The Dean's Gallery at the Sloan School of Management has reopened under new management after closing in August.
Sloan administrators discovered that the venue was sorely missed by faculty and staff, so they accepted a proposal from the List Visual Arts Center to compile three exhibitions from the List Center's permanent collection and present them in the Sloan space over the next 12 months.
The first exhibition, "Barbara Morgan: Photographic Studies of American Modern Dance," is on view through March 15 at the exhibition space located in Room E52-466.
Morgan (1900-1992) became interested in motion as a young girl when her father explained that even stationary, inanimate objects contained millions of tiny dancing atoms. In the 1930s and 1940s while photographing pioneering dancers such as Martha Graham, Erik Hawkins and Merce Cunningham, Morgan attempted to express the essence of the emerging phenomenon of American modern dance.
One influence on her sense of visual and kinetic movement and energy was the ritual dances of the Hopi, Navajo and Zuni tribes of the American Southwest. Morgan photographed the ritual dances using the new small-format Leica camera, a very experimental way to work at the time. Employing techniques such as double exposure, photo montage and strobe photography in her dance photographs and expressionist work, Morgan established herself as a major figure in the history of photography.
After presentation at the Dean's Gallery, the List Center hopes to exhibit these photographs at the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center. The Dean's Gallery is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on December 10, 2003.
