Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA Will Lecture MIT Students about Physics and the Arts

GZA.

Original Wu-Tang Clan member GZA (also known as “The Genius” or by his given name, Gary Grice) will visit Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in May to school students on how art and outer space collide. His lecture will be the third in an ongoing speaker series featuring hip-hop artists, and the second time in three years that he spoken on campus.

GZA’s long-awaited upcoming solo album Dark Matter is a conceptual work based on an imagined journey through time and space.

“GZA is coming in to talk specifically about how the arts and the study of physics intertwine,” Sam Magee, manager of Arts at MIT student programs, told the Boston Globe.

“This is really geared toward students to engender a conversation with popular artists who have a certain influence, and who have experience that other visiting artists don’t necessarily have,” Magee continued.

While there’s no word on exactly how GZA plans to make the connection between art and outer space to MIT students, he gave a similar lecture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2012, and at Harvard University in 2011.

“It’s just a beautiful story—planets, black holes, comets,” the rapper told Rolling Stone about his inspiration to do an album about space.

“He’d been doing his homework,” Penny Chisholm, an MIT professor of environmental science who met with GZA during his visit to the campus in 2012, told the Wall Street Journal.

“I was struck by his appreciation of the complexity of ecology and physics, and his views on life…[H]e could play an important role in getting various messages out through his art form—about the Earth, and science.”

Oh, the perks of being a student at MIT.


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