Arts at MIT

Congratulations to the four recipients of the 2026 Laya and Jerome B. Wiesner Student Art Awards: Clay Lewis ‘26 ( claylewis_), Andrea Marcano-Delgado PhD ‘26 (), Perry Naseck SM ‘25 (), and Gloria Zhu ‘26 ()! 🎉

Lewis, a music major with a minor in computer science, composed scores for the Logarhythms’ () films and is headed to USC’s screen scoring program. Marcano-Delgado balanced a PhD in chemical biology with a deepening vocal jazz practice, co-founding the MIT Afro Latin Ensemble along the way. Naseck, a Media Lab PhD student, has become the de facto lighting designer for the Thomas Tull Concert Hall while researching live concert visuals for improvised and AI-generated music. And Zhu, a double major in computer science and art and design, created metal wearables featured at the MIT Gala () and has mentored fellow students in MIT’s makerspaces for three years.

Named for past MIT President Jerome B. Wiesner and Laya Wiesner, these awards have honored students whose artistic contributions enrich campus life since 1979.

📸 Images courtesy of the artists
🔗 Learn more about the student artists at the link in bio

filmscoring vocaljazz medialab

Juke: Built Off the Record, a new exhibition in MIT’s Wiesner Student Art Gallery, reconstructs historic juke joints: the informal gathering spaces built by African American communities across the rural South during Jim Crow segregation. Through drawings, scale models, and installation developed from photographs and field research, MArch student C Jacob Payne () translates fragmentary historical evidence into spatial form, reexamining these overlooked environments as works of architecture and cultural memory.

On view through April 24, open daily 9am–9pm
Work by C Jacob Payne MArch ‘27

📸 Image credit Andy Ryan and Qingyang Xie (.xp)