Join us for the first Lilac Sunday since 2019! We’ll be celebrating 150 years of Arboretum history and 112 Lilac Sundays.
Experience the springtime bloom of our renowned collection of nearly 400 lilacs. Visit for tours with Arboretum experts, hands-on children’s programming, and more.
These tours, designed and led by Harvard undergraduates from a range of academic disciplines, focus on objects chosen by each student guide and provide visitors a unique, thematic view into collections.
Tours are limited to 18 people, and it is required that you reserve your place. At 10am the day of the event, reservations will open and may be arranged online through this form. The Student Guide Tour reservation will also serve as your...
Arnold Arboretum (Hunnewell Building), 125 Arborway, Boston
Ukrainian culture is rich with references to the natural world. Join a one-hour walking tour with Arboretum Horticulturist Brendan Keegan. Learn about plants within the Arboretum's collections that are notable in Ukrainian history, cuisine, agriculture, and more. The tour is in support of our colleagues at botanical institutions throughout Ukraine.
Named after Washington Allston—a visionary painter and 1800 Harvard graduate—the town of Allston features vibrant, eclectic art that reflects the neighborhood's creativity and diversity. On this self-guided tour, you'll discover "can't-miss" public art installations along Western Avenue and learn the stories behind them and their artists. Follow along to explore hand-painted murals, sky-high sculptures, 25-cent art prints, and more!
Tour Stops: 27 Tour Length: 1 hour (shorter routes included) Tour Distance: Up to 2 miles...
Anneliese Hager (1904–1997) made significant contributions to the medium of camera-less photography and to the wider surrealist movement in Europe. The camera-less photograph, or photogram, is an image made by placing objects directly on (or in close proximity to)...
German artist Anneliese Hager (1904–1997) made significant contributions to the medium of camera-less photography and to the wider surrealist movement in Europe. The camera-less photograph, or photogram, is an image made by placing objects directly on (or in close...
Repeats every week every Saturday until Sat Apr 30 2022 .
10:30am to 12:00pm
10:30am to 12:00pm
10:30am to 12:00pm
10:30am to 12:00pm
Location:
Hunnewell Building, Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Boston
On Saturdays and Sundays in April, join us for a 90-minute walk through the Arboretum! Tour seasonal plant highlights and learn about Arboretum history from a trained docent.
In this tour, Sophia Clark ’23 explores the varied means and ends of humor in three works of art that, at first glance, may not seem funny. They are Mervin Jules’s 1937 painting The Art Lover; Charles Bird King’s 1830 painting The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream; and the Archaic Greek Eye cup: Athena (c. 530 BCE), which gives drinkers a different face...
Repeats every week every Sunday until Sun Apr 24 2022 .
1:00pm to 2:30pm
1:00pm to 2:30pm
1:00pm to 2:30pm
1:00pm to 2:30pm
Location:
Hunnewell Building, Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Boston
On Saturdays and Sundays in April, join us for a 90-minute walk through the Arboretum! Tour seasonal plant highlights and learn about Arboretum history from a trained docent.
In celebration of Women's History Month, Sinead Danagher '22, Calla Bai '22, and Alexis Boo '22, three Ho Family Student Guides who were classmates in Harvard's Critical Printing seminar last fall, will explore printmaking and how it relates to womanhood. They will examine a variety of works from the collections.
In this tour, Eve Crompton ’23 will focus on works depicting women in poor health and what values were attributed to the figures. She will look at an Attic grave stele Woman Dying in Childbirth (c. 330 BCE); the painting Mother and Child (c. 1901) that Pablo Picasso was inspired to make after visiting a French prison hospital; and Erich Heckel’s painting ...
Sawyer Taylor-Arnold ’23 will highlight a few of the not-so-pretty subjects that have fascinated painters over the centuries—notably, head wounds, decapitated bodies, and severed heads. Moving through the museums’ collections, Taylor-Arnold will explore the symbolic and historical significance of Lorenzo Lotto’s portrait Friar Angelo Ferretti as St. Peter Martyr (1549), Gustave Moreau’s The Apparition (1876–77), and Johannes Molzahn’s...
Arnold Arboretum (Hunnewell Building), 125 Arborway, Boston
Join a docent tour through the Arboretum looking for the vibrant colors of the witch-hazel flowers. Learn about plants native to China and Japan, those from the Ozarks and Mississippi, and even one that was introduced right here at the Arnold Arboretum!
The walk is geared toward adults, and starts from the kiosk in front of the Hunnewell Building at 125 Arborway. This tour is limited to 15 participants. We ask that you only register if you are sure you will attend, and only register one person per form submission. Masks are required if you are unvaccinated.
On this tour commemorating Native American Heritage Month, Jacqueline Zoeller ’23 will contrast colonial visions of the Western U.S. landscape, such as Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, “Lander’s Peak” (1863), with the realities lived and portrayed by Native American artists. Stops on the tour will include Diné artist Will Wilson’s Mexican Hat Disposal Cell (2020), a landscape photograph of Halchita, Utah, the Navajo...
Hunnewell Building, Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Boston
Join us for a free, 90-minute walk through the Arboretum! Tour seasonal plant highlights and learn about Arboretum history from a trained docent. The walk is geared toward adults, and starts from the kiosk in front of the Hunnewell Building at 125 Arborway.
Hunnewell Building, Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Boston
Join us for a free, 90-minute walk through the Arboretum! Tour seasonal plant highlights and learn about Arboretum history from a trained docent. The walk is geared toward adults, and starts from the kiosk in front of the Hunnewell Building at 125 Arborway.
Kaitlin Hao ’21 explores how three historical vessels bring us into the worlds that created them, along with their legacies and their sense of the world yet to come.
First, she will discuss a ritual food vessel made in China in the 11th or 10 century BCE. She will then turn to a stoneware storage jar by David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter, an enslaved Black man in antebellum South Carolina. And finally, she will take a...
Both David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall consider their time as students of Charles White at the Otis Art Institute in the 1960s and ’70s as an important experience for them as young Black men and artists.
On this tour coinciding with Juneteenth, Maeve Miller ’22 and Cecilia Zhou ’22 will talk about a work by each of these artists: White’s linocut print of blues icon Bessie Smith (1950); Hammons’s Untitled [Body Print] (1974), which he made partly by...
Immerse yourself in the deep beauty of trees in this story and music journey through the Arboretum. Led by Oracle award-winning storyteller Diane Edgecomb and Celtic harper Margot Chamberlain, this unfolding performance of ancient tales and songs from cultures around the world takes place in a variety of groves—birch, cherry, and evergreen—at some of the Arboretum’s loveliest spots.
This event is free, but registration is required and limited. Not designed for children under 12, and dogs are not allowed. COVID guidelines will be followed.
In her tour, Maeve Miller ’22 will explore how performance and entertainment figure into three works of art. She will examine the woodcutMagician (1956), which Erich Heckel made in Germany more than 40 years after the heyday of his involvement with the Expressionist art movement; the painting Ventriloquist(1952), which Jacob Lawrence made in Harlem, New York, as part of his Performance Series; and a woodblock print...
