ArtsBites is the OFA round-table discussion series with undergraduate students and visiting artists. Discover and explore how you can create an expressive career and a performative life. Join us for a conversation with John Cariani, Tony-nominated actor and playwright for Almost, Maine, featured this fall in Caroline, or Change on Broadway. This event is in partnership with Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club.
Dulière, winner of Harvard Graduate School of Design's 2018 Wheelwright Prize, presents the conclusion of her research proposal, offering a collection of stories on the use and reuse of materials across building sites, demolition sites, salvage yards, quarries, film sets, and other out-of-the-way locations.
Initiation – In Love Solidarity is a choreographic narrative exploring the embodiment of the Middle Passage, and the resilience and evolving identities of women in the African diaspora. A film component of the work was created at historic sites in New England related to the transatlantic slave trade and emancipation. The imagery of the cowrie shell is present throughout, chosen as an emblem of the transformative identity of the Black female body.
Arts and sciences flourished in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century. Women such as Anna Maria van Schurman, Margareta van Godewick, and Anna Roemer Visscher excelled in scholarly pursuits and art practice. They were greatly admired, but they were nonetheless categorized as exceptional cases and never possessed the freedom to voice ideas enjoyed by their male counterparts. Working in a variety of art forms, including miniature painting, drawing, embroidery, and paper cutting, these women often meant to address no other audience than the artist herself.
Heralding the exhibition "Interrogative Design: Selected Works of Krzysztof Wodiczko," the artist joins architectural historian and GSD professor Erika Naginski for an exploration of architecture's role in the construction and performance of memory (12pm) and art historian Rosalyn Deutsche to discuss the role of trauma, healing, and survival in his work over the last five decades (2:30pm).
In collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums' current exhibit Devour the Land, the Harvard Film Archive presents a program of films that critically engage landscape as a site where deeper political, socio-cultural and historical forces are powerfully legible.
Jonathan Perel’s latest work is a systematic and forensic study of Argentina’s brutal dictatorship that dissects the insidious support given to the repressive regime by a wide range of still operating national and multi-national companies.
Through stories behind six recent cultural projects from the studio, Hu and Wenjing, Founding Partners of OPEN, discuss the changing role and opportunity for architects in a transformative society, and the importance of being radical yet poetic at the same time.
The major continents of the Southern Hemisphere—Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica—as well as India and islands in the Pacific, were once part of Gondwana, an ancient supercontinent that began to break up about 180 million years ago. How did this breakup influence the evolution of ecosystems and organisms found on modern continents and islands? This is one of the questions that biogeography, the study of how organisms are distributed across space and time, seeks to answer. Gonzalo Giribet will discuss how he uses biogeography and tiny invertebrate species to understand the...
Join Steven Phelps, a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas, Austin, for a discussion of his work using evolutionary neurobiology and social neuroscience to probe how and why species form attachments.
Tidepools exist where the land meets the ocean and the amazingly resilient creatures that live there manage the challenges of both environments. From swimming and climbing to burrowing, animals in tidepools have adapted many behaviors to live in an ever-changing world. Join human museum staffers Javier and Ryan as they lead you in a 45-minute program with live ocean invertebrates. This event will be fun for the whole family so bring your questions and sense of wonder.
This conversation is part of the series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speakers are Chloe Aridjis, award-winning novelist, Sea Monsters (2020) and organizer for Writers Rebel, and Wanjira Mathai, Regional Director for Africa at the World Resources Institute.
Activists Aridjis and Mathai are powerful, fierce, compassionate leaders in the global environmental movement. A writer and an organizer, they are also the daughters of iconic conservation heroes: Homero Aridjis,...
Culinary historian Michael Twitty, author of the James Beard-winning book, The Cooking Gene, discusses the impact of the collective perceptions of African American foodways on how we experience a broader vision of healing. With such foodways often stigmatized as a continuation of socio-cultural trauma or defended with a mark of "authentic" racial identity, Twitty offers alternative ways to see how the revitalization of ancestral foodways and culinary justice is a necessary part of our collective national experience.
In the 17th century, the Dutch Republic was a fast-paced, successful, modern society—economically, politically, and artistically. The work ethic of its citizens amazed foreign visitors, who compared the Dutch to crawling ants. Its flourishing art production showed the bustle of everyday life with almost scientific precision. Yet many artworks amassed by Dutch citizens in their homes portray scenes of silence and serenity. Such works, including genre pieces by Johannes Vermeer and still lifes featuring fruit, nuts or bread by Willem Heda and Adriaen Coorte, suggest a deep engagement with...
ArtsBites is the OFA round-table discussion series with undergraduate students and visiting artists. Discover and explore how you can create an expressive career and a performative life. Join us for a conversation with Jocelyn Bioh, performer and playwright who adapted Merry Wives of Windsor for Shakespeare in the Park in New York City. This event is in partnership with Harvard BlackCAST.
This conference brings together scholars whose research investigates the relationship between the African diaspora, Afro-descendants, and the built environment of North America and the Caribbean from a variety of lenses that are specific to the scholars’ fields of inquiry. The goal is to begin to expand the field of landscape history by taking into consideration questions that are not always deemed central to the practice of design, if design is understood as an activity that has featured—in the historical narratives—the presence of an author-designer, a client, and a variety of tools...
On this tour commemorating Native American Heritage Month, Jacqueline Zoeller ’23 will contrast colonial visions of the Western U.S. landscape, such as Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, “Lander’s Peak” (1863), with the realities lived and portrayed by Native American artists. Stops on the tour will include Diné artist Will Wilson’s Mexican Hat Disposal Cell (2020), a landscape photograph of Halchita, Utah, the Navajo...
The future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Drawing on extensive sociological research, Klinenberg claims that “social infrastructure,” which he defines as the physical spaces that shape our interactions, plays an essential but unappreciated role in modern societies, generating inequalities in health, education, crime, climate vulnerability, and social networks. In this lecture, he shares key findings from his landmark book, Palaces for the People, and...
A close look at a group of bold watercolors by Zelda Fitzgerald confirms her originality, talent, and wit as an artist. Known to her contemporaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s temperamental wife, Zelda was a creative force in her own right.
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 1 Divinity Ave., Cambridge
Stop by the Peabody Museum for a short moment of personal reflection on the past year which brought losses to so many. The front steps of the museum will be set up as a simple outdoor altar and staff will distribute lighted candles to visitors in observance of those we have lost. Pause and remember as you place your candle in our community display. Post a Message of Love to our online Virtual Altar before attending. And join us next year when our annual fiesta returns to the Peabody galleries! Rain or...
In a world of increasing polarization and boundary-drawing manifest at multiple scales, what has happened to the notion of “the public”? Is there evidence that collective understanding of who belongs in our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations is changing? And to what extent have the urban planning and design professions enabled or constrained these transformations? The 49th issue ofHarvard Design Magazine, guest-edited by Anita Berrizbeitia and Diane Davis, addresses “the status of the...