2021 Jul 27
Book Talk with Daniel Carpenter
4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
The third installment of the Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Daniel Carpenter, author of Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021). Carpenter is the faculty director of the social sciences at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Carpenter's reading will be followed by a discussion with Nikki M. Taylor, professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Howard University. The event will also include an...
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2021 Jul 20
Book Talk with Tiya Miles
4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
The second installment of the Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House, 2021). Miles is a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Miles's reading will be followed by a discussion with Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and...
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2021 Jul 16
Art Study Center Seminar at Home: A Conversation with Drawings Collector George Abrams
11:00am to 12:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Curator Joachim Homann will discuss the themes, techniques, and function of Dutch drawings with preeminent collector George Abrams (Harvard College ’54, Harvard Law ’57), who is internationally regarded as the preeminent collector of historical Dutch drawings.
Learn more about and register for this...
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2021 Jul 13
Book Talk with Clint Smith
4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Radcliffe Institute—Online
The first installment in the summer series of Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks will feature Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) and staff writer at The Atlantic. Smith's reading will be followed by a discussion with Kyera Singleton, executive director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, in Medford, Massachusetts. The event will also include audience Q and A.
...
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2021 Jul 13
Art Talk Live: On Cape Cod with Edward Hopper
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
A close look at Edward Hopper’s watercolors depicting Cape Cod, including the masterpiece Highland Light (1930) and a new acquisition, reveals a landscape in transformation.
Led by:
Joachim Homann, Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawings, Division of European and American Art
Learn more about and...
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2021 Jun 26
Basics of Glazing Workshop with Paul Wisotzky
Repeats every week every Monday until Mon Jun 28 2021 . Also includes Sat Jul 10 2021.
1:00pm to 4:00pm
1:00pm to 4:00pm
1:00pm to 4:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Ceramics Program—Online
This three-hour workshop (with 3 different dates to choose from) will provide an overview of basic glazing and decorating techniques. Consider it part introduction, part refresher, part crash course in glazing, decorating and surface. The session covers how to prepare your work for glazing and explores different ways to apply glaze. Considerations related to atmosphere, use and functionality will be discussed. Basic decorating methods using slips, underglazes and wax resist will be demonstrated. This includes the use of different tools and techniques including brush work, slip trailing,...
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2021 Jun 26
Virtual Student Guide Tour: LOL, with Cecilia Zhou
11:00am to 11:30am
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Cecilia Zhou ’22 looks at the historically specific ways humor is deployed in a few serious works of art from across time that may make you laugh out loud (LOL). She’ll focus on the 1640s painting The Drunken Silenus, by Francesco Fracanzano; the 18th-century scroll painting Puppies with Hotei and Jittoku, by Nagasawa Rosetsu; and a...
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2021 Jun 15
Art Talk Live: Up Close and Personal—Looking at Ancient Textiles
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Egyptian makers were skilled at using only a few materials to create a rich variety of textiles, but we rarely have detailed information about the people who made them or their artistic processes.
Join conservation fellow Julie Wertz to explore what close looking, microscopy, and micro-analytical techniques can teach us about the materials and methods these unknown makers used to create beautiful and functional art objects.
...
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2021 Jun 08
Reframing Japonisme: Painting Edo and Beyond
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
We’re bringing Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection to you! Join us for this final talk in our series of virtual conversations exploring themes highlighted in the exhibition.
How has Japonisme shaped the reception of Japanese art? In this online program, professors Elizabeth Emery and Chelsea Foxwell will consider the persistent influence of the western construct of Japonisme and the new aesthetic forms it inspired.
In 1872, French art critic Philippe Burty coined the term “Japonisme” to refer to the growing western admiration for “all things...
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2021 Jun 05
Creature Feature: Birds of a Feather
10:00am to 10:30am
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Explore a vibrant collection of watercolors featuring a flock of fantastic birds inspired by a king’s royal menagerie in Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Avian Album.
Creature Feature, an online series from the Harvard Art Museums, offers a chance for families to explore magical creatures across the collections through close looking and curious exploration with museum staff. Creature Feature talks are free, open to explorers ages 6 and up, and offered once a...
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2021 Jun 01
Art Talk Live: Käthe Kollwitz and the South African Left
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s reception in the Global South has only recently begun to be considered. Known for its socialist and anti-war sentiments, her work was largely introduced to South Africa by exiles fleeing Nazism, and her prints became an important touchstone for many of the country’s politically minded artists in the years leading up to and during apartheid.
Looking to Kollwitz’s 1905 cycle, Peasant’s War, Jessica Williams will explore how these images circulated among South Africa’s Left and how her work came to influence an entirely new generation of lesser-...
