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
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 Mar 31
Food in Art
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Join the Harvard Art Museums on Zoom for a bite-size look at the role of food in art, presented in partnership with the Food Literacy Project at Harvard University Dining Services.
From vegetable-based dyes to dairy fixatives, food and art share a long and interesting history. In this talk, curatorial and conservation fellows Ruby Awburn, Lauren Hanson, Leonie Mueller, and Julie Wertz will take us on a culinary tour of the Harvard Art Museums and discuss the varied roles that food has played in art.
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2021 Mar 31
MUTINY: poems
12:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Phillip B. Williams is the author of the poetry collection “Thief in the Interior.” His artistic interests manifest through lyrical and narrative investigations of the aesthetic possibilities and historical implications of the grotesque and through (re)creation of Afro-diasporic mythologies within contemporary timeframes.
Join Williams as he discusses researching, writing, and revising poems (title: “Mutiny”) and prose (title: “Threshold”) during his Radcliffe fellowship year. Within both genres, he hopes to research and explore Black folklore, African-diasporic mythologies...
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2021 Mar 25
Black Is Queen: The Divine Feminine in Kush
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East—Online
The prominence of powerful goddesses and queens in the Nubian Kingdom of Kush (now Northern Sudan) highlights the unusually high status of women in this ancient African society and serves as a fitting focus for the study of female power in the ancient world. Using temple inscriptions found in Egypt and Nubia, the rich funerary goods found in royal burials, and temple and tomb imagery, Solange Ashby will discuss how ancient Africans of the Nile Valley understood female power and presence. Songs from Beyoncé’s recent production "Black Is King" will be woven into this presentation on...
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2021 Mar 24
The Intentional Museum
4:00pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online
American historian Christy Coleman is the distinguished lecturer for the 2021 Seminar in Innovative Curatorial Practice. Coleman is renowned for creating innovative, engaging, and inclusive museum exhibitions and programs that tell a comprehensive story of American history. In this program she will discuss the power that museums have to genuinely engage with communities around what matters most to them. While expertise within the museums is invaluable, it is wasted if not used to help communities address their issues and aspirations.
Established in 2014, the Seminar in...
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2021 Mar 15
Mind, Heart and Body: The Creative Process of Making Theater From a Director’s Perspective
4:30pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative at Harvard—Online
How does an actor transform into a character? What is the process that allows this transformation to happen? What is the role of the audience in completing the theatrical event? Join Diane Paulus, Professor of the Practice in Theater, Dance & Media and English, for a behind the scenes look at the creative process of making theater.
Learn more about and register for Mind,...
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2021 Mar 11
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, "The Miasmist: George E. Waring, Jr. and Landscapes of Public Health"
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
In 1867, nineteenth-century sanitary engineer George E. Waring, Jr. (1833–1898) published an influential manual entitled “Draining for Profit, Draining for Health,” reflecting the obsessions of his gilded age—wealth, health, and miasma. Even as the germ theory emerged, Waring supported the anti-contagionist miasma theory, positing that disease spread through the air as a poisonous vapor, emerging from damp soil. He applied his knowledge of farm drainage to an urban theory of public health, with a drainage plan for Central Park; a sewerage system for Memphis; a transformation of New York...
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2021 Mar 10
Aesthetics of Memory, Narratives of Repair, and Why Remorse Matters
12:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a professor and South African National Research Foundation Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma at Stellenbosch University, focuses her research on trauma in the aftermath of gross human rights violations and on remorse and forgiveness that emerge in victim-perpetrator dialogues. At Radcliffe, Gobodo-Madikizela returns to the archive of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to think through the horrific violence in contemporary South Africa. Is this violence a reflection of “ghosts” from the past, the death of hope in the present, or a...
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2021 Mar 09
International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address: Ananya Roy, "Undoing Property: Feminist Struggle in the Time of Abolition"
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Renewed uprising against the death-making apparatus of police and prison demands that we attend to the relationship between property and personhood, specifically to how the theft of land is facilitated by the theft of life. This talk, given on the occasion of International Women’s Day and during the week that marks the first anniversary of Breonna Taylor’s killing, focuses on the propertization of the gendered subject in the making of whiteness. The time of abolition, Roy argues, requires the undoing of gender-property logics. What does this entail within the university? Speaking as "...
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2021 Mar 05
The Stories We Tell and the Objects We Keep: Asian American Women and the Archives
1:00pm to 3:30pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
The stories of Asian American women extend far beyond the geographic borders of the United States. Inspired by tales and objects from family history, their narratives often reflect the transnational nature of Asian American women’s lives. Despite the importance of these narratives to expanding and complicating our understanding of war, migration, inequity, and difference, the accounts and perspectives of Asian American women have often been overlooked in formal records, and the tangible objects providing critical evidence of their histories have been ignored. This program will bring...
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2021 Mar 04
Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: Julie Bargmann, “Modesty”
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Toxic Beauty. Troubled Allure. Fallow Fairness. Not Vacant, Open. Not Abandoned, Changing.
D.I.R.T. cultivates a perverse attraction and an unapologetic approach to wrecked landscapes.
Not Restorative, Regenerative.
The work holds back. It doesn’t make everything perfectly okay. The work listens. It hears them above trying to make sense, below the ground producing heritage. The work hurts. It flips preconceptions of stuck minds. The work is messy. It’s all about finding. The work emerges.
It doesn’t descend. The work leaves. It lets you in....
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2021 Mar 01
Ilze and Heinrich Wolff, “Homage and Refusal”
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Wolff is a design studio concerned with developing an architectural practice of consequence through the mediums of design, advocacy, research and documentation. The Wolff team is led by Ilze & Heinrich Wolff who work collaboratively with a group of highly skilled, committed and engaged architects, creative practitioners and administrators.
Learn more about and RSVP for Ilze and...
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2021 Feb 24
Latinx Modernism and the Spirit of Latinoamericanismo
12:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
John Alba Cutler, associate professor of English and Latinx studies at Northwestern University, is working on a new book examining the prodigious literary archive of early-20th-century Spanish-language newspapers in the United States. Newspapers in Latinx communities from New York to San Diego published tens of thousands of poems, short stories, chronicles, and serialized novels. These works show how Latinx communities grappled with the collision of Latin American and US modernities long before the advent of what we think of as “modern” Latinx literature.
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2021 Feb 23
Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture: Walter Hood
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
The Senior Loeb Scholars program invites prominent individuals whose expertise is outside the typical disciplines of the GSD or whose practice displays a unique focus. Scholars are welcomed for a short-term residency at the School, during which they present a public lecture, workshops, and other engagements. Since its inception, the program has offered the GSD community opportunities to learn from and engage with visionary designers, scholars, and thought leaders.
Walter Hood is the Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar. Hood joins a cohort of previous Senior Loeb Scholars, which...
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2021 Feb 23
Art Talk Live: Picturing the Modern Home—Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Living Room
12:30pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
In 1920s Germany, the progressive Bauhaus school of art, architecture, and design sought to create art, objects, and environments that would revolutionize everyday life. This talk will focus on Lucia Moholy’s carefully constructed photograph of her own living room in one of the newly built Bauhaus faculty residences. In addition to providing housing, the home served as an important publicity tool, showcasing Walter Gropius’s architecture as well as the Bauhaus products with which it was meticulously furnished.
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