster management meetings. The government stated that it could take 40 years to clean up the disaster. These issues prompted me to question our practices in disaster management with “Tsunami”.

Daily we face major disasters. In March 2012, the American Midwest was struck by tornadoes. The threat of solar storms is now evident. The natural gas industry grows exponentially without regulation, disposing waste in foreign countries, increasing environmental damage. The humanitarian and economic impact of these major crises merits reflection on the ways of the management of disaster.

Camila Chaves Cortes is a photographer and painter of two of the 20th century’s largest urban renovations: Berlin, Germany (1994-2004) and Big Dig of Boston with its Zakim Bridge (1998-2011)


Window to My World 4 – Winds of Change in Galilee

October 17 – December 15, 2011
Opening reception: October 18, 5:30-7:30 pm

Man in mask with girl & baby on a stony hill
“Window to My World” is a photograph competition that is held annually, and which is open to all those residing in Israel and the Galilee. The theme of this year’s competition is the winds of change in the Galilee. In recent years the region of Galilee has undergone many changes that find expression in all spheres: social, cultural, technological, and ecological, as well as in various projects and initiatives.

Participating in the competition this year were 63 Arab and Jewish photographers from a broad spectrum of ages and from all parts of the country. They used the medium of film as a tool for transmitting their own personal stories, their weltanschauung, and their individual points of view regarding the changes that are taking place in the Galilee and the influence of these changes on the landscape and the residents of this region. Through this exhibition one may glimpse a mosaic of cultures, traditions, world views, and a fascinating human panorama.

The three previous “Windows of My World” exhibitions were held in the Lady Roslyn Lyons Gallery in the ORT Braude Academic College of Engineering in Karmiel, and parts of these exhibitions were shown in Pittsburgh, USA in 2007.

The artists participating in this exhibition made use of the photograph as a non-verbal means of communication that bridges over the gaps between language and culture. The realistic dimension of this medium allows the observer to connect with the subject of the photograph and to understand it in depth.

The ORT Braude College which stands in the heart of the Galilee in Carmiel attributes great importance to the development of the Galilee by its encouragement and support for the changes occurring in the region in various spheres and has therefore chosen to give its patronage to this project.

The competition and exhibition were the result of the initiative and direction of Eppy Omiel-Pedida in cooperation with Shlomi Schvartsberg, curator and director of the gallery.

Exhibit at Rotch Library sponsored by MISTI MIT-Israel and MIT Hillel.


beSIEged: an exhibit of conceptual art by Jan Kokol, MIT 2010, Harvard GSD 2011

www.jankokol.com
July 1-October 12, 2011
Reception: Thursday, July 14, 4-6 pm

Circular image of a city
Nature has somehow been conquered by human kind. Human-created habitats lead to the transformation of natural surroundings. Nature is constantly remodeled due to the application of our needs. There is a strong tendency towards human agglomeration on an urban scale, which is expanding exponentially. The declining availability of raw materials because of climate change is transferring existing human habitats to new territories, defined by inhabitant spatial environments.
Nomadic behavior as social migration might be the new pattern of the near future. Soon the scenario of climate refugees searching for new inhabitable spaces might not be a fiction anymore.

The city has been translated from a physical competitive environment to a dynamic field of information flow. It is not only about bigger, better and faster as the new city aspires to focus on knowledge and sense-able interaction with its inhabitants. Silvia Bianchini and Luis Falcón describe in ‘Beyond Scenarios and Speculations’ the roots of tourism springing from the Grand Tour, a journey of young aristocrats to gain knowledge. The pattern started to change rapidly when new transportation methods and new technologies were invented. Globalization has created an overlaid pattern of culture and knowledge exchange by the use of real time communication technologies. The journey as experience only, focused mainly on leisure, makes tourism very attractive on a global scale.

The city is not a static piece of infrastructure anymore, providing only limited service, but a dynamically adapting kind of living organism with a flexible corpus. Information exchange and experience are used for the creation of knowledge, for adaptive thinking and rethinking. Consider one of the world’s largest metropolises: the border between the city and its metropolitan area as it extends into further surroundings begins to blur due to the constant dynamic negotiation of its boundary. How to define the outline or contour of a city, considering its time frame and fixed spatial space? Cities of today have expanded to certain extents over the whole earth with their implementation of global networks and act as attractors for all kind of information.

Inspired by the ideas of the 1960s avant-garde architectural group Archigram – particularly Peter Cook’s Plug-In City (1964) and Ron Herron’s Walking City (1964) – a new kind of dynamic symbiosis could be generated. New, unseen scenarios could emerge: as the walking city is temporarily static (until its surrounding natural resources are harvested to the extreme) then the city moves on to let nature recuperate on its own.

Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, a member of the Situationist International (1957), developed the utopian project New Babylon, describing a dynamic city, developable in each direction, overlaying the whole world via a connected network of units. Activities could create facilities over a certain time frame, due to their dynamic adaption and the city’s interaction. The city would literally be reprogrammed.


Makuleke Project: A Different Africa

May 15-June 30, 2011
Reception June 3, 2:00-4:00 pm

Wooden sign: "Makuleke Project" against a sunrise In 1969, the then apartheid government of South Africa violently removed some 3,000 people belonging to the Makuleke clan from their 24 000-hectare ancestral lands between the Levuvhu and Limpopo Rivers to extend Kruger National Park. In the mid-1990s, the Makuleke people entered into negotiations with the South African National Parks (SANP) with the aim to regain ownership of the land in terms of the country’s land restitution laws. An agreement was reached between the parties and formalized by the Land Court in May 1998, under which the land was returned to the Makuleke on condition they did not occupy it but instead conserve it as a game reserve. The Makuleke agreement represents perhaps the most advanced integrated conservation and development model in the world. These models ensure that rural people are able to practice their ‘traditional’ ways of life either inside or on the boundaries of the game reserve while also participating in its wildlife management. Makuleke is our lens into a different kind of Africa.

So much of what we hear about Africa is negative. A place full of wars, disease, and poverty, with no sense of technology, a corrupt continent—Africa is portrayed as a sad place full of suffering. This exhibition is about a different Africa: a bio-diverse place full of innovation even in—indeed because of and to escape—negative and difficult situations. It is a bottom up story, co-produced by a team of five local youths, four MIT students and their Zimbabwean professor as the first of many “Co-Innovation Lab” projects in partnership with the Makuleke Community. The idea is to bring Africa into the MIT class and take the MIT class to Africa to work with Africans as co-innovators, not just to receive the products of our wisdom.

The “Co-Innovation Lab” research trip to Makuleke was generously funded by the following MIT organizations: Alumni Funds, MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), and the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI). It was conducted January 4-29th 2011 and produced by Prof. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga (Program in Science, Technology and Society), Alice Yu ’11, Erica Little ’11, Jessica Oleinik ’11, Dianna Cowern ’11, Elmon Chauke, Solomon Chauke, Patrick Maluleke, Charlotte Masia, Violet Mtileni, and Rose Ntwanano Maluleke.


Secret Toy Surprise: a photo exhibit

Poster of a face looking up, on a post, beside a crosswalk.by Pam Nicholas

Opening reception: April 21, 2011, 5:30-7:30 pm
On view: April 12-April 29, 2011

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

“A collection of amusing, mysterious, and just plain weird images captured on walks around Boston and beyond. Hopefully they will inspire you to pay attention to the magic of the fleeting moment as you go about your daily routine. – Pam Nicholas

More fun at the photoblog: http://secrettoysurprise.blogspot.com


Painting of colorful city building fronts chaotically leaning together

Harry Ellenzweig: Works on Paper, 1955-2010

On view: March 4-April 7, 2011
Opening reception: March 11, 2011, 6:00-8:00 pm

Harry Ellenzweig, the founding principal of the Cambridge-based firm Ellenzweig, has practiced architecture for almost 50 years. His work has focused on innovative designs for major academic institutions, as well as a wide range of projects for research, medical and corporate clients. His most recent building is the just-completed David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research here at MIT. In addition, Mr. Ellenzweig is an artist, and has been painting since youth. His work is included in several museums and many private collections in the United States. He has described his graphic works as reflecting “a vision informed by the architect’s eye, a passion for forms found in nature and images of cities – the shared heritage merging with an imagined and abstracted urban landscape.”


Sacred Space: (Re)Constructing the Place of Gender in the Space of Religion
A Photographic Installation by Maryam Eskandari, SMArchS (Islamic Architecture)

February 1-March 21, 2011
Opening reception: February 17, 2011, 5:30-7:30pm

Interior of a community mosque
With 6 million observant Muslims residing in the United States, there is an ever-present demand for construction of mosques in U.S. cities. The architectural design of community mosques in the U.S. emerges as a particularly understudied problem in the aforementioned encounter between Middle Eastern architecture and American religious practice. Numerous case studies and investigations of a diverse set of mosques were conducted and studied, indicating an overwhelming majority of diverse Muslim communities across the U.S., articulating the ideal space between a “Modern Mosque” versus a “Traditional Mosque.”

All images are now part of the the Aga Khan Visual Archive.

Sponsored by: The Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture, MIT Libraries, School of Architecture + Planning, The Office of Religious Life in honor of Dr. Omar Khalidi.


