Harvard Art Museums

Sep 19, Oct 8, Nov 19 · 12:30pm

Gallery Talk: _On Location: Drawing the Outdoors_

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

Sat Sep 19 / Thu Oct 8 / Thu Nov 19 · 12:30pm

Susanne Bartels, former Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow in European and American art, gives a half-hour gallery talk in the exhibition On Location: Drawing the Outdoors. Through drawings and watercolors by Millet, Van Gogh and Manet among others, she looks at how 19th-century artists responded to industrialization and urbanization, when the landscape was both a place of hard physical toil and a destination for fashionable escape.

Wed Oct 7 · 6:00pm

American Art Curators in Conversation

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · Menschel Hall · 32 Quincy St · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

The 2026 Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge Lecture is a discussion of what is at stake in curating American art now, with Candice Hopkins (Tlingit), executive director and chief curator of The Forge Project; Ilona Katzew, head of Latin American art at LACMA; and Stephanie Sparling Williams, head of American art at the Brooklyn Museum. Horace D. Ballard, the museums' curator of American art, moderates with the student Frances Yee.

Tue Oct 13 · 6:00pm

Pınar Öğrenci: _Good Luck in Germany_

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · Menschel Hall · 32 Quincy St · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

The 2026 Busch-Reisinger Museum Lecture. Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci will discuss her 2024 film Glück auf in Deutschland (Good Luck in Germany), which is featured in her first major exhibition in the United States, here at the Harvard Art Museums.

Fri Oct 16 · 11:00am

Art Study Center Seminar: A Closer Look at the Forbes Pigment Collection

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA 02138 · Cambridge

Alison Cariens, conservation coordinator at the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, leads a close look at the Forbes Pigment Collection, the museums' "library of color," begun by Edward Waldo Forbes while he directed the Fogg. The seminar covers the collection's history, how its materials serve the conservation labs, and the story behind each featured pigment. It is free with registration and open to ages 14 and up.

Tue Oct 20 · 12:00pm

Art + Science: Papermaking

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA 02138 · Cambridge

Penley Knipe, the Philip and Lynn Straus Senior Conservator of Works on Paper and head of the Straus Center's Paper Lab, talks about the history of paper, how it is made and what it reveals about a work of art. The session is part of a free monthly series in the Lightbox Gallery in which conservation staff bring out tools and materials of their labs for visitors to handle.

Wed Oct 21 · 12:30pm

Gallery Talk: Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and Their Avant-Garde Circle

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy St · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

Ken Hakuta, nephew of the video artist Nam June Paik, shares memories of the multimedia performances Paik made with the cellist Charlotte Moorman and others in their avant-garde circle. He talks with Vuk Vuković, the museums' Hakuta Family Nam June Paik Curatorial Fellow, and Mitra Abbaspour, Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The museums hold Moorman and Paik's Blue Cello, a gift of the Hakuta family.

Oct 27, Dec 1, Jan 14, Mar 11 · 12:30pm

Gallery Talk: Activation of Moholy-Nagy’s _Light Prop for an Electric Stage_

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA 02138 · Cambridge

Tue Oct 27 / Tue Dec 1 / Thu Jan 14 / Thu Mar 11 · 12:30pm

Museum staff discuss László Moholy-Nagy's Light Prop for an Electric Stage, the motorized 1930 construction of metal, glass and moving parts that the Bauhaus teacher designed to throw shifting patterns of light and shadow, and then set it running. Held in the Busch-Reisinger Museum's collection, it has been read as a lighting device, a kinetic sculpture and the subject of New Vision films and photographs.

Thu Oct 29 · 12:30pm

Gallery Talk: Hauntology, Death Discs, and the Specter of Postwar America

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy St · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

A half-hour gallery talk pairs photographs by Joseph Janney Steinmetz and Terry Wood with the teen tragedy songs of the 1950s and '60s known as “death discs,” among them “Leader of the Pack,” “Teen Angel” and “Last Kiss.” Krystle Brown, an artist on the museums' marketing staff, looks at how photography can “preserve and haunt cultural fantasies of innocence, romance, suburban adolescence, and loss.”

Thu Oct 29 · 6:00pm

Artist Talk: Sneha Shrestha

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · Menschel Hall · 32 Quincy St · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

an exciting discussion featuring Nepali artist Sneha Shrestha, known artistically as IMAGINE, in conversation with curator Sarah Laursen. Shrestha's work infuses her native Devanagari script with the visual language of graffiti handstyles to convey stories about migration, diasporic identity, and belonging.

Wed Nov 4 · 12:30pm

Gallery Talk: Picturing Taste, Style, and Space in 1950s American Suburbia

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy St · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

Destiny Crowley, a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in the history of art and architecture and curatorial intern in photography, leads a free, half-hour gallery talk in The Way We Never Were: The American Professional Photographers Collection. Her subjects are the 1950s revolutions in self-fashioning and labor, the pursuit of modern domestic comfort and respectability, and the aesthetics of American suburbia.

