Arts & Culture

All Arts & Culture

  • Ideas (and sneakers) were in the air

    Designer Virgil Abloh’s Harvard lecture mirrored his multiplatform career: bold, dynamic, and audacious.

  • Music and meaning, the Marsalis way

    Wynton Marsalis was back at Harvard on Monday night to celebrate the release of the video version of his first lecture performance at Harvard from 2011, “Music as Metaphor,” and to discuss the importance of the arts.

  • Feejee Mermaid is unattractive attraction

    Feejee Mermaid offers haunting image at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

    The Feejee Mermaid has haunted the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology for more than 100 years. Video still by Kai-Jae Wang/Harvard Staff
  • Depths of slavery, heard, seen, and felt

    The poetry of Phillis Wheatley adds power to a film by Harvard scholars that re-creates an 18th-century campus debate on slavery.

    Harvard sophomore Ashley LaLonde portrays poet Phillis Wheatley in the film "No More, America," directed by Peter Galison and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
  • Honoring Mexican discovery

    A Harvard delegation traveled to Mexico to take part in the inaugural talk of the Eduardo Matos Moctezuma Lecture Series.

    Eduardo Matos Moctezuma discusses discoveries at Templo Mayor in a lecture the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
  • The queen of Halloween

    Harvard Music Department administrator Lesley Bannatyne’s other life is as a Halloween expert. She has written five books on the topic, including a children’s work.

  • Festive start to Worldwide Week

    The Harvard Graduate Council kicked off Worldwide Week with the inaugural International Festival, featuring music and dance by multicultural student groups.

  • Eden as a storyteller’s paradise

    A conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar Stephen Greenblatt on his new book, “The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve.”

    Stephen Greenblatt and Dean Robin Kelsey chat about Greenblatt's new book "The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve" in the lobby of Harvard Global Support Services.
  • Life stories keep him turning (and sniffing) the page

    A profile of Luke Kelly ’19, a history concentrator whose work at Houghton Library has nurtured his award-winning passion for books.

  • ‘The Paintings of Yoshiaki Shimizu’

    At the Center for Government and International Studies, a small exhibit captures the life and work of an artist influenced by Harvard, by a range of cultural forces, and by the postwar art movements swirling in Europe and New York City in the 1950s and ’60s.

    "Irresolution: The Paintings of Yoshiaki Shimizu,” an intimate exhibit at the CGIS is marked by a large banner showing the artist at 24 years old.
  • The not lost generation

    Oula Alrifai, A.M. ’19, and her brother, Mouhanad Al-Rifay, are releasing “Tomorrow’s Children,” a documentary about Syrian child refugees trying to survive in Turkey.

  • More ‘Answers’ than expected

    La’Toya Princess Jackson, a master’s of liberal arts candidate in dramatic arts, takes a main role, and learns more than just her part.

  • Wynton Marsalis makes a return engagement

    Wynton Marsalis shares the stage with President Drew Faust to celebrate the release of his video, based on a lecture series he started at Harvard in 2011.

  • New adventures in editing

    An interview with George Andreou, who took the helm as new director of the Harvard University Press in September.

  • Kazuo Ishiguro’s (mostly) brilliant blandness

    Harvard professor and New Yorker book critic James Wood talks to the Gazette about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize in literature.

  • An American in Moscow

    Sebastian Reyes ’19 took a course in Soviet film and ran with it — all the way to Russia.

    eyes is along the Moskva River with the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in the background. At 338 feet, it is the tallest Orthodox Christian church in the world.
  • Fathers, killers, God, and ‘Maus’

    “Maus” author Art Spiegelman discussed art, existence, and Jewish identity during a visit to Harvard.

    Art Spiegelman.
  • Echoes of Capote and Warhol

    “WARHOLCAPOTE” draws from 75 hours of conversations between Andy Warhol and Truman Capote recorded during the 1970s, when they discussed everything from the trials of fame to using their talks to create their own Broadway show.

  • Museum leaders have more than just art on their minds

    Radcliffe hosted directors from five Boston-area museums for a discussion titled “The Museum, the City, and the University.”

    “The Museum, the City, and the University" brought together museum directors from Boston and Cambridge to Radcliffe to discuss the challenges museums must address in order to excel, engage, and create community.
  • Giving Harvard a little more groove

    Harvard’s newest assistant professor of music brings years of experience as a composer, pianist, choir director, and minister.

  • Alumni celebrate the arts

    Generations of Harvard alumni came together on campus last weekend to celebrate the arts as a dynamic part of the University’s curriculum. 

  • Messud on the makings of her ‘Burning Girl’

    Claire Messud, senior lecturer in the Creative Writing Program, discusses her latest novel about the joy and pain of middle school as a young woman.

  • Frida the artist before Frida the icon

    A course on Frida Kahlo helped students understand the context in which the Mexican painter developed her works and how she became a cult icon.

  • Warhol’s Marilyn

    A special show at Harvard Art Museums features a series of 10 prints from Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn Monroe” portfolio.

    Curator Mary Schneider Enriquez with Andy Warhol silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe, at the Harvard Art Museums..Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer.
  • Harvard Art Museums tour takes visitors to Dighton Rock

    Harvard Art Museums trip to Dighton Rock explored its connection to the exhibition “The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766-1820.”

    The carvings from Dighton Rock were traced by Harvard Professor Stephen Sewall in 1768 and attracted the attention of scholars from around the world.
  • A transition for Transition

    Transition, a magazine published by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, has been published in Africa for the first time in nearly three decades.

  • A shady past haunts Rushdie’s ‘House’

    Salman Rushdie discussed his new novel, “The Golden House,” in a conversation with Harvard’s Homi Bhabha at First Parish Church.

  • The life behind Wonder Woman

    Two collections of William Moulton Marston, a Harvard graduate, psychologist, and inventor of the lie detector machine whose Wonder Woman comics promoted the triumph of women in a male-dominated world, arrived at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s Schlesinger Library.

  • Harvard jazz leader, amid his Cuban roots

    Harvard jazz leader and instructor Yosvany Terry returns to his musical roots in Cuba, where his destiny was formed.

  • Student actress or acting student?

    Ashley LaLonde ’20 may soon have the enviable dilemma of choosing between following her dream to Broadway or continuing her studies at Harvard.

    Rising actress Ashley LaLonde '20