Join the Harvard Graduate School of design for a virtual lecture with Michael Murphy, Danielle Allen, and Sarah Whiting.
Michael Murphy is the Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, an architecture and design collective with offices in Boston, Kigali, Poughkeepsie, Santa Fe, Cape Town, and London. As a designer, writer, and teacher, his work investigates the social and political consequences of the built world. Michael’s research and writing advocates for a new empowerment that calls on architects to consider the power relationships of...
How can looking at art help high school students envision a future for themselves in medicine? Join us live on Zoom to learn more about a recent collaboration with Project Success for High School Students, a summer school program at Harvard Medical School that offers 11th and 12th graders from Boston and Cambridge an opportunity to explore professional pathways in the biomedical field. This collaboration builds on a program that helps doctors-in-training better understand their patients by engaging with art at the Harvard Art Museums.
In this half-day virtual symposium, leading practitioners and scholars from three cities, Washington, DC, Detroit, and Boston, will explore efforts to bring equitable development to their communities and outline how they are responding to current challenges. The presentations and discussions will help students, scholars, community leaders, public officials, and others identify innovative strategies and successful approaches to advancing social justice in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
Since the early 20th century, plastic has been a popular material for many artists due to its ability to be transformed—bent, shaped, molded, stretched. However, when works made with plastic enter a museum collection, they bring numerous challenges. Join conservation scientist Georgina Rayner and conservator Susan Costello to learn more about the materials, condition and treatment issues, and the demands this material poses for storage and display.
Led by: Susan Costello, Associate Conservator of Objects and Sculpture, Straus Center for Conservation and...
Online—Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
As the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow, Leslie M. Harris is completing “Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History.” She uses memoir and family, urban, and environmental histories to explore the multiple meanings of New Orleans in the nation, from its founding through its uncertain future amid climate change.
American instincts oscillate between the allure of the city and that of life free of city stress; between the temptations of the metropolis, and bucolic retreat from those very centers of civic life. Such oscillation, occurring across American history, have on the one hand enabled the building of Manhattan, the ‘Capital of Capitalism’ (and culture, too) and the invention of the ‘garden suburb’ where family grace was to dwell, prior to metastasizing into sprawl.
Online—Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
The artists Marilyn Pappas and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman met at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute in the 1980s. Decades later, their sustained friendship has led them to work in adjoining studios and teach generations of artists.
In this exhibition-opening discussion, Pappas and Slosburg-Ackerman will reflect on how their artistic practices have been shaped by friendship and the ways in which women’s art is shaped by the conditions of its making. Pappas and Slosburg-Ackerman will be joined in conversation by author Maggie Doherty.
Almost 200,000 acres of land in the fertile Mezquital Valley are irrigated with the untreated sewage of Mexico City. Every drop of rain, urban runoff, industrial effluent, and sewage in Mexico City is sent to the Mezquital Valley through a 60 kilometer pipe. Soils in this valley have been continuously irrigated with urban wastewater since 1901, longer than any other soil in the world. The capacity of these soils to produce conditions in which agriculture can be practiced safely and produce healthy crops depends on a complex negotiation between soil...
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online
Join the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian for a virtual Public Observatory Night with guest lecturer Donavan Moore, author of "What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin."
It was not easy being a woman of ambition in early twentieth-century England, much less one who wished to be a scientist. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin overcame prodigious obstacles to become a woman of many firsts: the first to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, the first promoted to full professor at Harvard, the first to head a department there. And, in what...
Presenter: Willeke Wendrich, Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology; Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Digital Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles
Archaeologists study stylistic and technological changes in excavated materials—especially pottery—to better understand developments in ancient Egyptian society. However, little attention has focused on using the archaeological record to understand the transfer of cultural knowledge. How did people learn the arts and crafts of potters, basket makers, metalworkers, and scribes?...
Fossils provide evidence of how organisms have evolved and ecosystems have changed through time—and offer clues to our present and future. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History recently completed a seven-year renovation of its Fossil Hall, the largest in the institution’s history. Matthew Carrano, lead curator of the Fossil Hall, will describe the museum’s approach to creating a modern, relevant exhibition for the twenty-first century, featuring new research and more than seven hundred fossils. His talk will detail the goals, processes, and results of this enormous project...
Join Harvard Graduate School of Design for a virtual lecture with Rafael Moneo and Sarah Whiting.
Rafael Moneo, AM '85, was born in Tudela, Spain, in 1937. He graduated in 1961 from the Architecture School of Madrid. He was a professor in the Architecture Schools of Barcelona and Madrid, and he was appointed Chairman of the Architecture Department of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he is now Emeritus Josep Lluis Sert Professor in Architecture...
This lecture explores whether it is possible to achieve both social justice and environmental sustainability in efforts to mitigate urban flood risk. The expanding scale of urban flooding under climate change has renewed interest in large-scale restoration projects that make room for water in metro centers. However, ecologically functioning green infrastructure – unleashed rivers, sprawling wetlands – is inconsistent with the current governance landscape of fragmented local governments seeking to maximize local land values and minimize affordable housing. Moreover, even...
Persian albums contain specimens of calligraphy in various scripts, normally compiled from different sources and several artists, and mounted on decorated margins. We will look at a beautiful example from our Islamic art collection and explore its artistic and aesthetic features together.
Led by: Shiva Mihan, Schroeder Curatorial Fellow of Islamic Art, Division of Asian and Mediterranean Art
Prints tell so many stories, from all the materials that went into their creation to the numerous artists involved in their production. In this talk, curator Elizabeth Rudy will explore five stories within one print, a 1797 book illustration by French artists Pierre-Paul Prud’hon and Barthélemy Roger.
Led by: Elizabeth Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Associate Curator of Prints, Division of European and American Art
Join us for a virtual field trip to an artist's studio! We will visit contemporary ceramic artists for a guided tour of their space, a demo of their process, and discussion about their work and how it has progressed throughout their career. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and participate in the discussion.
This week, we visit the studio of sculptor Christina Erives! Christina believes that ceramics as material has permanence, it is one of the ways we were able to learn about ancient...
Join us for a virtual field trip to an artist's studio! We will visit contemporary ceramic artists for a guided tour of their space, a discussion about their process, and discussion about their work and how it has progressed throughout their career. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and participate in the discussion.
This week we travel to Chicago to visit former Harvard Ceramics Program Artist-in-Residence (2015-2017) Salvador Jiménez-Flores. We are looking forward to catching up with...
Author and journalist A’Lelia Bundles will read from her book "Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker" (originally titled "On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker" [Scribner, 2001]) and join Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin for a discussion followed by an audience Q&A.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Join us for a virtual field trip to an artist's studio! We will visit contemporary ceramic artists for a guided tour of their space, a demo of their process, and discussion about their work and how it has progressed throughout their career. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and participate in the discussion.
We are thrilled to travel to Chicago to visit multi-media artist, author and educator Paul Andrew Wandless. Our discussion will be around materiality and the...
In this session, senior objects conservator Tony Sigel will take a closer look at architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s terracotta models for the marble sculptures that would transform the visual landscape of 17th-century Rome. Sigel will reveal the intimate details of Bernini’s modeling process and his signature techniques.
Led by: Tony Sigel, Senior Conservator of Objects and Sculpture, Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies