2020 Oct 16
Emerging Scholars of Color Abroad
2:00pm to 3:30pm
Location: 
Online Event
Race in Focus: From Critical Pedagogies to Research Practice and Public Engagement in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Among the first African Americans to join the American Communist Party and an important architect of communist approaches to race, racism, and African American equality, Lovett Fort- Whiteman (1889-1939) was one of the US citizens convinced (naively, to be sure) that Soviet society showed the way for overcoming racism in the United States. While visiting...
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2020 Oct 15
Marcus Samuelsson in Conversation with: Thelma Golden, Toni L. Griffin, and Mark Raymond
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Celebrated chef Marcus Samuelsson will share reflections on race, class, place and equity in the American food landscape, drawing from his forthcoming book The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food. He will then be joined by Professor in practice, Toni L. Griffin together with Thelma Golden and Mark Raymond for a conversation exploring the deep and intertwining relationships between memory, identity and authorship that exist for black creatives who reference, make and keep place through there work.
...
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2020 Oct 15
The Obsidian Mirror: Literature and Archaeology in Mexico
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology—Online
Mexican authors Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco, Salvador Novo, Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, and Rosario Castellanos, among others, have sought to use language to explore and recover the links between Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and its contemporary society. Focusing on Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past, Juan Villoro will explore the intimate and evocative relationships among literature, archaeology, and culture.
Learn more about and RSVP for The Obsidian...
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2020 Oct 13
Addressing Homelessness: What Can (and Can’t) Architecture Do?
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
In the 20th Annual John T. Dunlop Lecture, presented by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, Michael Maltzan will discuss his work with the Skid Row Housing Trust and what it suggests about the ways in which architecture and other design professions can help address problems of housing affordability and homelessness. After the lecture, Mike Alvidrez, CEO Emeritus of the Skid Row...
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2020 Oct 09
Art Study Center Seminar at Home: Obsession and Labor
11:00am to 12:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
British artist Albert Moore’s painting process is believed to be among the most elaborate of the Victorian era. Join conservation fellow Ruby Awburn and curatorial fellow Sophie Lynford as they discuss the results of their recent research and examination of Moore’s painting Study for “Blossoms.” The conservation treatment revealed layers beneath the surface of his work, which allowed Awburn and Lynford to reconstruct Moore’s elaborate, multistage painting process.
Led by:
Ruby Awburn, Paintings Conservation Fellow, Straus Center for Conservation and...
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2020 Oct 08
The Enduring Legacy of Slavery and Racism in the North
4:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Although Massachusetts formally abolished slavery in 1783, the visible and invisible presence of slavery continued in the Commonwealth and throughout New England well into the 19th century. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz’s theory about human origins is but one example of the continued presence and institutionalization of racism in the North.
Taking as a starting point the new book To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, this panel of experts will examine the role and impact of slavery in the North and discuss the influence...
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2020 Oct 08
Art Talk Live: Precious Deception: The Illegal Use of Gold Leaf in an 18th-Century Color Print
2:00pm to 2:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
This handsome engraving, with its printed gold-leaf frame, was made by Louis-Marin Bonnet, one of the most gifted and innovative producers of full-color prints in 18th-century France. However, the inclusion of gold leaf in the print was illegal. In this talk, visiting senior scholar Margaret Morgan Grasselli will discuss Bonnet’s elaborate efforts to conceal his authorship, pretending that the print had originated in England and had been made by a mysterious artist named “L. Marin.”
Led by:
Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Visiting Senior Scholar for Drawings,...
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2020 Oct 08
Loeb Lecture: Edgar Pieterse
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
African cities are confronted by large youthful labour markets with limited prospects of formal industrial employment, on the one hand, and rapid physical expansion without the resources to address the massive infrastructural requirements to support people and economies, on the other. These daunting challenges are compounded by the impacts of the climate crisis and other forms of acute environmental risk. This confluence calls for situated innovations to reimagine and redesign investments in sustainable infrastructures that are simultaneously low-carbon, labour-intensive and geared...
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2020 Oct 07
From the Hands of the Makers
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online
From 1886 to 1936, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka applied their artistic talents and knowledge of natural history to create an exquisite collection of glass models of plants to support the botanical education of Harvard students and the public. This program will explore the history, conservation, and relevance of the Glass Flowers in the twenty-first century and introduce the publication Glass Flowers: Marvels of Art and Science at Harvard, a compendium of new photographs that captures the beauty and magnificent detail of the models.
...
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2020 Oct 07
Animals: A Mission Brief
12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Using the military's "five-paragraph order" format, Mackin will provide the listener with the essential information needed to carry out and understand the mission of writing a war story. "Animals," is a collection of short stories based on his experiences as a special operations soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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2020 Oct 06
Lecture: Cannon Fodder: Debating the Racial Politics of Canonicity in Modern Architectural History
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
This talk introduces audiences to the antiracist framework for architectural history that guided the formulation of the recent monograph Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (2020). This revisionist intellectual history recovers the ways that architectural organicism provided a rationalist model of design to consciously relate the perceived racial and architectural “characters” of a nation to the people they served.
From the ethnographic histories of style penned by Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Gottfried Semper, to Louis Sullivan...
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2020 Oct 05
Lecture: Metahaven, “Inhabitant”
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
How can we respond to the imperative of being in the now, of inhabiting the present? Can a work absorb the moment in time of its making without becoming like the news?
Inhabitant is about this question and how it has informed our work in filmmaking, art, and design. Referring to processes of sensing and inhabiting as practiced by non-human-species such as mushrooms and lichens, we will reference the work of Anna Tsing and Jennifer Gabrys, among others. In doing so, Inhabitant will explore affinities between sensing and cinematic capture.
...
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2020 Oct 03
Amazing Virtual Archaeology Fair at Harvard
1:00pm to 3:00pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East
Celebrate the glamour, labor, humor, and discoveries of archaeology at Harvard. Join student archaeologists as they share their experience with an Irish castle, a shaft tomb in western Mexico, monuments on the Giza plateau in Egypt and drones used to study El-Kurru in ancient Nubia, among other locations. Place a friendly wager on an atlatl (spear throwing) demonstration, observe chew marks on bones from the Zooarchaeology Lab and experience a virtual-reality view of the Great Sphinx.
...
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2020 Oct 03
Student Guide Tour: Art in Exile, with Vlad Batagui
11:00am to 11:30am
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Join us live on Zoom for a Student Guide Tour! Vlad Batagui ’21 explores the relationship between art and the origins of creation, looking at different ways in which art objects and artists get removed from their original cultural contexts. This free tour will take place online via Zoom.
To join, click the following link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/94341342869 (no pre-registration required).
...
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2020 Oct 03
Creature Feature: Merpeople!
10:00am to 10:30am
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Creature Feature, a new online series from the Harvard Art Museums, offers a chance for families with children ages 6 and up to explore magical creatures across the collections through close-looking and curious exploration with museum staff. In this talk, take a (virtual) trip to the sea! Join curatorial assistants Casey Monahan and Heather Linton on Zoom to discover sirens and merpeople in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s "A Sea-Spell" and Edward Farrell’s "Pair of Rutland Tazzas."
This online talk is free and open to all, but registration is required. To register, please complete...
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2020 Oct 01
On Account of Sex (1920)
4:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
The passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 did not "give" women the vote. Rather, it established a negative: that the right to vote could not be abridged on account of sex alone. This session brings together diverse participants who will each illuminate one facet of women’s political history at this key transitional moment. Together, participants will emphasize the radical achievement of the amendment, exploring the full implications of what it meant to remove sex as a barrier to voting, which resulted in the largest-ever one-time expansion of the electorate and mobilized a...
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2020 Oct 01
Lecture: [Re]Constructing Real Estate: The Question of Value
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
For this event with the Harvard Graduate School of Design, speaker Emmanuel Pratt will contextualize the historical degeneration vs. regeneration of The Commonwealth to present date, lead viewers on a virtual site visit, and share some upcoming developments emerging across a network of value-based partners.
Speaker:
Emmanuel Pratt, LF ‘17, received a BArch (1999) from Cornell University and an MSAUD (Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design, 2003) from Columbia University. From 2011 to 2019, Pratt served as the director of aquaponics at Chicago...
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2020 Sep 28
Our Common Purpose: Voting by Design
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Graduate School of Design
Join the Harvard Graduate School of design for a virtual lecture with Michael Murphy, Danielle Allen, and Sarah Whiting.
Michael Murphy is the Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, an architecture and design collective with offices in Boston, Kigali, Poughkeepsie, Santa Fe, Cape Town, and London. As a designer, writer, and teacher, his work investigates the social and political consequences of the built world. Michael’s research and writing advocates for a new empowerment that calls on architects to consider the power relationships of...
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2020 Sep 26
Learning to See: Art, Medical Imaging, and Project Success
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Art Museums
How can looking at art help high school students envision a future for themselves in medicine? Join us live on Zoom to learn more about a recent collaboration with Project Success for High School Students, a summer school program at Harvard Medical School that offers 11th and 12th graders from Boston and Cambridge an opportunity to explore professional pathways in the biomedical field. This collaboration builds on a program that helps doctors-in-training better understand their patients by engaging with art at the Harvard Art Museums.
Following presentations by this year’s...
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2020 Sep 25
In Pursuit of Equitable Development: Lessons from Washington, Detroit, and Boston
12:30pm to 4:30pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Graduate School of Design
In this half-day virtual symposium, leading practitioners and scholars from three cities, Washington, DC, Detroit, and Boston, will explore efforts to bring equitable development to their communities and outline how they are responding to current challenges. The presentations and discussions will help students, scholars, community leaders, public officials, and others identify innovative strategies and successful approaches to advancing social justice in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
Co-sponsored by the Joint Center for Housing...
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