get SLAPped! by Mel N. '24, MEng '25

last year, i got an email from sandy, the head of house at east campus. my tenure as a physical resident of ec had just ended due to the initiation of a two-year renovation plan, but house team was still emailing us from time to time about events, dining hall swipes, free covid tests, and cool opportunities around campus. this email was in the last category, and i’ve unfortunately since deleted it,⁠01 this is a tangent, but i used to keep every single email that came into my inbox out of frosh naievete and fomo until i met chris, who deletes almost every email she receives, and i also realized that my gmail storage was filling up rapidly. i've since changed my email management strategies because i don't actually need to be notified about every single event on campus but it was telling us two key things:

1. we can get free art from mit for our living spaces, and

2. the free art is REALLY GOOD.

the program is called SLAP, which stands for the student lending art program, and i suspect they chose the name at least partially for the sake of an amusing acronym. at the beginning of every academic year, the mit list visual arts center offers a lottery to all students (grad or undergrad) for a chance to pick out a piece from their collection that they can hang up in their room or common area. if you’re selected, you pick a time to visit the gallery and claim an artwork.

it’s a bit competitive — art goes on a first-come, first-serve basis, and there are a few that get snatched up right away.

i think i was still half-asleep from getting up too early while i was looking through their collection last year, which consists of mostly original prints and photography, when suddenly:

THEY HAVE A JENNY HOLZER PIECE?????????

(i spent a considerable amount of time in my formative years reblogging art and poetry on tumblr, and jenny holzer was always a big hit among my mutuals.)

now wide awake, i clicked through the rest of their collection and spotted yoshitomo nara works, along with some really beautiful photographs by doc edgerton.

i made a list of pieces i wanted before i went into the gallery so that i could find them more quickly. i left with a painting by ria brodell that seemed to be part of a series called butch heroes. looking it up, i found that brodell, a boston-based artist, had actually written a book by the same name with more paintings and texts about queer historical figures:

I was thinking about what my life would have been like had I been born into a different century. […] I supposed that queer people of the past must have found other ways to live, and I wanted to find out how they did so.

[…]

For this project, I was looking for people in history with whom I can personally identify—people who were assigned female at birth, had documented relationships with women, and whose gender presentation was more masculine than feminine. […] Each portrait involved extensive research into all aspects of the person’s life, social class, occupation, clothing, and environment.

[…]

In addition to the term’s traditional associations of being masculine in appearance or actions, I chose to use “Butch Heroes” to indicate people who were strong or brave in the way they lived their lives and challenged their societies’ strict gender roles.

helen oliver aka john oliver hung in my room for all of senior year, complementing the greens and whites and browns of my bedding and furniture.

image by ria brodell

this year, i signed up again (thanks to another one of sandy’s reminders) and was lucky enough to be chosen. my appointment was actually scheduled on the day of the mid-autumn festival, so when i popped into my lab’s office to say hi and check in with my pi, a postdoc offered me a mooncake,⁠02 a traditional chinese dessert you eat during mid autumn festival. some people cut it up into little servings? in my family growing up you just took a bit bite of your own mooncake lol, i think it's mostly regional preferences which made me very happy. i took this as a good sign.

and it was, because when i went into the gallery, i found one of the yoshitomo nara pieces i had picked out still hanging on the wall. i was almost shaking as i took it off the hanger. it’s a print, not the original, otherwise i wouldn’t even want to breathe on it — but it’s still SO COOL. i brought it to the entrance to fill out paperwork and chatted about it with the people there.

(“good find! it’s a little creepy though, so make sure you can still sleep at night.”)

there’s something mesmerizing about the contrast between thick and thin lines here, as well as the waves meshing in with the figure’s hair, and the story it’s telling about gender. getting to look at this painting up close in my room and noticing all the little details is…really special.

if you’ll still be at mit next year, sign up for the lottery!! the list center has such an incredible collection. whatever you find is going to add a lot of character to your room. get SLAPped!