Street Scenes of Istanbul
A Photo Exhibit by Linda Ciesielski, DUSP MCP 2011

February 1-27, 2011
Opening Reception: February 17, 2011, 5:30-7:00pm

Photos taken during a trip for Prof. Antoni Shop with red tables, a man in a coat and hat, and a sign saying DEDEMuntada’s Public Art class in March 2009. On the last day of the trip, Linda “missed the bus” after popping into a shop for a cup of Turkish tea. These photos are from Linda’s solo day exploring the city streets.

Sponsored by: The Office of Religious Life in honor of Dr. Omar Khalidi.


Re-Imagining Gaza and Youth Visions of Jerusalem
A Photography Exhibition, MIT Rotch Library

November 1, 2010-January 28, 2011
Opening Reception: November 4, 2010, 5:30pm-7:00pm

Hands framing eyes as if preparing to take a photo, with the text "Re-Imagining Gaza and Youth Visions of Jerusalem"

The photography exhibition and related films showcase work emerging from a participatory media program conducted by Voices Beyond Walls with community centers in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza since 2006.

Re-imagining Gaza (2010) peers into rarely seen perspectives captured through photography and films produced with Palestinian youth in Gaza City, the Jabaliya refugee camp, and the Gaza buffer zone, re-imagining their lives despite the ongoing blockade and recent war in the Gaza Strip.

Youth Visions of Jerusalem (2009) shows how Palestinian children develop spatial representations and creative media narratives in the contested spaces of the Old City and Shu’fat refugee camp, both a part of the divided city of Jerusalem today.

Voices Beyond Walls is a participatory media initiative led by a collective of local and international filmmakers, artists, educators, technologists and activists. The initiative was co-founded by Nitin Sawhney, Ph.D., a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology. He was awarded the Visionary Fellowship with the Jerusalem 2050 Project at MIT in 2008-2009.

The Re-imagining Gaza project was supported in 2010 by the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, Council for the Arts at MIT and the Genevieve McMillan-Reba Stewart Foundation.

The Youth Visions of Jerusalem project was supported in 2008-2009 by the Jerusalem 2050 Project, co-sponsored by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Center for International Studies at MIT.

The exhibit is designed by Jegan Vincent de Paul, a Research Fellow in the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT). It is supported by the Council for the Arts at MIT and an ACT Director’s Discretionary Grant.

Program Website: www.voicesbeyondwalls.org


 

Park bench & fence overlooking water, city buildings beyond

Overlooked, 2010, 18 inch square oil painting on stretched canvas

dishes with varied food

Dinner in Budapest, 6 x 9 sketchbook, Gouache and pen on paper

Water Works
Recent Oil Paintings and Sketch Books by Carol Schweigert

October 4-October 29th, 2010
Reception: October 15, 2010, 4-6pm

Carol’s passion is painting from direct observation in both oil and gouache, indoors and out, sometimes in the rain, never in the ice. “I like the vitality and physicality of plein air painting. It hints of extreme sport with police encounters, slippery slopes and lightening storms.” Carol sketches constantly, obsessively. For over two years, she has kept a food diary, sketching food she is eating every day, throughout the day. The sketchbooks document in scribbles and gouaches extravagant meals in restaurants, snacks at her desk, and events like weddings and formal occasions where food is richly displayed.


Sustainable Neighborhoods Through Inclusiveness, Community & Environment
Case Study: Shenzhen, China

September 13-October 1, 2010
Reception: September 20, 2010, 5:30-7pm

Book cover, "Sustainable Neighborhoods": blue sky. white skyscrapers

Since 2005, Vanke Corporation has sponsored research seminars, studios, and workshops at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the topic of sustainable residential development. This exhibit synthesizes the four years of ideas, discussion, drawings, and writings produced by the students involved. The issues explored were: resource efficiency, the natural environment, community facilities and mobility.

This exhibit is bilingual, in Chinese and English.


SLAB: sidewalk laboratory
social construction
space
street vendors
Saigon

May 10 – September 12, 2010

Smiling woman in straw hat and white dress sitting next to food displayed in bamboo frames, watched by playful girl in red dress.

Photography by:
Associate Professor Annette M. Kim
with: Holly Bellocchio Durso ’10,
Tiffany Chu ’10, Minh Huynh-Le ’10, and
Courtney Sung ’10

The exhibit includes an installation of the symbolic vocabulary practiced on Ho Chi Minh City’s sidewalks and photographs of some of the 250 street vendors that the research team interviewed in January 2010. These are a part of SLAB’s larger research agenda to develop a critical and publicly engaged cartography that celebrates, reconstructs knowledge about, and advocates for one of the most mundane of public spaces in a mega-city of the developing world.

This exhibit was funded in part by a Director’s Grant from the Council for the Arts and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.


