Events

    Day of the Dead Celebration

    Location: 

    Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, 11 Divinity Ave., Cambridge

    Learn more about this joyful holiday, a national symbol of Mexico. Enjoy craft activities for the young and young at heart. Personalize a sugar skull (extra fee), learn about the natural history of Mexico, watch live folk dance and mariachi performances, purchase traditional pan de muerto, hot chocolate or specialty cocktails. Contribute your message of love to honor and celebrate the lives of the departed at the museum’s altars.

    Activities are free except where noted. RSVP by October 25 at 12:00pm and check in on arrival.

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    Harvard Art Museums at Night

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    Join an evening of art, fun, food, and more! Gather with friends and mingle inside the museums' Italian-inspired courtyard while taking in the smooth sounds from DJ C-Zone. Browse the museum shop and chat over a snack or drink for purchase from local vendors. And of course, wander the galleries to take in world-class art collections with over 50 galleries to explore!

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    Exhibition Tour—Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire, and the Chinese Art Trade

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    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.

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    Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture: Manuel Salgado, "City-Making"

    Location: 

    Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)

    “City-making” can be approached from different points of view and disciplines, whether starting from global theoretical reflections or from a particular and pragmatic approach to solving concrete problems. One can contribute to ‘city-making’ as a thinker, sociologist, economist, legislator, planner, developer, policymaker, or even an agitator. Architect Manuel Salgado will discuss how he has contributed to this process in three different ways: as a planner, architect, and policymaker.

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    Gallery Talk: Seeing in Art and Medicine

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    Join curator Laura Muir for a closer look at portraits from Timm Rautert’s photographic series Germans in Uniform (1974), which are included in the exhibition Seeing in Art and Medicine, on view from September 2 to December 30, 2023. Muir will share insights about the series and encourage participants to reflect on the role uniforms play in constructing our professional identities and the way we relate to others.

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    Spotlight Tour: Out of This World, with Arielle Frommer '25

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    On this tour, Arielle Frommer ’25 will explore the intersection of art and astronomy in three works: Light Prop for an Electric Stage [Light-Space Modulator] (1930), a reflective kinetic sculpture by László Moholy-Nagy, who had been a professor at the Bauhaus in Germany; Prince Shōtoku at Age Two (datable to about 1292), an iconic Buddhist sculpture from Japan; and The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train (1877), a large canvas that Claude Monet painted in Paris, soon after he began painting in the Impressionist style. An astrophysics student, Frommer will ask, “How does our...

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    Spotlight Tour: Deconstructing Disorientation, with Emily Feng '25

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    On this tour, Emily Feng ’25 will explore how certain works of art provoke a sense of disorientation. A student of philosophy and economics, Feng will look closely at three works: Saxon Motif (1964), an oil painting made in West Germany by Georg Baselitz; Zhan Wang’s Sculpture in the Form of a Nine-Hole Scholar’s Rock, made in China in 2001; and The End of the World (1936), a painting by David Alfaro Siqueiros, which he produced in New York City.

    No registration required.

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    Spotlight Tour: Sensing the Divine, with Hanna Carney '25

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    On this tour, Hanna Carney ’25 will look at multisensory religious experiences as portrayed in art and the significant role they play in people’s lives. Featured works include a bronze ritual wine vessel (late 11th–early 10th century BCE), cast in China during the Zhou dynasty, and The Miracle of the Sacred Fire, Church of the Holy Sepulchre (1892–99), an ambitious painting by Englishman William Holman Hunt, based on his multiple trips to the Holy Land. Emerging from Carney’s studies of comparative religion and the history of art and architecture, the tour encourages visitors to embrace...

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    Teen Saturdays at the Museum! / ¡Sábados de Jóvenes en el Museo!

    Location: 

    Harvard Museum of Natural History (26 Oxford Street) and Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology (11 Divinity Avenue)

    Teen Saturdays is designed for Latino high school students. Workshops delve into four fascinating traditional celebrations from Central America. Participants will embark on a journey to discover diverse festivals that shape societies in El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. During each workshop, teenagers will visit exhibits, use art and language to create original works, and challenge their sense of what a tradition can be through discussion. We will learn about the historical and social contexts behind these festivities, their cultural symbolism, and the values they embody...

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    Augmented Reality Maya Chocolate Plate

    Location: 

    Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, 11 Divinity Ave., Cambridge

    "Shrink" yourself down to "walk" into an ancient Maya vessel using augmented reality! Maya women were often essential for uniting kingdoms. When a marriage was arranged between Maya royal families, kings would exchange gifts like this ceramic three-legged plate for serving chocolate. Use the museum's iPad as a "magic window" to discover fine details on one such plate that cannot be seen on the actual artifact. A gallery facilitator will guide you through the experience and will share more about the Maya.

