Events

Kim and Judy Davis Dean's Lecture in the Humanities with Midori

Location:

Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online

The 2022 Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture in the Humanities will feature Midori—artist, activist, and educator who explores and builds connections between music and the human experience, which makes her one of the most outstanding violinists of our time. She has performed with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras and has collaborated with world-renowned musicians, including Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma, and many others.

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Clay—Modeling African Design

Location:

Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

On View:
November 17, 2018–November 13, 2022
University Collections Gallery, African Art, Harvard Art Museums

This exhibition highlights artistic innovation and creativity in Africa as seen primarily through the traditions of ceramic arts from across the continent and over its long history. Countering the assumption that African arts and societies are largely unchanging and bound to traditions and customs, the remarkable diversity of objects and styles on display here tells a different story. A selection of more than 50 works on loan from the...

Mediterranean Marketplaces: Connecting the Ancient World

Location:

Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, 6 Divinity Ave., Cambridge

Mediterranean Marketplaces: Connecting the Ancient World explores how the movement of goods, peoples, and ideas around the ancient Mediterranean transformed the lives and livelihoods of people at all levels of society, driving innovations that had lasting impacts—even on the modern world.

Make an advance reservation to visit the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East.

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Muchos Méxicos: Crossroads of the Americas

Location:

Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, 1 Divinity Ave., Cambridge

Muchos Méxicos explores Mexico’s rich history as a site of human innovation, creativity and cultural diversity. Featuring Mexican objects from the Peabody Museum collections, this bilingual exhibit tells the story of Mexico as a multicultural and geographic crossroads—one where the exchange of resources, products, and ideas among Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas before the Spanish invasion, and then with cultures around the globe—have all created a vibrant nation.

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Himalayan Art: Art of the Divine Abode

Location:

Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

On View:
January 22, 2022–May 8, 2022
University Teaching Gallery, Harvard Art Museums

Drawn from the museums’ rich Asian art collections, this installation complements a Harvard undergraduate course that explores the art of the Himalayan region, focusing on the major cultural centers such as the Kathmandu Valley and Buddhist sites across the Tibetan plateau, while examining the history of reception and imagination of the Himalayas in the west. The course is taught by Jinah Kim, George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art. In...

Social Fabrics: Inscribed Textiles from Medieval Egyptian Tombs

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,...

Art and Thought in the Dutch Republic: Erasmus Lectures on the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders (Part 3)

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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Film Screening: The Airstrip

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....

Reconstructing Queen Amanishakheto’s Musical Instruments

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...

Useful Objects: Nineteenth-Century Museums and American Culture

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...

Indian Collectibles: Appropriations and Resistance in the Haudenosaunee Homelands

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....

Black Women and the American University: Eileen Southern's Story

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...

Black Women and the American University: Eileen Southern’s Story

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...

Harvard Dance Center Showing: Initiation – In Love Solidarity

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: ...

Art and Thought in the Dutch Republic: Erasmus Lectures on the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders (Part 2)

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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Tell the truth but tell it slant—Behind the Scenes of Apple TV+’s Dickinson

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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Michael Twitty, "Beyond 'Slave Food': Re-Organizing the Perceptions and Potential of African American Foodways"

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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Art and Thought in the Dutch Republic: Erasmus Lectures on the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders (Part 1)

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...

Landscapes of Slavery, Landscapes of Freedom: The African Diaspora and the American Built Environment

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...

Virtual Student Guide Tour: This Land Is Whose Land?, with Jacqueline Zoeller

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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114 Mount Auburn Street
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Cambridge, MA 02138
T (617) 495-1585 | F (617) 495-0754