The List Visual Arts Center has named a new director: Jane E. Farver, director of exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art in New York. She will assume the List Center post this summer.
Ms. Farver replaces Katy Kline, the List Center's director for nearly 20 years, who last fall became director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Bruns-wick, ME. At MIT, she will oversee List Center programming, exhibitions and publications. She will also supervise artist residencies, educational activities, collections acquisition and management, and MIT's Percent for Arts Program.
"We had many applications for the List position and were gratified by the interest from some of the finest people in the contemporary art scene," said Associate Provost for the Arts Alan Brody. "Jane Farver rose to the top of our list almost effortlessly. She is a woman of ideas&emdash;innovative and superbly informed. As one colleague told us, 'wherever Jane is, new and illuminating things happen.' We're looking forward to her stimulating presence at MIT and the List."
Today, Ms. Farver was also named one of six curators to organize the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2000 Biennial, which opens in March 2000.
Director of exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art since 1992, Ms. Farver was formerly director of Lehman College Art Gallery at the City University of New York (1989-92), and director of the Tomoko Liguori Gallery (1987-89) and director/curator at the Alternative Museum (1985-87), both in Manhattan.
Before moving to New York in 1985, Ms. Farver was director of Spaces Gallery in Cleveland and was a photo librarian at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Exhibitions she has organized during her career include Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South AsianDiaspora; Cai Guo Qiang, Cultural Melting Bath: Projects for the 20th Century; Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art; Yukinori Yanagi: Project Article Nine; Luis Camnitzer: Retrospective; and Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967-1987, as well as Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, which will open at the Queens Museum of Art in April 1999.
Ms. Farver has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio and South Carolina Arts Council and the Percent for Arts Program in New York City, and is a member of the Museum Committee for the College Art Association. She has received a travel fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council, curatorial awards from the Arts Development Commission, and the Governor's Award for Arts Administration from the state of Ohio in 1985. Ms. Farver holds an MA in art history from Kent State University and a BA in English from Seton Hill College in Greenburg, PA.
"I have long admired the excellent exhibitions and scholarly catalogues produced by Katy Kline and the curators and other staff members of the List, as well as MIT's dedicated support of the arts, which is so rare today," said Ms. Farver. "This position offers many exciting challenges, and I look forward to working collaboratively with the staff and students of this remarkable institution, as well as with other arts organizations in the Boston area."
Since its founding in 1985, the List Visual Arts Center (formerly known as Hayden Gallery) has established a reputation as one of the nation's liveliest contemporary art programs, recognized for its thought-provoking exhibitions and award-winning publications. Recent exhibitions include Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, which traveled to the Miami Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Francesc Torres: The Repository of Absent Flesh; and The Art of Detection: Surveillance in Society.
The List Center also maintains MIT's permanent collection of more than 2,000 paintings, sculpture, photographs and contemporary works on paper which are sited throughout the campus. It also oversees the Student Loan Art Collection, which annually loans over 300 original works of contemporary art to students for their living and communal spaces.
A version of this article appeared in the March 3, 1999 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 43, Number 21).