    This is a drop-in activity for International Archaeology Day — no...

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    Spotlight Tour: Sightseeing, with Soleil Saint-Cyr '25

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    On this tour, Soleil Saint-Cyr ’25 will explore urban landscapes and how interactions between public and private spaces shape people’s experiences. The stops on the tour include Four Stops (2007), a large acrylic painting by Nina Chanel Abney; a tile panel with flowers and serrated leaves (c. 1570), an architectural element from Ottoman Turkey; and Head of an Oba, a sculpture from 1525–75 that belongs to the group of “Benin Bronzes,” which were taken from Benin City as part of the British Punitive Expedition of 1897.

    No registration required.

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    WAX POETIC: Audre Lorde LP Launch Party with Tongo Eisen-Martin

    Location: 

    Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, 11 Quincy St., Cambridge

    The Woodberry Poetry Room invites you to a launch party for Audre Lorde at Fassett Studio, 1970, our latest collaborative release with Fonograf Editions: Here to help us celebrate is current Poet Laureate of San Francisco and Lorde LP contributor Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Blood on the Fog (City Lights, 2021) and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (2017).

    Eisen-Martin will get the event rolling with a brief reading of his own poems (and a selection of Lorde's works) and then we will cue up the record for its premiere on the Aalto turntables. Come one, come all to this evening of...

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    Bosco Sodi in Dialogue

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    Join us for a discussion with Bosco Sodi about his sculpture installation Origen, which marks the first outdoor public art display for the Harvard Art Museums. Mary Schneider Enriquez, former Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums, will talk with Bosco Sodi about his practice, the ideas central to Origen, and the placement of his work outside as well as in galleries featuring Buddhist sculpture and funerary art.

    No registration required.

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    Skate & Slay: A Fabulous Drag Extravaganza

    Location: 

    Science Center Plaza, 1 Oxford St., Cambridge

    In celebration of LGBTQ+ History Month, join us for Skate & Slay: A Fabulous Drag Extravaganza! We are bringing you a night of drag show performances, FREE roller skating and a whole lot of fun!

    • Enjoy performances by Briar Blush, Candace Persuasian, Lilly Rose Valore, and Rusty Hammer.

    • Lace up some free skates for a glowing time with our glow in the dark roller rink.

    • Skate, Slay, Repeat

    Whether you identify with the LGBTQIA2S+ community, an ally, or just want to have fun, you...

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    Gallery Talk—Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire, and the Chinese Art Trade

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    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.

    ...

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    Loeb Lecture: David Gissen with Sara Hendren

    Location: 

    Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)

    The Architecture of Disability, David Gissen’s newly published book, situates experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for “the construction of disability,” this book fundamentally reconsiders how we conceive of and experience disability in our world. Gissen will be joined by GSD alum Sara Hendren for a conversation surrounding the publication and how we might look beyond traditional notions of accessibility to positively reimagine the roots of architecture.

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    Houghton-Medieval Studies Lecture in Early Book History: "Arthurian Immobilities: Disabled Kings and Nobles in the Lancelot Prose Cycle"

    Location: 

    Houghton Library, Harvard Yard, Cambridge

    Houghton Library and the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies present Christopher Baswell on "Arthurian Immobilities: Disabled Kings and Nobles in the Lancelot Prose Cycle."

    While the lived reality of disability in the Middle Ages was surely a wretched one, at the same time we encounter persistent associations between disabled and royal or aristocratic bodies in medieval culture, its imagery, and narratives. Nowhere is this truer than in the Arthurian world, at whose core there lies a powerful but immobile figure, the Rich Fisher King. In this talk, Christopher Baswell will...

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    Spotlight Tour: Sightseeing, with Soleil Saint-Cyr '25

    Location: 

    Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge

    On this tour, Soleil Saint-Cyr ’25 will explore urban landscapes and how interactions between public and private spaces shape people’s experiences. The stops on the tour include Four Stops (2007), a large acrylic painting by Nina Chanel Abney; a tile panel with flowers and serrated leaves (c. 1570), an architectural element from Ottoman Turkey; and Head of an Oba, a sculpture from 1525–75 that belongs to the group of “Benin Bronzes,” which were taken from Benin City as part of the British Punitive Expedition of 1897.

    No registration required.

    ...

    Read more about Spotlight Tour: Sightseeing, with Soleil Saint-Cyr '25

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