In 1951, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” His assertion is pardonable but profoundly untenable. The supposed hole in the production of German art after 1943 was long understood as “the gap,” by…
Just as we get pummeled with snow, there’s no better time to update our preview of spring exhibitions. Many of these are shows that just opened and we hope to catch, as well as a few upcoming events on our…
For decades, Carrie Mae Weems’s staged photographs and videos have served as aids for processing the legacies of slavery, racism, and sexism in the United States. The elegant solutions in Weems’s compositions, their gravitas and narrative content, appear to operate…
“Painting is not merely illustration, but real-time communion with ancestors,” reads a wall text in Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia a show at the Harvard Art Museums up through September 18. Spanning several decades of work…
Corita Kent and the Language of Pop is a tight survey, focused primarily on the work Kent and other pop artists produced in the mid-1960s. This span of time also maps onto Vatican II, the Catholic church’s ecumenical council that…
The remaining brick façade from 1927, facing Harvard Yard, suggests an institution steeped in tradition. From the front, one expects to step inside and see art by dead white men, displayed according to national styles and chronology. The backside, however,…
Editor’s Note: This essay was written in reaction to Harvard Art Museum’s re-opening on November 16, 2014. Kayla Hammond Larkin responds to the event of a major museum reopening to the public, the Harvard Art Museums collections, as well as…
Just before her lecture last Tuesday night at Harvard Art Museum, Doris Salcedo sat in the last row of a lecture hall in Sackler, starring off into space. She seemed unaware of the burgeoning crowd, lost in thought, present in…
The Harvard Art Museums announced that its much awaited renovation and expansion of the 32 Quincy Street building will finally open to the public in the fall of 2014. Since breaking ground in 2010, the project has presented numerous challenges…