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...
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.
At the end of the nineteenth century, British and American lesbian artists settled around Florence, Italy, renovating neglected Renaissance estates. Contemporary accounts describe the hillside region as colonized by a “cult of women.” These women restored, refashioned and theorized gardens as places of queerly mythic erotic encounter.
In this lecture Professor Thomas will explore how design features such as nymphaeums, water parterres, secret gardens, grottos and boscos provided both refuge and open-air expression for lesbian subjectivity. Remembering that the first documented...
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Writer Kiese Laymon will explore whether the actual histories of American colleges and universities should be ripe sites for Black American horror and comedic narratives. Laymon will create a live novella and a live essay during this talk, while questioning the ethics of making art “for” an audience longing for both titillation and innocence from the horrific histories of Black Americans in and around American institutions of higher learning.
Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies—Online
Artist Anne Bobroff-Hajal, a PhD in Russian history, seeks to understand what underlies Russian autocracy across centuries, and to paint hundreds of individual people struggling to achieve their life goals within it: a comical yet deadly-serious human tapestry of raw ambition, pain, and joy. In conversation with Dr. Alexandra Vacroux, Bobroff-Hajal will discuss her large scale polyptychs, where viewers are led across...
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Tonya M. Foster’s writing and research focus on ideas of place and emplacement, on intersections between the visual and the written, and on mapping the 20th- and 21st-century African Americas. During her Radcliffe year, Foster is completing a book-length manuscript of poetry, “AHotB,” that takes up Fanny Lou Hamer’s idea that “a black women’s body is never hers alone.”
The FAS Division of Science will host their 2nd annual lecture in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. via Zoom. Special guest speaker Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, III, President of The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will share remarks.
Known for his iconoclastic use of nontraditional artistic materials, ranging from chocolate to playing cards to animal excrement, artist Dieter Roth (1930–1998) underscored processes of decomposition in his work. Curatorial fellow Lauren Hanson considers how Roth’s “decay objects” from the 1960s and ’70s harness self-deprecating humor to challenge notions of originality, artistic genius, and the museum as a site of preservation.
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard—Online
Book Panel on Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic by Álvaro Santana-Acuña
Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude seemed destined for obscurity upon its publication in 1967. The little-known author, small publisher, magical style, and setting in a remote Caribbean village were hardly the usual ingredients for success in the literary marketplace. Yet today it ranks among the best-selling books of all time. Translated into dozens of languages, it continues to enter the lives...
In the mid-second millennium BCE, sculptors, painters, potters, and glass- and metalworkers were busy in the northern Mesopotamian town of Nuzi (Iraq). Some of their products are in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums, which supported excavations at the site between 1925 and 1931. In this online talk, conservation scientist Katherine Eremin and curator Susanne Ebbinghaus will discuss the discovery of these objects and how technical study over decades has revealed the secrets of their making, as well as plans for future display.
Exhibition designer Elie Glyn and production specialist Sean Lunsford will explain the creative process behind the planning and installation of a display of framed fans by Suzuki Kiitsu, featured in the special exhibition Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection.
Led by: Elie Glyn, Assistant Director for Exhibitions, Collections Management Sean Lunsford, Exhibition Production Specialist, Collections Management...
During the Great Depression, artist Ben Shahn produced hundreds of photographs while working for the Farm Security Administration. Among his most common subjects were musicians. In this talk, curatorial fellow Kappy Mintie will examine Shahn’s interest in folk music in the context of concurrent government efforts to record this important strand of American music.
Led by: Katherine “Kappy” Mintie, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow in Photography, Division of Modern and Contemporary Art
Members of the itinerant Roma, or Romani, people arrived in Europe by the Middle Ages and have held a prominent place in Western art and literature, from the work of Shakespeare and Hieronymus Bosch to that of the many Roma artists and writers active today. This talk will focus on an unusual and moving depiction of a Roma woman and child by Dutch artist Jacques de Gheyn, exploring it in relation to the broader visual and literary tradition and to the realities of the lives of the Roma in the 17th-century Netherlands.
Public images of rulers serve as potent symbols of power and propaganda. In ancient Rome, tyrannical emperors were deposed and assassinated, their likenesses defaced by angry citizens and sometimes by official decree.
This talk is part of a series investigating power dynamics in artworks across the collections. Considering intersections of art and power, our curatorial team discusses how artists engage with social and political crises, use art to upset systems of power, and imagine more equitable futures.
James S. Snyder, HKS/MEI Senior Fellow, in conversation with award-winning Palestinian-Israeli architect Senan Abdelqader on the influences of Arab culture across time on art, architecture, and design in Israel, Palestine, and the world today. This event is part of the fall 2020 MEI series, James Snyder in Conversation: A series of dialogues on art, culture, politics, and the possibilities for transcending conflict through cultural connection in the modern Middle East.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Alumni of the Ho Family Student Guide Program talk about works of art they still think about, how their museum experience affected their path after graduation, and how this experience feeds into their current work in architecture, social justice, and environmental policy.
Join David Kurlander ’15, Catarina Martinez ’15, and John Wang ’15—all members of the first Student Guide cohort in our renovated building—for an interactive conversation with Camran Mani, the Cunningham Curatorial Fellow in Academic and Public Programs, about how they have carried forward their museum...
Join the Carpenter Center for a conversation between Kemi Adeyemi, Director of the Black Embodiments Studio, and curators Jessica Bell Brown, Lauren Haynes, and Jamillah James. This conversation is a continuation of Adeyemi's oral history project “Black Women Curators, A Brief Oral History of the Recent Past,” which documents the perspectives of Black women curators working in the United States from the mid-2000s onward.
Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies—Online
Join Maggie Paxson and Alexandra Vacroux for a wide-reaching, long-looking, spirit-warming conversation and mini-concert as we prepare for this strangest of holiday...
Buddhism is a way of life, a philosophy, a psychology, a set of ethics, a religion, or a combination thereof. Central to the many ways Buddhism is understood is the achievement of emotional, mental, and psychological wellness. African Americans are at perpetual risk of psychological imbalance and trauma due to the social realities of racism in the United States. The authors engage the question, What can Buddhism offer African Americans who want to be emotionally resilient in a context they cannot...