Art adorns students' walls

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The Miró prints were gone, stripped from the gallery walls. Someone had walked off with the Marc Chagall lithograph, and the Robert Rauschenberg silkscreen was nowhere in sight. \nBut Hugo Solis didn't call police. He just walked away, disappointed there wasn't much left for him. \nSolis and dozens of other Massachusetts Institute of Technology students had turned up at the university gallery hoping to benefit from an unusual student loan program: Instead of keeping its art locked up, MIT lets students take home original works to hang on their dorm room and apartment walls.\n"I don't think there's any book or any lecture or any art historian who can tell you more about a work of art than living with a work of art," said Jane E. Farver, director of MIT's List Visual Arts Center, which runs the program. \nAll of the more than 300 pieces available for loan at the center are original works, though only a handful are unique -- most are limited editions of prints, silkscreens or lithographs. They are appraised at between $250 to $2,000, and all are insured. \nStudents sign contracts agreeing to return the art at the end of the year. Aside from bumped or scuffed frames, every piece loaned out since the program's start in the 1960s has been returned in good shape, officials say. \n"Usually every spring, someone gives us a little bit of a scare, they don't respond to our e-mails, and it turns out they've left campus, but their roommate has it, and they return it the next day," said David A. Freilach, the program's administrative officer. "They all come back," he said.\nMIT's art collection began with a donation in 1966. Since then, the university has been buying about ten pieces a year.\nIf the students are allowed to take out art, it's partly because they have a hand in acquiring it. Each year, student fees go toward purchasing new pieces. \nIf a work's value rises too high for the insurer's liking, as has happened a few times, it's moved to another collection that isn't available to students, Farver said.