Wed Nov 4 · 6:00pm

Artist Talk: Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · Menschel Hall · 32 Quincy St · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

The 2026 Nancy Stephenson Nichols Memorial Lecture brings the artists Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, Harvard graduates who work together between New York, Berlin and Manila on documentary projects about labour, land and resistance in the Philippines. Their study of Alfonso Ossorio's mural at the Chapel of St. Joseph the Worker on Negros Island led them to the sugar-plantation landscape around it. It accompanies the Ossorio exhibition Line and Lineage.

Tue Nov 17 · 12:00pm

Art + Science: Inpainting Techniques

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA 02138 · Cambridge

Kate Smith, senior conservator of paintings and head of the Straus Center's paintings lab, discusses the differing philosophies behind inpainting, the restoration of losses in a painting's surface. The talk belongs to a free monthly series of informal conversations in the Lightbox Gallery, beside the conservation labs, where staff bring out tools and materials from their work for visitors to see up close and handle.

Sun Nov 22 · 12:30pm

New on View: Community and Self-Representation in the David and Jane Shapiro Collection

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA 02138 · Cambridge

Leah Yeshitila, former Hao Family Intern in Modern and Contemporary Art, discusses her installation of late 20th-century Black artists, drawn from David and Jane Shapiro's gift to the museums. Its layered pictures of Black men centre community, interiority and the rituals of everyday life, in settings from D9 collegiate fraternities to barber shops, as an alternative to media images of trauma in Black life.

Wed Dec 2 · 6:00pm

John Constable and the Outdoors: Writing about Drawing

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · Menschel Hall · 32 Quincy St · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

In conjunction with the exhibition On Location: Drawing the Outdoors, author and scholar Susan Owens will share John Constable's sketches, paintings, diaries, and letters to trace the creative process of a painter in love with nature. In conversation with curator Joachim Homann, she will discuss sketching outside, looking, and writing.

Wed Dec 9 · 6:00pm

The Material Culture of Islamic Calligraphy

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · Menschel Hall · 32 Quincy St · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

The 2026 Norma Jean Calderwood Lecture. Calligraphy is the most recognizable of Islamic arts, and it is often seen in its finished form—an inscription written on paper; carved in stone, wood, or ivory; cast in metal; or woven into fabric.

Dec 10, Mar 31 · 12:30pm

Gallery Talk: The Gelatin Silver Print

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA 02138 · Cambridge

Thu Dec 10 / Wed Mar 31 · 12:30pm

Tatiana Cole, conservator of photographs at Harvard's Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, leads a half-hour gallery talk on the gelatin silver print, the most popular photographic process of the 20th century. Working from prints on view in The Way We Never Were: The American Professional Photographers Collection, she looks at the range of surface textures and image tones the process can produce.

Sat Dec 12 – Sat Dec 12 · 11:00am & 2:00pm

Life Sciences in the Galleries

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA 02138 · Cambridge

Sat Dec 12 · 11:00am & 2:00pm

Harvard graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the life sciences give five-minute lightning talks in the galleries, each on an original work of art and the new ways it has led them to think about their own scientific research. The morning hour is one of two sessions that day, the second at 2pm; both are free, with space limited and check-in at the Visitor Services desk.

Tue Jan 26 · 12:00pm

Art + Science: Canvas

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA 02138 · Cambridge

Ellen Davis, associate paintings conservator at the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, talks about how artists have used canvas through the ages and how conservators care for it. The monthly series brings conservation staff into the Lightbox Gallery, just outside the Straus labs, for an informal conversation about treating objects in the collections, with tools and materials to examine up close and handle.

Tue Feb 2 · 12:30pm

Gallery Talk: Redlining and the Visual Culture of Suburbia

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy St · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

Krystle Brown, an artist and marketing assistant at the Harvard Art Museums, leads a half-hour gallery talk on how postwar photographs of lawns, neighborhoods and suburban development helped construct the American Dream's visual mythology, and on their relationship to the history of redlining in the United States. It accompanies the exhibition The Way We Never Were: The American Professional Photographers Collection. The talk is free, with limited space.

Mar 3, Apr 9 · 12:30pm

Gallery Talk: _Alfonso Ossorio: Line and Lineage_

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA 02138 · Cambridge

Wed Mar 3 / Fri Apr 9 · 12:30pm

Ally Cirelli, curator of Alfonso Ossorio: Line and Lineage and Cunningham Senior Curatorial Assistant in the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, looks closely at the iconography, materials and techniques of Ossorio's six decades of works on paper. Drawing on the artist's papers in the museums' archives, she traces his early training in engraving through his prints, drawings and experimental wax-resist works.

Tue Apr 6 · 12:30pm

Gallery Talk: Material Experimentation in _Alfonso Ossorio: Line and Lineage_

Harvard Art Museums · Harvard Art Museums · 32 Quincy Street · Cambridge · MA 02138 · Cambridge

Penley Knipe, Philip and Lynn Straus Senior Conservator of Works of Art on Paper and head of the Straus Center's paper lab, explores Alfonso Ossorio's experimental wax-resist technique in his works on paper. She discusses the investigative methods the lab has used to understand the work and the conservation team's ongoing research on the artist, in conjunction with the exhibition Alfonso Ossorio: Line and Lineage.