Online or at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Knafel Center, 10 Garden St., Cambridge
The civil rights lawyer and scholar Sherrilyn Ifill will join dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, in conversation about the recent United States Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and access to higher education.
This year’s high school seniors are facing a much-changed college admissions landscape following the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action based on race. Our panel will discuss how seniors and other aspiring college students, including those in underserved communities, can best prepare for college and present themselves in the application process — and we'll also offer guidance for the counselors, educators, and parents who support them.
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.
Oscar Lopez is a Mexican writer and freelance journalist living in Mexico, where he covers violence, politics, and human rights. Prior to joining the Times, Lopez was Americas correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, where he covered LGBT+ rights in the United States and Latin America. As a freelancer, he has reported in more than a dozen countries for the likes of the Guardian, Time, the Times of London, the Washington Post, and many more.
In this lecture, Lopez will examine the phenomenon of forced disappearance in Mexico. Using the shocking abduction of 43 students...
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.
In conjunction with the 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.
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...
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.
In this tour, Eve Crompton ’24 will analyze historical social attitudes toward female health and illness as she examines a selection of representations of women in art. She will look at an Attic grave stele, Woman dying in childbirth (c. 330 BCE); the painting Mother and Child (c. 1901), which Pablo Picasso was inspired to make after visiting a French prison hospital; and Erich Heckel’s painting To the Convalescent Woman (Triptych) (1912–13). An integrative biology student, Crompton aims to address the health inequalities perpetuated by structural barriers and individual prejudices,...
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...
Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, 8 Garden St., Cambridge
Join the curator Jinah Kim and the artist Atul Bhalla for a tour of Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis and a discussion of the artwork I was Not Waving but Drowning II.
After years of observing ecological deterioration and alienation of the river from urban communities, Atul Bhalla ritualistically submerged himself in the Yamuna River, alluringly captured in the set of fourteen serial photographs on loan from the Harvard Art Museums. Kim and Bhalla will discuss this work and its context within the gallery.
Join curator Jen Thum and radiologist Hyewon Hyun for a tour of the exhibition Seeing in Art and Medicine, on view from September 2 to December 30, 2023. Thum and Hyun will share insights about the museums’ medical humanities program for radiologists—on which the exhibition is based—the curatorial process, and what can be gleaned through close looking.
On this tour, Isa Haro ’24 will explore how abstraction in art has been practiced, viewed, and enjoyed over time, with three very different examples. She will look at a group of Ming dynasty garden rocks (16th–17th century), which served as focal elements in traditional gardens; Paul Cézanne’s Study of Trees (c. 1904), a radically austere painting that contributed to Cézanne’s renown as a pivotal figure in the history of abstraction; and Alberto Burri’s Legno e rosso 3 (1956), a painting made with lacquered bark and a blowtorch. An art, film, and visual studies student, Haro aims to...
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Askwith Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge
2023 is on track to be the hottest year on record. What do we do next?
Rising air temperatures are now a fact of life in the world's cities, with major implications for public health and urban design. Join a panel of global experts, innovators, and practitioners to learn more about the impacts of extreme heat on our bodies, our buildings, and our cities–and what individuals and institutions can do to prepare.
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
Imprisonment, quite literally, is all around us. The American criminal legal system, especially as it disproportionately incapacitates Black and Brown communities, forms a landscape of retribution and inequity. Carceral Landscapes focuses on the network of prisons, jails, detention centers, and their attendant infrastructure that comprises the backbone of the United States legal system. This symposium aims to expand conversations on the criminal legal system beyond law and police, centering the pivotal—though often unacknowledged—role of design in the construction of carceral...
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Askwith Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge
With the growing concern about social media's impact on teen mental health, what can we do to support the teens in our lives? Join us as we launch HGSE’s new Center for Digital Thriving by welcoming the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, to the Askwith Education Forum for a conversation that gets to the heart of how families and educators can help young people build and sustain their digital wellbeing.
Online or at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Knafel Center, 10 Garden St., Cambridge
Artists whose works are represented in the Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis exhibition will engage with scholars of religion, anthropology, and transnational studies to discuss aesthetic and spiritual experiences of water in the age of climate crisis. Participants will discuss traditional paintings depicting mythological stories along with contemporary works evoking different aesthetic and spiritual experiences of water in the age of climate crisis.
In this conversation, Simone Browne and Mimi Ọnụọha will examine how artists have critically grappled with the hidden infrastructures of surveillance today, and explore the consequences of what is made visible through data.
A reception will follow in the related Surveillance exhibition at the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard Science Center, 1 Oxford Street, second floor, Cambridge, MA, from 7:30pm–8:15pm.
Join curatorial fellow Sarah Lieberman for an exploration of works in the exhibition Seeing in Art and Medicine, on view from September 2 to December 30, 2023. Lieberman will share insights about the museums’ medical humanities program for radiologists—on which the exhibition is based—and what can be gleaned through close looking.
Harvard Art Museums, Adolphus Busch Hall, 29 Kirkland St., Cambridge
Carson Cooman, composer-in-residence at Memorial Church at Harvard University and organ and choral editor for Lorenz Publishing and Sacred Music Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will perform.
Recitals are performed on Harvard’s famous 1958 D. A. Flentrop organ. Audience members are invited to lunch quietly while listening.