Harvard Art Museums

Add our Wertheim Collection to your #MassMuseumBucketList ! In one spectacular gallery, you'll find impressionist and modernist masterpieces and learn new stories about artists you know well. The Harvard Art Museums is open Tuesday-Sunday and admission is free.

Join curatorial fellow Peter Murphy this Friday, June 28 at 1:30pm for a gallery talk on queer portraiture in the work of Wolfgang Tillmans. In 2013, Tillmans created the installation "Folding, Refraction, Touch," specifically for the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Murphy will discuss queer elements of a selection of works that appeared in that installation, now on view in Gallery 1520. #Pride #WolfgangTillmans #NewOnView #CollectionsInMotion #HarvardArtMuseums @busch_hall

Join us Thursday, June 27 from 5-9pm for an evening of art, fun, food, and printing! We're welcoming printmaking workshop @biginkprints into our materials lab to demonstrate how their giant mobile press creates stunning works of art. As always, Harvard Art Museums at Night will feature tours, activities, music, and food and drinks for sale. @lamplighterbrew and @belulugreen are this month's featured local vendors! Admission is free ✨

One of the most striking juxtapositions of artwork and person in LaToya Hobbs's woodcut series “Carving Out Time” occurs in the third scene, where Hobbs’s self-portrait in profile harmonizes with the screenprint “Senufo” (1981) by artist Valerie Maynard (1937-2022). Hobbs’s profile echoes and amplifies the profile of Maynard’s figure; the two rhyme across the upward diagonal, drawing the viewer into the work and towards the family dinner table. Maynard was a teacher, designer, printmaker, and sculptor. Like Hobbs, Maynard especially excelled at techniques of carving on immense scales; in the late 1970s, she completed two fourteen-foot-tall bas relief murals carved in wood for Baltimore’s City College. Though not the result of carving, “Senufo” communicates the dimensionality of a piece of wood in its striated lines and curving contours. The artwork’s title references the Senufo linguistic group of West Africa. Senufo languages are prevalent at the intersections of present-day Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali; Senufo artists are particularly noted for their rich sculptural tradition. Asked about the intention and purpose of her art, Maynard stated: “My sight has been honed by ancestors and family long before me. I take responsibility for my life and experience in the here and now by forming an aesthetic I hope speaks to the seriousness of my message and hopefully my audience sees the irony, wit, and humor along with the cutting edges of my work.” See “LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time” at the Harvard Art Museums through July 21, and follow this series to learn about the inspiring artists whose works Hobbs incorporated into “Carving Out Time,” on view through July 21. ✍️ by Nora Rosengarten, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art and Architecture

This week, you have two opportunities to tour "Future Minded: New Works in the Collection" with curators! Tuesday, June 25 at 12:30pm, curatorial fellow Madeline Murphy Turner will discuss two works by Ana Mendieta featured in the exhibition in a half-hour gallery talk. Wednesday, June 26 at 12pm, chief curator Soyoung Lee will give a final hourlong exhibition tour. Don’t miss the chance to see exciting recent acquisitions on view for the first time! Learn more through the calendar link in our bio. #HarvardArtMuseums

Entering the spotlight for this month’s selection of drawings from our European and American division is Franz Kobell, a German artist whose most notable works feature landscapes from his travels around the countryside. From the meticulous specificity of the first drawing, “Classical Landscape,” to the amorphous shapes of “River with Mountains in the Background,” reminiscent of an impressionist landscape, Kobell’s versatility is impressive. If the first drawing is indicative of fastidious precision and the second is emblematic of spontaneity, then the third drawing, “High Mountain Landscape with Rocks” showcases Kobell’s ability to sketch landscapes that fall between detail and impression. The spectrum of Kobell’s landscapes was likely a product of his keen observation and extemporaneous wanderings. His work highlights the wonders of approaching landscapes as a serendipitous journey of discovery rather than a fixed scene to be transposed onto paper with absolute fidelity. When it comes to the beauty of the natural world, it sometimes pays not to look before you walk, but most certainly to look while you are walking! These drawings, together with a wider selection of Kobell’s works, are on view in Gallery 2220 through September 15. ✍️This is the second installment of a new series focusing on our drawings collection. This post was contributed by undergraduate research assistant Joseph Foo. #NewOnView #CollectionsInMotion #FranzKobell #Drawing #HarvardArtMuseums Franz Kobell “River with Mountains in the Background,” 18th-19th century. 1898.107 Franz Kobell “Classical Landscape,” 18th-19th century. 1985.58 Franz Kobell “High Mountain Landscape with Rocks” 18th-19th century. 1898.595

The third scene from LaToya Hobbs’s “Carving Out Time” depicts the family about to sit down for dinner at their dining room table. Hobbs’s self-portrait is stilled in the process of carrying food to the table. One son washes his hands at the sink, while Hobbs’s partner Ariston Jacks pours water into a glass for their second child, who is already seated at the table. On the wall behind the dining room table, Kerry James Marshall’s (b. 1955) 2014 “Club Couple” is featured. Since the late 1970s, Marshall has crafted a painting practice centering Black figuration and aesthetics. Many of Marshall’s canvasses are immense and his figures are often life-sized (in her replication, Hobbs carefully cut each artwork to scale). In “Club Couple,” Marshall monumentalizes a young Black couple celebrating a night out on the town; their fingers entangle warmly as they lean in to embrace one another, all smiles as though posing for a photograph. The artwork’s inclusion is both a homage to Marshall—his large-scale woodcut prints inspired “Carving Out Time”—and a callback to the nascence of Hobbs and Jacks’s relationship. Marshall’s practice is concerned with love and the role the visual can plays in cultivating affection and care: “images,” he says, “teach us how to love things.”[1] In “Carving Out Time,” Hobbs enacts Marshall’s statement: she depicts love with love, trusting images to express the most intimate forms of interrelation. See “LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time” at the Harvard Art Museums through July 21, and follow this series to learn about the eight artists whose works Hobbs incorporated into “Carving Out Time”: Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Margaret Burroughs, Kerry James Marshall, Valerie Maynard, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ariston Jacks, and Hobbs herself. ✍️ by Nora Rosengarten, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art and Architecture

