Ligia Bouton awarded 2026 Faculty Award for Scholarship

Ligia Bouton is an internationally recognized artist whose work has secured a prominent place in contemporary art history for her award-winning practice at the intersection of art, science, and feminist historical recovery. Take, for example, Ligia’s work on “25 Variable Stars.” The installation, located at the Kendall/MIT MBTA stop in Cambridge, MA, celebrated astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, whose under-recognized work at the Harvard Observatory laid the groundwork for our understanding of the scale of the universe. The installation built on Ligia’s research at the Center for Astrophysics, supported by a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Drawing on the history of science to recapture a forgotten history, Ligia’s artistic practice tells the story of a woman who found her way in a world largely closed to her, bringing it to vivid life for the thousands of commuters passing.

This most recent project is emblematic of her entire body of work, an oeuvre that is at the forefront of research-driven creative practice in the art world, leading to an extensive and interdisciplinary list of awards and invitations. Ligia’s research has taken her to cutting edge space observatories and physics laboratories across the globe as an Artist in Residence, including CERN and the Niels Bohr Institute. It led her to serve as production designer for the chamber opera “Inheritance,” with the support of a 2016 Creative Capital grant. Most recently, it led to her collaboration on a multi-media installation at the Emily Dickinson Museum, “Something Overtakes the Mind.” Ligia’s work has been reviewed in leading art publications including Art in America, Art Papers, The Art Newspaper, Art Ltd., and The New York Times. Her artistic work has been exhibited at the Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Guildhall Art Gallery (London, UK), Minneapolis Institute of Art, SITE Santa Fe, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Bellevue Arts Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Emily Dickinson Museum, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Ligia’s work is also included in numerous public and private collections including Crystal Bridges Museum, the Albuquerque Museum, St. John’s College, and the Falconer Gallery at Grinnell College. Her participation in historically significant exhibitions, such as the 2016 “Charlotte Great and Small” at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, celebrating Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary, has also positioned her work within important cultural and literary contexts, once again indicating her exceptional ability to cross disciplinary boundaries.

Ligia has established herself as a significant voice in contemporary feminist art practice and the expanding field of art & science collaboration. Her work is an extraordinary example of the interdisciplinary practice championed by the liberal arts. By fusing an extensive research practice based in multiple archives with field research on a global scale, she creates stunning visual works that push her audiences to reconsider historical legacies. She is an incredible example to both our faculty and students. We recognize Ligia’s excellence as a scholar-teacher, and we are delighted to present her with the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship.