2022 Jan 22
Social Fabrics: Inscribed Textiles from Medieval Egyptian Tombs
Sat Jan 22 (All day) to Sun May 8 (All day)
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge
On View:
January 22, 2022–May 8, 2022
University Research Gallery, Harvard Art Museums
From swaddling newborns to enshrouding the deceased, woven fabrics touch nearly every aspect of human existence. The textiles in this exhibition are particularly meaningful, for they tell a bigger story about political and social power, class, trade, and concerns for the afterlife during a transformative period in Egyptian history. In the medieval era, control of the region shifted repeatedly, as Egypt was subsumed under a sequence of empires—Byzantine,...
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2021 Nov 19
Art and Thought in the Dutch Republic: Erasmus Lectures on the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders (Part 3)
4:00pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
The new genre of interior painting enjoyed great popularity among 17th-century Dutch citizens. Its indoor scenes featuring people involved in mundane activities resemble the domestic settings in which they were hung. Other art forms such as perspective boxes and dollhouses further reinforce the link connecting physical, pictorial, and mental space by relating home to the interiority of the individual.
...
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2021 Nov 19
Film Screening: The Airstrip
Fri Nov 19 (All day) to Mon Nov 22 (All day)
Location: 
Harvard Film Archive—Online
In collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums' current exhibit Devour the Land, the Harvard Film Archive presents a program of films that critically engage landscape as a site where deeper political, socio-cultural and historical forces are powerfully legible.
The Airstrip is a profound study of the heavy legacy of modernist architecture that traces its deep roots in the fascist ideologies and militarist imperatives that rose to strength in the WWII era and continue to gain strength to this day.
Cost: $10 / Free for Harvard affiliates....
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2021 Nov 18
Reconstructing Queen Amanishakheto’s Musical Instruments
6:00pm to 7:15pm
Location: 
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online
Double reed pipes, known as auloi, were popular musical instruments in the ancient Mediterranean. In 1921, archaeologists exploring the necropolis of Meroë (northern Sudan)—as part of the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition—found a large collection of auloi in the pyramid of Nubian Queen Amanishakheto. Susanne Gänsicke will discuss the discovery’s importance and what it reveals about the connections between Nubia and the Mediterranean world as well as the significance of far-reaching musical traditions. She will also share recent efforts to conserve...
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2021 Nov 17
Useful Objects: Nineteenth-Century Museums and American Culture
4:30pm to 5:45pm
Location: 
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online
What can the history of museums tell us about their role in American culture today? What kinds of objects were considered worth collecting, and who decided their value? Join Reed Gochberg, author of Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, September 2021) to learn about the early history of American museums, including Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. In conversation with HMSC...
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2021 Nov 17
Indian Collectibles: Appropriations and Resistance in the Haudenosaunee Homelands
12:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
Scott Manning Stevens is an associate professor and director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University. In this lecture, he will discuss his new project, which focuses on ways Indigenous communities can confront cultural alienation and appropriation in museums, galleries, and archives.
Learn more about and RSVP for this virtual event....
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2021 Nov 15
Black Women and the American University: Eileen Southern's Story
4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
Join us for a one-hour webinar exploring the legacy of Eileen Southern, author of The Music of Black Americans: A History and founder and editor of The Black Perspective in Music. In 1976, Eileen Southern became the first African American woman tenured in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Southern played an important institutional role at Harvard. She was central in developing the Department of Afro-American Studies (now African and African American Studies), serving as an early chair, and was on the faculty of the Department of Music, where she taught...
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2021 Nov 15
Black Women and the American University: Eileen Southern’s Story
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Education—Online
Join us for a one-hour webinar exploring the legacy of Eileen Southern, author of “The Music of Black Americans: A History” and founder and editor of “The Black Perspective in Music.”
In 1976, Eileen Southern (1920–2002) became the first African American woman tenured in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). She was central in developing...
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2021 Nov 13
Harvard Dance Center Showing: Initiation – In Love Solidarity
4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Dance Center—Online or in-person
Initiation – In Love Solidarity is a choreographic narrative exploring the embodiment of the Middle Passage, and the resilience and evolving identities of women in the African diaspora. A film component of the work was created at historic sites in New England related to the transatlantic slave trade and emancipation. The imagery of the cowrie shell is present throughout, chosen as an emblem of the transformative identity of the Black female body.
Saturday, November 13, 4pm & 7pm: ...
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2021 Nov 12
Art and Thought in the Dutch Republic: Erasmus Lectures on the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders (Part 2)
4:00pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Arts and sciences flourished in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century. Women such as Anna Maria van Schurman, Margareta van Godewick, and Anna Roemer Visscher excelled in scholarly pursuits and art practice. They were greatly admired, but they were nonetheless categorized as exceptional cases and never possessed the freedom to voice ideas enjoyed by their male counterparts. Working in a variety of art forms, including miniature painting, drawing, embroidery, and paper cutting, these women often meant to address no other audience than the artist herself.
...
