For a few years now, Lupe Fiasco has been visiting public artworks around the MIT List Visual Arts Center campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, armed with an iPad and microphone.

Stopping at selected pieces, he’s made beats and crafted raps—some odes and others responses to the works. An Alexander Calder structure is memorialized as “a siren in the silence of the culture”; the orbs on an Antony Gormley sculpture inspire wordplays on bonds and electrons. The rapper records on the spot such that in an hour or so, he’s transformed a static viewing experience into a living, musical one.

“You go to this piece, you see one thing,” Fiasco told me over a video call. “But what else is there? What are the other possibilities?”

Fiasco terms these exercises “ghotiing” (pronounced “fishing”). With ghotiing, he said, “you don’t have anything preconceived. You come, you set up, you investigate, then you write and record all in that moment.”

These in-the-moment tracks Fiasco recorded at the school have now been compiled in GHOTIING MIT, an audio tour bringing together the producer’s interactions with the sculptures, murals, and installations that dot the campus. Seven tracks are gathered so far—from a soulful homage to Jacques Lipchitz’s abstract sculpture Bather (1923) to a laidback jam inspired by Jaume Plensa’s towering Alchemist (2010). The raps are occasionally interspersed with field recordings and environmental noise, reminders of the site-specificity of Fiasco’s project.

“Initially, it was just like what the piece looks like,” he said about his work on the raps. “But that approach evolved into who did it and why, more biographical stuff. Then it went into just pure expression. The latest work from 2025 is more about what it means to the space, what it means to the institute.”

The rap icon is well-practiced on this front. Behind him lies a storied hip-hop career, begun in the early 2000s, during which he’s dropped chart-topping, multiplatinum-selling records that bear out his expansive, cerebral approach to the form. He’s branched out further afield, too. Besides launching fashion lines, Fiasco has created visual art—for the album covers of Tetsuo & Youth, Drogas Wave, and Drill Music in Zion—and entered academia as a visiting scholar at MIT since 2020.

At the school, Fiasco has been teaching courses in rap theory and practice, more recently bringing ghotiing into the classroom. It’s a practice, he pointed out, rooted in art history.

In the late 19th century, a group of French landscape artists opted to shed the confines of the studio, heading outside to paint directly from nature. Outdoors, they could more closely observe how light shifted or how the wind moved the trees. En plein air painting, as the practice became known, caught on big-time with the Impressionists—Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro among them—who turned out canvases rich in color and atmosphere.

What would it look like, Fiasco thought, to rap en plein air? He first tested it in his California backyard, around an orange tree, before formalizing the practice. By the time it came to recording his MIT tracks, the rapper had locked in his setup of mic, iPad, and solar panels to power both. Like the Impressionists, he’s been confronted with outdoor elements from bugs and stray dogs to wind and rain (he playfully dubbed recording in the cold “ice ghotiing”). These challenges posed constraints, which nonetheless offered opportunities to “explore the extremes of your craft,” he said.

“As MCs and rappers, I feel like we’re in that tradition of writing to a particular constraint,” he explained. “Like, can you tell six stories in four bars, you know? If you look at entendre itself as a constraint, it’s about operating in that space to have multiple meanings within a single phrase, as opposed to just telling the story flat or linearly.”

Fiasco has dispatched his students on ghotiing assignments. The point, he said, was for them to experience writing and recording in new environments with different constraints—whether that be around a public sculpture at MIT or a bus station in their neighborhood. They could even go ghotiing at the same spot at various times of the day or even multiple times across years. (Some students, he told me, have spent four to six hours outdoors at a time.) What could be captured is the gradual evolution of a site as much as a writer’s state of mind, he said.

“Some of these public artworks have been here for decades. They’re not going anywhere,” he explained. “But what has changed about them in that time? What has changed about you?”

The language of rap, however, does come attached with prejudices, said Fiasco. In 2012, he wrote a song tracing the biography of Mark Rothko, the only recordings of which were donated to MIT’s ICE Lab; he believes some people might be “fucking pissed” that a rap exists about fine art—that he’d “disturbed the precious sentimentality” surrounding the celebrated painter. (Though, of course, Fiasco is not the only musician to write odes to visual art: the likes of Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and Taylor Swift have nodded to art history in song.)

Then again, he noted how rap’s practice of sampling has historically revived interest in classic disco or jazz records (Chic’s 1979 single “Good Times,” for instance, has been sampled hundreds of times across hip-hop history). Likewise, he said of ghotiing: “This gives people a new way to express their art. It gives new life to art, brings new people to come and interface with it.”

Same goes for the tracks on GHOTIING MIT, which Fiasco hopes to grow to include raps by students. To him, these songs, as they’re featured on the MIT self-guided walking tour, could function as well as wall text, offering new windows into the public art on campus.

“They live right next to the descriptions of the work,” he said of the tracks. “You have my song about the piece next to preexisting audio of a curator or historian talking about what this piece is. This just happens to be wrapped into a beat.”