2021 Oct 20
Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine
12:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
Amelia M. Glaser is an associate professor of literature at UC San Diego and the author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine, about leftist Yiddish poets who wrote about the struggles of non-Jewish ethnic minorities in the 1930s. Focusing on performative genres such as music, comedy, film, theater, and highly visible poetic performance, Glaser is working on a new book that will examine how artists have re-envisioned the history and future of Ukraine since the 2014 “Maidan” revolution. Join her to learn more about her book and her...
Read more about Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine
2021 Oct 19
Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts: Jade Kake, “Indigenous Urbanism”
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Jade Kake (Ngāpuhi, Te Arawa, Te Whakatōhea) leads a small team at Matakohe Architecture + Urbanism, a kaupapa Māori design studio based in Whangārei in the Te Tai Tokerau region of Aotearoa New Zealand. The architectural department of the studio is focused on working primarily with Māori community clients on their papakāinga, marae, commercial and community projects, whilst the pūrākau (culture narrative) integration strand focuses on working to facilitate meaningful hapū participation in the design of major civic, commercial and education projects within their rohe. Matakohe are also...
Read more about Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts: Jade Kake, “Indigenous Urbanism”
2021 Oct 14
Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture: Jamaica Kincaid
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Jamaica Kincaid is a widely acclaimed and fiercely original writer known for her novels, short stories, and essays, including writings on her life as a gardener. She was also staff writer for the New Yorker from 1973 to 1996 and has been a contributor for the Village Voice.
She is beloved by generations of readers who discovered her fiction, including Annie John and “Girl,” in high school and is admired by critics for her daring and unorthodox body of work. Answering claims that her fiction and essays are characterized by anger, Kincaid says, “The...
Read more about Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture: Jamaica Kincaid
2021 Oct 12
Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: Zoe Leonard with José Esparza Chong Cuy
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
The artist Zoe Leonard will present a work in progress titled Al Rio/To the River and will engage in conversation about the project with curator José Esparza Chong Cuy.
Al Rio/To the River is a large-scale photographic project centered on the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, in particular the 1,200-mile section of the river that is used to demarcate the international boundary between Mexico and the United States. Begun in 2016 and currently still a work in progress, the work engages in a sustained observation of the water, surrounding landscape, and built environment,...
Read more about Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: Zoe Leonard with José Esparza Chong Cuy
2021 Oct 07
American Women and the Ongoing Battle to Save Democracy
4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
Jennifer Rubin, the author of Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump (William Morrow, 2021) and a Washington Post opinion writer, will join Michel Martin, weekend host of NPR’s All Things Considered, in a conversation about the persistent threat to American democracy and the central role women from across the political spectrum played in opposing and ultimately defeating Trump. Rubin will discuss how American women redefined US politics and, looking ahead, will examine women’s importance to defending the rule of law and multiracial democracy.
...
Read more about American Women and the Ongoing Battle to Save Democracy
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...
Read more about Airbrush, Instamatics, and Funk: Art, Pop, and New York City’s Long 1970s
2021 Oct 05
Loeb Lecture: Reginald Dwayne Betts, “Felon: A play; A discourse”
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
From the speaker, Reginald Dwayne Betts:
"Felon: An America Washi Tale is about re-imagining paper. A solo performance that begins with the pages of a book being slid into a cell, traverses stoves made of toilet paper, kites from a father, handwritten affidavits, legal complaints, handmade paper, certificates of pardon, and a 1,000 squares fashioned from the clothing of men serving life sentences, the variety of papers that reveals what is possible and burdened by prison. Here, I weave traditional theater, poetry, fine art, and Japanese paper making aesthetic...
Read more about Loeb Lecture: Reginald Dwayne Betts, “Felon: A play; A discourse”
2021 Oct 05
Art Talk Live: A Sea Shell off the Sea Shore: Van der Ast’s Feathered Cone Shell
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
In this intricate drawing, 17th-century Dutch artist Balthasar van der Ast captured the natural beauty of a “feathered cone”—the discarded shell of a sea snail indigenous to the Indo-Pacific. Join curatorial fellow Joanna Seidenstein as she explores the histories of global trade and colonization behind this work and the curatorial questions that have come up in preparation for its display.
...
Read more about Art Talk Live: A Sea Shell off the Sea Shore: Van der Ast’s Feathered Cone Shell
2021 Oct 04
Spiro Pollalis, “Sustainability and Climate Change: From Science to Design”
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
The upcoming national investment in infrastructure is most welcomed; it will add jobs and stimulate the economy. However, it is imperative for the infrastructure to be sustainable, resilient, and mitigate climate change. How can that be ensured?
Since its founding in 2008, the research at the Zofnass Program has focused on providing tools for designers and planners to measure the sustainability and resilience of infrastructure. Recently, the focus is on expanding the tools for mitigating climate change. Today, the outcome of the Zofnass Program empowers both sides: the design...
Read more about Spiro Pollalis, “Sustainability and Climate Change: From Science to Design”
2021 Sep 30
Learning from Performers: Joey and Faith Soloway
4:00pm
Location: 
Office for the Arts at Harvard—Online
A discussion with siblings Joey Soloway and Faith Soloway who collaborated on the Emmy Award-winning TV series Transparent. This event is in partnership with the Office for BGLTQ Student Life.
...