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2021 May 18
Art Talk Live: Reframing the Tianlongshan Cave Temple Fragments
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
In 1943, the museum was gifted 25 stone fragments from the Tianlongshan cave temples in China’s northern Shanxi province. Beginning in the late 1920s, the reliefs and sculptures were removed from the site and published by art dealer Sadajirō Yamanaka, sparking interest among collectors worldwide. This talk will highlight a collaboration with Harvard students that investigates the creation of the works, their meaning in Buddhist medieval China, their sale and journey to their current home, and the ravaged site they left behind. 
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2021 May 14
Art Study Center Seminar at Home: Slavery’s Landscape
11:00am to 12:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
This seminar will explore how photographers from the Civil War era constructed landscapes of slavery. What symbols and facts did they draw upon, and what narratives and interpretations were they in dialogue with and which did they promote?
Join Makeda Best, photography curator and author of Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America (2020), as she explores how Alexander Gardner and others presented the infamous Franklin and Armfield slave pen...
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2021 May 04
Art Talk Live: Reframing Japonisme
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
The fable of the 19th-century European “discovery” of Japanese prints and their catalytic effect on Impressionist painting is by now comfortably worn, threadbare even. But what were painters in Europe actually encountering? 
In this talk, curator Rachel Saunders will take a close look at a major new acquisition that shines a distinctly different light on European interest in “Japanese art,” and the ways in which this new category was constructed in Japan itself. 
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2021 Apr 29
Performance and Ritual in Ancient Egyptian Funerary Practice
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East—Online
One of the best documented Egyptian rituals—occurring in both cultic and funerary contexts—is known as the Opening of the Mouth ritual. Performing this ritual was believed to animate statues and temples, while also restoring the senses of the deceased, thus ensuring that they could eat, drink, and breathe in the afterlife. Textual and iconographic references to the ritual are found in different time periods, from the Old Kingdom through the Roman Period.
In this lecture, Mariam Ayad uses the Opening of the Mouth ritual as a case study to illustrate the power of imagery and the...
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2021 Apr 28
Stories from the End of the World
7:00pm to 8:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
The Harvard Art Museums collections have played an important role in the popular undergraduate course Stories from the End of the World, taught by Harvard Divinity School professor Giovanni Bazzana. This fascinating course, which is part of the Harvard College Program in General Education, explores why humans have always imagined the end of their worlds. In this conversation, Professor Bazzana and Jen Thum of the Harvard Art Museums will discuss their recent online collaboration for the course and what students learned about artists’ apocalyptic inspirations over time.
...
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2021 Apr 28
Prosociality in Hybrid Societies of Humans, Agents, and Robots
12:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Ana Paiva is a computer science professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, and is investigating the design of intelligent interactive systems by creating “social agents'' that can interact with humans in a natural manner. Over the years, she has developed this field by engineering social agents that exhibit specific capabilities, including emotions, personality, culture, nonverbal behavior, empathy, and collaboration, among others.
Join Paiva to learn about her current investigation into the conditions and mechanisms that drive societies of agents and...
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2021 Apr 23
The Work of Objects: Interpretation within and beyond Museum Walls—Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures (Part 4)
1:00pm to 2:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
This session includes brief talks, followed by a roundtable discussion, by academics and museum professionals who focus on Dutch and American art and history. Speakers will discuss specific objects—ranging from the 17th to the 21st century—that have posed interpretive and museological challenges. They will also present new possibilities for considering the relationship between slavery’s past and present-day racial injustice.
This is the fourth and final session of Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures, presented...
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2021 Apr 23
History, Memory, and Legacy: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosana Paulino, and Cheryl Finley in Conversation—Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures (Part 3)
11:00am to 12:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Renowned writer Jamaica Kincaid and groundbreaking visual artist Rosana Paulino will discuss their explorations of the legacies of slavery in their work. They will be joined in conversation by eminent art historian Cheryl Finley.
This is the third session of Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures, presented by the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, and...
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2021 Apr 21
The Dawn of Olmec Civilization
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online
The hearth of Olmec civilization is located in the tropical lowlands of Mexico’s southern Gulf Coast region, in the majestic archaeological site of San Lorenzo. The inhabitants of this first Olmec capital developed a distinctive geo-political territory and managed complex trade systems. The Olmec also created spectacular earthen architecture and magnificent stone sculpture—including the famous Colossal Heads—that reflect their stratified social organization and centralized political system backed by religion and directed by hereditary rulers.
Building on the pioneering work of...
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