When Claude Flight joined the faculty of London’s Grosvenor School of Modern Art in 1926, he ushered in a revolutionary era of printmaking colloquially known as the Grosvenor School. Along with students such as Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews, and Lill Tschudi, he made fine art prints from linoleum, a material he considered accessible, democratic, and modern. At the time, linoleum was most commonly used for flooring and had been manufactured in English factories since 1864. Each artist associated with this group had their own distinct style, but they all engaged in some way with the speed and trauma of modern life. These three prints are linocuts, a relief printmaking technique in which an artist carves into a linoleum block with a variety of tools. The uncarved areas stand in relief and are inked, making the design. One block is used for each color; for multicolored prints, each block must be printed sequentially on one sheet of paper and must be carefully aligned to create a legible, overall image. The blocks can be printed by hand (applying pressure with a kitchen spoon, for example) or by a printing press. See these and three more prints from the Grosvenor School in Gallery 2700 through October 27! #NewOnView #CollectionsInMotion #Printmaking #HarvardArtMuseums Image credits: Cyril Power, The Giant Racer, c. 1930-c. 1932. Color linocut on Gampi paper. M20553, © Estate of Cyril Edward Power / Bridgeman Images. Sybil Andrews, “Sculls,” 1930. Color linocut on Gampi paper. M25786. Lill Tschudi, “Pass-Road,” c. 1935. Color linocut on Asian paper. M21313. Claude Flight, “Dirt Track Racing,” c. 1928-1930. Color linocut on Gampi paper. M22646.

🥵🌡 Sometimes the summer sun is best enjoyed indoors . . . Escape this week's heat dome in our air-conditioned galleries! Jean Frédéric Bazille's "Summer Scene (Bathers)," basically summer in a painting, hangs in Gallery 2700. When it was first exhibited in 1870, critic and artist Zacharie Astruc wrote of Bazille, “The sun inundates his canvases.” It appears that Bazille began this composition in his Paris studio but completed the details of the landscape after traveling to the south of France. Enjoy art, AC, and a cold drink from our museum cafe 10am-5am, Tuesday through Sunday. #Bazille #HarvardArtMuseums — Jean Frédéric Bazille, "Summer Scene (Bathers)," 1869-1870. Oil on canvas, 1937.78.

"I have drunk deeply of late from the foundation Of my black culture, sat at the knee and learned From Mother Africa, discovered the truth of my heritage, The truth, so often obscured and omitted. And I find I have much to say to my black children." Margaret T.G. Burroughs In 1963, Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs (1915-2010) wrote “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black (Reflections of an African-American Mother).” The poem’s speaker wishes to share with Black children the confidence and self-knowledge to withstand racism. “I will lift their heads in proud blackness,” she writes, through the history of ancient African culture. Burroughs’s numerous achievements as an educator, artist, and co-founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History and Culture were in service of preserving and presenting Mother Africa’s truths. Two years after she wrote the poem, Burroughs carved a linocut titled “Mother Africa.” This print is recreated in “Carving Out Time’s” second scene, hanging on the playroom wall. Against a lush setting populated with ferns, palm trees, and thatched-roof dwellings, a woman in three-quarter profile fills the sheet. Her hair is parted and tied back behind her ears, and she wears a white garment across one shoulder. Both Burroughs and LaToya Hobbs’s prodigious technical skills are showcased by the variety of textures they achieve, including skin, hair, and fabric. Hobbs locates “Mother Africa” beside her own body in the composition; as Hobbs teaches her son, the print communicates Mother Africa’s wisdom through the lens of Burroughs, a fellow Black woman, educator, artist, and printmaker. Follow this series to learn about the eight artists whose works Hobbs incorporated into her monumental series of prints, “Carving Out Time,” on view at the Harvard Art Museums through July 21. ✍️ by Nora Rosengarten, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art and Architecture

Silk was first cultivated more than 6,000 years ago in China, where it functioned as a fabric and later as a currency. In a gallery talk today at 12:30pm, curatorial fellow Talitha Maria G. Schepers will dive deeper into the world of Chinese silk production, trade with 16th-century Europe, and the role women played in making silk. This gallery talk is part of our New on View series, highlighting recent gallery installations and presenting new insights into recent acquisitions or old favorites. #CollectionsInMotion #HarvardArtMuseums

We are thrilled to announce that Sarah Ganz Blythe, a highly respected curator, educator, and scholar with more than 25 years of museum experience, will be the new Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums. Ganz Blythe is joining Harvard from the Rhode Island School of Design’s RISD Museum, where she is currently Deputy Director, Exhibitions, Education, and Programs. She will take her post as director on August 12. ​​ Ganz Blythe has held leadership positions at the RISD Museum for the past 15 years, including serving as its interim director from 2020 to 2023. In addition to the RISD Museum, she has worked in curatorial and educational positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City. During her time as an undergraduate at Wellesley College, she was a conservation intern at the Harvard Art Museums. Tap the link in our bio to read more!