To spell out the allegory...

• The roasts and soufflees are our alumni/ae and their achievements.
• The recipes are the principles that seem to have guided the founding of the school and its evolution.
• Finally, the kitchen work is a rough sketch of the campus, curriculum, leaders, and administrative initiatives, how it all fell together at various moments.

Those recipes were written down in Boston in the 1870s, just after the civil war and the Great Boston fire, a time of economic and cultural explosions, a time, like our own, when almost anything, good or bad, seemed possible. Those who agitated for, and those who built, MassArt spelled out four recipes:

• Creative economy. Art education fuels the economy.
• Personal growth. Underlying the creative economy is the care and feeding of imaginations. The artists and designers who enable economic development are not die-casted, but nurtured.
• Accessibility. Providing professional-level education in creative-process skills to all regardless of gender, race, and economic wherewithal isn’t just equitable, it’s optimal.
• Centrality/Proximity. Art, design, media, craft, art education, history of art, cutting edge and traditional technologies, each viable as individual disciplines, thrive exponentially when rubbing elbows.

Visit the exhibition in person and online where you can contribute memories and ideas to the historical exploration!

When you view the show and you’re inspired by what you see, we hope you imagine yourself there “on the ground” as the MassArt experiment unfolded. We can help. One part of the exhibit is an installation that capture an images of you as a time-traveling visitor to MassArt’s beginnings.