One of the initial e-mails describing the "Jackie Matisse Mountain Lake Workshop" at Virginia Tech through the Art & Art History Department and in coorespondence with Virginia Tech Virtual Reality CAVE Facilities and University of Illinois Virtual Reality CAVE Facilities

I am beginning the planning and correspondence stage of an important visual art collaboration with an internationally prominent sculptor, Jackie Matisse-Monnier, a well known artist in Europe.
        Jackie has agreed to visit Tech as an artistic director of a new Mountain Lake Workshop in April 2002. Several special resources at Tech may provide her with new initiatives in her work, but I think that the Industrial Design program might offer her a particularly important opportunity.
        Jackie has worked with "movemented forms" that are are usually mechanical affairs, or set aloft in air or water (she has mad underwater Kites that exist as film documents, etc.).
        The facilities, faculty and students in the Industrial Design Department  may offer this exciting artist many new creative possibilities. The "outreach" potential of this collaboration could be very significant for us all.
        At this point I would like to locate the special technical resources and people at Tech that may be able to offer ideas and advice, and/or may become the principal participants in the Matisse-Monnier art collaboration. I think that we may also be working with the Virtual reality Cave in Torgeson Hall.
        Fortunately, we have a significant amount of planning time to correspond with the artist and develop a really high quality agenda for this project. my goal will be to out-put artistic production that can be exhibited internationally.
       
        Ray Kass, Professor of Art - Department of Art & Art History,
        and Founder and Director, The Mountain Lake Workshop

About the Mt. Lake Workshop:
        Since 1983, Ray Kass and the Mountain Lake Workshop have conducted an ongoing series of inter-related art workshops that have resulted in  many unique (usually non-objective) works of art that endeavor to extend the creative scope of the collaborating artists and deeply involved the local community and technical resources in the production of the artworks.
        Artists who have completed several workshops at Mountain Lake (or are currently engaged in ongoing projects) include folk-artist Howard Finster, Japanese artist & sculptor and  Jiro Okura, the late avant-garde composer, writer and artist John Cage, waste management installation-artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (official artist in residence of the New York Sanitation Dept.), ceramic artist, poet  and author M.C. Richards (author of Centering), Shanghai painter Xiao Yan Gen, Colorado Eco-artist Lynn Hull, and myself.  My individual workshops seek to provide an interface between the concepts and discipline-centered activities of the visiting-artists.
        Works produced at the Mountain Lake Workshop are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY) The Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), The Menil Collection (Houston), The Phillips Collection (wash. D.C.), the Sackler Gallery of the Freer (Wash. D.C., the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and many museums in Europe.