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2021 Nov 10
Tell the truth but tell it slant—Behind the Scenes of Apple TV+’s Dickinson
5:30pm to 6:30pm
Location: 
Houghton Library—Online
Join Houghton Library for a peek behind the scenes of Apple TV+’s Dickinson, a biographical comedy about poet Emily Dickinson. Show creator Alena Smith, Set Decorator Marina Parker, and Costume Designer Jennifer Moeller will be joined by Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Deidre Lynch to delve into the research and creativity driving the show. The show’s archive—scripts, set and costume designs, tone books, and more—are now housed at Houghton Library as part of its Emily Dickinson Collection.
...
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2021 Nov 05
Michael Twitty, "Beyond 'Slave Food': Re-Organizing the Perceptions and Potential of African American Foodways"
6:00pm to 7:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Culinary historian Michael Twitty, author of the James Beard-winning book, The Cooking Gene, discusses the impact of the collective perceptions of African American foodways on how we experience a broader vision of healing. With such foodways often stigmatized as a continuation of socio-cultural trauma or defended with a mark of "authentic" racial identity, Twitty offers alternative ways to see how the revitalization of ancestral foodways and culinary justice is a necessary part of our collective national experience.
...
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2021 Nov 05
Art and Thought in the Dutch Republic: Erasmus Lectures on the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders (Part 1)
4:00pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
In the 17th century, the Dutch Republic was a fast-paced, successful, modern society—economically, politically, and artistically. The work ethic of its citizens amazed foreign visitors, who compared the Dutch to crawling ants. Its flourishing art production showed the bustle of everyday life with almost scientific precision. Yet many artworks amassed by Dutch citizens in their homes portray scenes of silence and serenity. Such works, including genre pieces by Johannes Vermeer and still lifes featuring fruit, nuts or bread by Willem Heda and Adriaen Coorte, suggest a deep engagement with...
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2021 Nov 05
Landscapes of Slavery, Landscapes of Freedom: The African Diaspora and the American Built Environment
Repeats every day until Sun Nov 07 2021 .
(All day)
(All day)
(All day)
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
This conference brings together scholars whose research investigates the relationship between the African diaspora, Afro-descendants, and the built environment of North America and the Caribbean from a variety of lenses that are specific to the scholars’ fields of inquiry. The goal is to begin to expand the field of landscape history by taking into consideration questions that are not always deemed central to the practice of design, if design is understood as an activity that has featured—in the historical narratives—the presence of an author-designer, a client, and a variety of tools...
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2021 Nov 04
Virtual Student Guide Tour: This Land Is Whose Land?, with Jacqueline Zoeller
8:00pm to 8:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
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...
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2021 Oct 27
Between Worlds: China’s WWII Interpreters and Their Divergent Fates in China, Taiwan, and the United States
12:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
David Cheng Chang is an associate professor of humanities and the associate director of Global China Center at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. While at Radcliffe, he is using interdisciplinary source materials to write a book that will weave together the personal histories of more than 3,000 Chinese interpreters for the American and British allied forces during World War II with the larger military, political, diplomatic, and social history of World War II, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Join Chang as he discusses this project and the...
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2021 Oct 26
Daniela Bleichmar, “The history of cochineal and the changing value of Mexican indigenous environmental knowledge, ca. 1500–1800”
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Before the development of synthetic dyes in the second half of the 1800s, natural dyes were some of the most prized and sought-after commodities in the global economy. This talk uses historical images and texts to excavate changing approaches to indigenous environmental knowledge in colonial Mexico and early modern Europe through the study of cochineal.
This insect, native to the Americas, produced the world's best quality and most valuable red dye from the 1520s until the rise of the modern chemical dye industry. Long used by indigenous people in the Americas, under Spanish...
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2021 Oct 25
Rachel Dorothy Tanur Memorial Lecture: Andrea Roberts, “The Community Core: Making and Keeping Place Heritage in Texas’s Freedom Colonies”
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
In Texas’ freedom colonies — African American settlements founded 1866-1930 — descendants of community founders engage in heritage conservation by keeping folklife, sacred rituals, and other cultural expressions that sustain communities’ Black sense of place. However, rural, vernacular African American placekeeping strategies are rarely framed in planning and architectural history as transgressive or expressions of Black liberation.
Presenting an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Never Sell the Land, Dr. Roberts shares case studies in which descendants of Deep East...
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2021 Oct 20
The Art of Making Day of the Dead Altars
6:00pm to 7:15pm
Location: 
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online
Live interpretation in English and Spanish
Interpretación en vivo en inglés y español
Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a Mexican tradition that seeks to commemorate and celebrate the lives of loved ones who have passed away. The creation of an altar is a key component of this celebration, which is both bittersweet and joyful. In this program, Los Angeles-based artist, educator, and altarista Ofelia Esparza will share her philosophy and approach to making altars and to keeping Día de los Muertos alive in the U.S. She will be joined by her daughter,...
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2021 Oct 06
Airbrush, Instamatics, and Funk: Art, Pop, and New York City’s Long 1970s
12:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
A presentation from 2021–2022 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow Uri McMillan.
Uri McMillan, an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies and Department of English at UCLA, is a cultural historian who researches and writes in the interstices between black cultural studies, performance studies, queer theory, and contemporary art. He is writing a book about the effervescent artistic practices and networks of affiliation of three artists living and working in 1970s New York City: the Jamaican American visual artist Grace Jones, the Nuyorican illustrator Antonio...
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