Light, Details, Poetics: Revealing Stories of Place

May 6 – September 12, 2010

Photography by: Kathryn Patricia Dineen, Salomé Francpourmoi, Marium Gul, Marika Kobel, Ethan Lacy, Aditi Mehta, James Moore, Sarah Nusser, Kristal Peters, Sara Elizabeth Rothrock, Mishayla Greist Schmidt, Buck Sleeper, Julie Stein, James Willeford, Sara Zewde

Places speak. They declare their origins. They assert their identity and proclaim values. They allude to art, literature, and politics. They embody stories.

Reading and revealing the stories of place is the subject of Sensing Place: Photographing the Urban Landscape, a class at MIT taught by Anne Whiston Spirn. The pairs of photographs on display are the work of students in the fall 2009 class. During the course of the semester, each chose a site for the focus of their work and kept a journal of writings and images. Through a series of assignments on light, significant detail, poetics, and landscape narrative, each photographer explored their site, seeking to discover what makes it particular, what stories it holds, and how those stories can be told.

The pairs of photographs on display provide a glimpse of larger stories of place, which are told by each photographer in a Web essay of photographs and words. One of these, “The Borderland: Between Southie and the Seaport” by James Moore, is included in the exhibit. Others can be seen on the class Web site: http://architecture.mit.edu/class/landphoto/.

The exhibition was organized and curated by students in the class. Funded in part by a Director’s Grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT, it was also supported by the Dean’s Office – School of Architecture and Planning, the Department of Architecture, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and by DUSP Student Council.


Water Walkers: Portraits of Ghana’s Street Vendors
Melissa Haeffner

April 1 – 30, 2010

Girl with very short cornrowed hair in white dress, in front of other women in colored dresses and scarves

Urbanization of water is a fact of life in developing countries where growing cities require alternative flows of water to meet demand. And yet, so little of the literature has previously considered the role of young vendors in water distribution in developing countries. This exhibition of photographs compliments a book of the same title, written from 100 interviews with street vendors, mostly young ladies, who are active participants in moving water around developing cities.

Through digital storytelling, Haeffner presents the daily experience of water vendors as they negotiate their way through spatial dimensions of traffic and market, home and school. Although these portraits are often of individuals, collectively, they represent the broader community of a new generation of young adults growing up on the rapidly urbanizing streets in the developing world. Haeffner hopes to contribute to the current discourse in sustainable development by adding the social context to this primarily technical project of water distribution to urban populations.

This project was funded in part by a Director’s Grant from the Council of Arts and the Program on Human Rights and Justice, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Women in scarves seated on the ground around an in-progress solar panel

The First Women Barefoot Solar Engineers of Mauritania Installing Solar Lighting Systems photographer: Bata Bhurji

Women’s Entrepreneurship: Empowerment through Innovation
Selected Photos from the Legatum Center’s 2nd Annual Photo Competition
March 1 – 31, 2010

The Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship presents this exhibit of winning and honorable mention photographs from the Center’s 2nd Annual Photo Competition, which sought photos of women entrepreneurs in low-income countries using transformative technologies. Drawing on photography as a powerful tool to spread the message of economic and social progress through entrepreneurship, the exhibit showcases stories of entrepreneurial activity, innovation, and empowerment in the developing world. By displaying the winning photos, chosen from nearly 700 submissions from 50 countries, the Legatum Center aims to present a new, dignified vision for development that inspires action.


Industrial Landscapes of Trinidad
Kristal Peters

February 8 – 25, 2010

Blue sky, tree, green foreground, with bare sand and industrial plant in background.

Mention of the Caribbean usually conjures mental images of sun, sea and sand. Mention of Trinidad and Tobago may invoke images of carnival and steelpan. This exhibition presents photographs of another side of the twin-island state – its industrial landscape.

Due to its close proximity to the South American continent, the island of Trinidad does not possess the clear blue waters and white sand beaches typical of Caribbean islands. Tobago, on the other hand, being further away from the continental shelf does have these spectacular natural features. However, it is because of this proximity to the South American continent that Trinidad is endowed with oil and gas reserves, also abundant in other parts of South America (especially in Venezuela, Trinidad’s closest neighbor). The presence of these resources has allowed for the nation to pursue a path of economic development different from that of its neighboring Caribbean states, while at the same time also offering the experience of a tropical paradise. Rapid industrialization within the energy sectors (oil and gas) has taken place in Trinidad over the past several decades rendering it the most industrialized nation in the Caribbean, as well as a petrochemical producer in the global market.

The focus of this exhibition is the industrial landscape of Trinidad; more specifically, the landscapes developed by heavy industries in the oil and gas sectors.

Funded (in part) by a Director’s Grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT, and MIT’s Caribbean Club.