Art
Recovering the Philosophy Chamber, Harvard's Enlightenment-Era Teaching Cabinet
The small chamber was at the heart of intellectual life in New England from 1766 to 1820, and then it all but disappeared.
Harvard Art Museums
Art
Doris Salcedo Captures the Weight of Mourning
Doris Salcedo is interested in replicating the indefinite, affective qualities of mourning — its weight, intangibility, absurdity, and reliance on personal associations.
News
Harvard Adds the Blackest Black to Its Historical Pigment Collection
Harvard Art Museums acquired a sample of Vantablack, a material that absorbs almost 100% of light.
Art
Drivel, Drool, Babble, Blabber: An Evening with Mel Bochner
The highly influential conceptual artist Mel Bochner recapitulates his 50-year dalliance with the English thesaurus.
Art
Journeying Beyond Western Time in Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In 1971, at a remote government settlement in Australia’s Northern Territory called Papunya, a group of elderly Aboriginal men painted designs from ancestral creation stories onto a school wall in cheap, bright acrylics.
News
Explore the Harvard Art Museums’ Massive Bauhaus Collection Online
Home to one of the first and largest collections devoted to the Bauhaus, Harvard Art Museums now has a new, online resource that makes it easier to navigate these holdings.
Art
Lapis Lazuli: A Blue More Precious than Gold
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The first blue pigment to hold its color was often prized over gold. The semi-precious stone lapis lazuli was ground into an iridescent pigment, sometimes called ultramarine, that seemed to shine when applied to the canvas.
Art
Flowers of Evil and the Macabre Literary Imagination of Symbolism
Symbolist artists — including Aubrey Beardsley, Jean Delville, and Odilon Redon — were united less by style than by their shared intention of illustrating invisible aspects of human experience.
Art
Corita Kent’s Political and Holy Language in the Context of Pop
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Among Pop art’s notable motifs are capitalism, consumerism, and now Catholicism.
Art
Eyewear for Chickens and a Time Capsule Full of Twinkies: Highlights from #AskAnArchivist Day
Today, archivists across the US took to Twitter to answer questions from the public.
Art
In the Spotlight, Harvard’s Rothkos Don’t Shine
Cambridge, Mass. — There is a story that sometimes circulates through the art world claiming the reason some of Mark Rothko’s work has faded over time is because he bought his paint at Woolworth’s Department Store.
Art
For the Harvard Art Museums, a Top-to-Bottom Renovation and Rethinking
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — On a warm day in June six years ago, the front doors of the Fogg Museum closed quietly. There was no banner reading “Closing Day” on Quincy Street at the edge of Harvard Yard, no ceremony, no press, no speech. At five o’clock, museum visitors shuffled out the exit in droves, totin