A presentation from 2023–2024 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow Francesca Wade
At Radcliffe, Wade is completing her second book, "Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife," a new biography of Stein told through the story of her posthumous legacy. She will also begin work on a new project, exploring the intersecting lives and work of several women poets and activists in 1970s New York.
Join curator Sarah Laursen for a tour of the exhibition Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire, and the Chinese Art Trade (September 15, 2023–January 14, 2024). The exhibition explores the entwined histories of the opium trade and the Chinese art market between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. Laursen will share how these two commodities—acquired through both legal and illicit means—have had a lasting impact on the global economy, public health, immigration law, education, and the arts.
In conjunction with our special exhibition Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire, and the Chinese Art Trade, and with an abundance of care for our community, the Harvard Art Museums are hosting a one-hour on-site Narcan training, facilitated by the Cambridge Public Health Department and Somerville Health and Human Services. Their staff will also distribute the medicine for attendees to take home.
Please join us at the Harvard Art Museums for an afternoon of family-friendly activities open to all ages. Explore the museums with scavenger hunts and family conversation cards; use your eyes, mind, and imagination to engage deeply with works on view; and play with clay, wire, and shadows in the Materials Lab.
The event is free and open to the public. Sign-up for certain activities during the day, such as art-making workshops, will occur on-site and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Why do the Harvard Art Museums have a collection of Chinese art? In conjunction with the exhibition Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire, and the Chinese Art Trade, curators and specialists will explore early collecting of Chinese art in Massachusetts, historical interpretations of cultural heritage, and how contemporary museum collecting practices have changed and will continue to change in the future.
In the Whale is a feature-length film about, arguably, the greatest true fish story ever told. It's the account of a man, Michael Packard, who survived to tell the tale of being swallowed and then spit out by a whale.
A Q&A with filmmaker David Abel will follow the screening.
Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, 8 Garden St., Cambridge
Join the artist and educator Evelyn Rydz for an afternoon of conversation and collective artmaking within the exhibition Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis, on view September 18–December 16, 2023.
The exhibition presents artworks that tell alternative stories of water experience in the context of climate change, while encouraging viewers to appreciate the multivalent meaning of water and their own relationship to it. Rydz has repeatedly observed the increasing impacts on natural and cultural ecosystems throughout her various field...
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
What is the state of housing design in the US? In particular, how are architects of new single- and multi-family housing responding to issues such as the warming climate, the affordability crisis, increasing regulations and construction costs, and the demand for new unit types that better reflect today's demographic realities?
These questions will be the focus of a half-day event marking the release of The State of Housing Design 2023, a new book that examines themes in housing design, explored through over 100 recent buildings in the US. The event will feature panels...
Good political leadership requires acumen, decisiveness – and empathy. Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand, built her career with empathy at its core. And during the 5 ½ years that she led her country, Ardern demonstrated that value repeatedly, from strong COVID-19 protections to fast tightening of gun laws following attacks on mosques.
Now a fellow at Harvard and a role model to many, Ardern will reflect on what it’s like to make hard but compassionate policy choices under a global spotlight.
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge
Join the fall 2023 Public Building & Architecture Tours of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, housed within Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, led by architecture students. Walk through and learn more about the layered history of the building, its brutalist and modernist structural features, and the educational and cultural legacy of the Carpenter Center at Harvard University.
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
On the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Our Artificial Nature, featuring Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities core and affiliated research faculty, the GSD hosts a candid dialogue on the trajectory of design research and practice in response to environmental change.
Carson Chan, curator of the concurrent MoMA exhibition Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, will engage GSD faculty in a conversation about past design speculations, current research, and practice futures.
The Harvard Viol Consort, a group of students from Harvard’s hands-on history course Performance and Culture: Renaissance Music (Music 181R), will put on a pop-up concert in the Calderwood Courtyard. The course is taught by Professor Kate van Orden and assisted by Laura Jeppesen.
The performers will play compositions for viol by William Byrd, John Dowland, Diego Ortiz, Leonora Duarte, and other Renaissance composers.
Join curator Sarah Laursen for a closer look at artworks in the exhibition Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire, and the Chinese Art Trade (September 15, 2023–January 14, 2024). The exhibition explores the entwined histories of the opium trade and the Chinese art market between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. Laursen will share how these two commodities—acquired through both legal and illicit means—have had a lasting impact on the global economy, public health, immigration law, education, and the arts.
The Woodberry Poetry Room welcomes you to its grand finale event of the season: a reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Forrest Gander (author of Knot, Copper Canyon, 2022) and Jorie Graham (author of To 2040, Copper Canyon, 2023). Introductory remarks will be delivered by poet and critic Stephanie Burt.
An informal reception and book-signing (provided by Grolier Poetry Book Shop) will follow the event.
Online or at Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford St., Cambridge and Peabody Museum, 11 Divinity Ave., Cambridge
Join Stephanie Mach (Diné), Peabody Museum Curator of North American Collections and Diné (Navajo) guests for a panel conversation about the ways they each care for Navajo cultural heritage within their various areas of work and interest.
Following the panel conversation, attendees are encouraged to visit the Hall of the North American Indian at the Peabody Museum where Harvard students will be available to share information about key cultural items on display.
Lecturer Jean Dalibard (Professor, Collège de France): "At zero temperature, a Galilean-invariant Bose fluid is anticipated to be completely superfluid. When translational (and thus Galilean) invariance is broken, A.J. Leggett demonstrated in the 1970s that the superfluid fraction must be strictly less than one. Here, we examine both theoretically and experimentally how the presence of an external 1D periodic potential quenches the superfluid fraction of a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate and compare it to Leggett's bound. We show that the anisotropy of sound velocity...
Join curatorial assistant Casey Monahan to explore how two 19th-century ceramic vessels tell different stories of the United States. One vessel is made by enslaved potter David Drake and shows us both the artist’s agency and the lack of it. The other vessel is a presentation vase created for the U.S. centennial; it includes narrative imagery intended to evoke a shared American identity after the Civil War.
A presentation from 2023–2024 Radcliffe fellow Donna L. Maney
Much of Maney's current work focuses on how sex differences are discovered and reported in biomedical research and how these differences influence public policy. At Radcliffe, she is collaborating with scientists at Harvard University and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health to develop resources to help make biomedical research more sex/gender inclusive.
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
Drawing works both ways. Behind the outline, there is a goal to be reached: to give visibility to the masses in the process of being produced. It is only a revelation of possibilities. It is clearly the outline that produces the narrative. The masses evolve at their own pace, whether micro or macro. The outlines are a matter of a 'self,' of a 'singular' that exposes itself to the 'multiple;' for the time being, we don’t know about tomorrow.
What would be our sensitive imprint if we gave up on interpretation, in other words, on the subtle interplay between the eye,...