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This exhibition marks an important moment in the ongoing dialogue between art and technology. As a museum dedicated to the intersection of contemporary art and advanced technologies, it is essential to recognize the historical foundations upon which today's technological and interactive practices are built. The kinetic and optical art movements of the 1950s and 1960s stand among the most significant predecessors to contemporary explorations of movement, light, perception, and systems-based art.
The collection from which this exhibition is drawn contains works by some of the most influential figures of the kinetic art movement, including Wen-Ying Tsai, Howard Jones, Takis, Julio Le Parc, and others who expanded the possibilities of art through motion, light, electronics, and viewer participation. Their pioneering experiments challenged traditional notions of static objects and transformed the artwork into an active, dynamic experience.
This presentation focuses on a selection of works that exemplify the movement's fascination with light, movement, and perception. Featured works include Intersections Lumineuses by Martha Boto, Skylight Six and Time Columns – The Sound of Light by Howard Jones, and Donna Meets the Wolfman by Louis Cork Marcheschi. Together, these works reveal the remarkable diversity of approaches that artists employed to create visual experiences that are constantly changing and responsive to their environment.
The collection was originally assembled by collector Patrick Lannan Sr., who began collecting contemporary art in the 1950s and amassed more than 5,000 significant works before his death in 1983. In 1999, this collection was transferred to Robert and Mary Montgomery along with the Lake Worth Contemporary Art Museum. The Montgomerys subsequently donated the collection to the Kinetic Art Organization (KAO) in 2005, ensuring its preservation and future study. Today, the collection is part of MAD Arts' permanent collection.
Today, as artists increasingly work with artificial intelligence, robotics, immersive environments, and digital networks, these kinetic pioneers appear more relevant than ever. This exhibition invites viewers to rediscover a critical chapter in the history of art and technology—one that continues to shape contemporary artistic practice and our understanding of how art can activate space, light, movement, and perception.
Martha Boto became involved in the era’s lively art scene with her partner Verdanega in the 1930s — a period typified by forays into various schools and styles, including Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and abstraction, eventually leading to Optical and Kinetic Art. Boto would come to play a key role in the evolution of Optical and Kinetic art. Focusing her work around the concepts of movement, illumination, and color, Boto explored the potential of materials that could modify, absorb, and reflect light. In 1964, she approached an even more articulated aesthetic, utilizing electric mechanisms and projected light on objects in movement, creating the first kinetic-light boxes. Mirrors, multiangular surfaces, or reflective metal played a fundamental role in the artist's ability to distort space and transform the appearance of each ordinary element of an object in order to suggest an undefined depth.
Howard Jones was born in New York in 1922. Although trained as a painter, in the 1950's, Jones became interested in working with technology. By the early 1960’s, he made light and sound his primary mediums, using them to explore concepts of time and space. During the next several years, Jones became an important artist in his field and had several one-man exhibits around the country. Jones’s work is a direct product of this experimental environment. His efforts to pursue the relationship between human experience and man-made materials and tools were largely motivated by the conviction that, in an electronic age, artists must actively apply the products of technology in order to address philosophical and moral questions raised by its rapid development.
Louis Cork Marcheschi is an Italian-American sculptor and musician, most notably recognized for his pioneering use of light in sculpture, his large body of public art, gallery, and museum work, and for founding the avant-garde psychedelic rock band Fifty Foot Hose. In the words of curator David Ryan, "Through art, music, writing, collecting and teaching, Cork saw the light early on — pursuing it in its many permutations — perfecting his artistry, a sculptural vision now widely admired.”
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