Read more about Learning from Performers: Joey and Faith Soloway
2021 Sep 24
Art Study Center Seminar at Home: Adventures in Teaching “Drawing Lessons”
11:00am to 12:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Among its many disruptions, the pandemic robbed students of the opportunity to explore works of art, in person, in the Harvard Art Museums. With considerable help from colleagues and some simple technology, however, visiting lecturer and senior scholar Margaret Morgan Grasselli was able to teach her seminar Drawing Lessons from the Art Study Center and to approximate for her students the joy of experiencing artworks up close. Join her as she talks about the challenges she faced and presents favorite drawings by Michelangelo, Rubens, Watteau, and Van Gogh, among others.
...
Read more about Art Study Center Seminar at Home: Adventures in Teaching “Drawing Lessons”
2021 Sep 22
Entangled Histories: The Bamiyan Buddhas—Past, Present, and Future
7:00pm to 8:15pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Western scholarship has focused on the monumental sculptures in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley as Buddhas created in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. This lecture tells an alternative story based on Islamic sources from the tenth to the twentieth century, which saw these sculptures not as Buddhas but as legendary heroes representing the mythic conversion of the Bamiyan Valley to Islam.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Taliban destroyed the sculptures—as Buddhas. After the fall of the Taliban, the sculptures’ entangled histories and the viewpoints of...
Read more about Entangled Histories: The Bamiyan Buddhas—Past, Present, and Future
2021 Sep 22
Muchos Méxicos: Virtual Exhibition Preview and Conversation
6:00pm to 7:15pm
Location: 
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online
Join us for a virtual preview and conversation about the Muchos Méxicos exhibition! Three scholars who contributed to the making of the show will discuss their favorite objects, and how they each tell stories of exchange and innovation—as well as loss and perseverance—across time and space.
Live interpretation available in English and Spanish.
Learn more about and RSVP for this virtual event.
Read more about Muchos Méxicos: Virtual Exhibition Preview and Conversation
2021 Sep 21
Anne Anlin Cheng, "Monsters, Cyborgs, and Vases: Apparitions of the Yellow Woman"
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
What does it mean to be a human ornament, to be a subject who survives as or through crushing objecthood? What is beauty for the unbeautiful?
This talk takes a series of humanoid objects – monsters, cyborgs, and standing vases – as fulcrums through which to explore how racialized gender, specifically the specter of the yellow woman, animates the designs of futurity and enables the slippage between the human and the inhuman so fundamental to the dream of modernity.
...
Read more about Anne Anlin Cheng, "Monsters, Cyborgs, and Vases: Apparitions of the Yellow Woman"
2021 Sep 20
Artist Discussion for Brown II Exhibition
4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
The artist Tomashi Jackson and Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, will engage in a wide-ranging conversation to mark the opening of Jackson’s new Radcliffe exhibition, Brown II, which explores the challenges of implementing the landmark 1954 US Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Her work centers on the subsequent 1955 case (referred to as Brown II), which stated that the effort to desegregate schools in the United States was to be undertaken with “all deliberate speed.”
Jackson and Brown-Nagin will consider the Brown II...
Read more about Artist Discussion for Brown II Exhibition
2021 Sep 17
Online Opening Lecture: Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970
3:00pm to 4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
In this virtual lecture, curator Makeda Best will introduce our latest special exhibition, Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970, on view at the Harvard Art Museums from September 17, 2021 through January 16, 2022.
Devour the Land explores the unknown and often hidden consequences of militarism on habitats and well-being in the United States. Featuring approximately 160 photographs across 7 thematic...
Read more about Online Opening Lecture: Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970
2021 Sep 14
Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, "The City as Accumulated Knowledge: Urban Design and Research"
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Like architecture and landscape architecture, but possibly even more so, urban design is a discipline that relies on precise and complex knowledge. This knowledge has been patiently accumulated over time and is the sum of the intelligence, experience, and creativity of those who have built up our cities and the discipline itself.
The lecture addresses this layered historical and contemporary knowledge of the city: How can we really see our built environment and understand its intertwinings that reveal and create genealogies? How can we organise its solutions in compendiums...
Read more about Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, "The City as Accumulated Knowledge: Urban Design and Research"
2021 Sep 13
Robin Winogrond, "In Search of Geographical Re-enchantment"
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
The replacement of the unique and specific with the generic is a sign of our times. Cities make no exception. In the name of the modern, new and improved, the luring richness, unexpected and uncontrolled are being standardized out of our urban landscapes. The result is often a sterile built environment with scary resemblance to architectural renderings that has little to do with the unfolding of human experience.
Robin Winogrond will show a series of her recent projects in Switzerland and Germany, most often on the urban periphery, which increasingly focus on sussing out the...
Read more about Robin Winogrond, "In Search of Geographical Re-enchantment"
2021 Sep 07
Art Talk Live: In the White Mountains with John Marin
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
John Marin's vibrant watercolors of Mt. Chocorua in the White Mountains of New Hampshire offer an exhilarating experience of the New England landscape. What’s left of the promises of American Modernism that these works helped usher in?
Learn more and RSVP for this virtual event.
Read more about Art Talk Live: In the White Mountains with John Marin
2021 Aug 24
Art Talk Live: Jean Frédéric Bazille’s Summer Scene
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
French painter Jean Frédéric Bazille's Summer Scene is one of the most iconic—and most enigmatic—paintings in the Harvard Art Museums collections. Join curator A. Cassandra Albinson as she traces this work's history—from its making and its reception during Bazille's lifetime to the painting’s final journey from France to Cambridge, in the summer of 1937.
...
Read more about Art Talk Live: Jean Frédéric Bazille’s Summer Scene

Pages