Our educators and curators are dedicated to offering programs and resources that will encourage visitors of all ages to interact and be more engaged with Harn exhibitions.
The Harn exhibition, Dreaming Alice: Maggie Taylor Through the Looking-Glass, was set to open April 5, 2020. Then, COVID struck. Luckily, the show was scheduled to run through January 3, 2021. April, May and June were lost, but several months still remain for visitors to enjoy this stunning exhibition. Two years...
The Harn docents have always delighted and challenged me with their insightful responses to art works on view in our exhibitions. They see what I can’t see, and in many cases their probing questions flummox me, and call for further investigation and re-evaluation of our interpretive materials. A case in...
On a positive note regarding the year 2020, and on the occasion of the Harn Museum of Art’s 30th Anniversary, we are celebrating women artists throughout all of the collecting areas and throughout the galleries. (Please see the exhibition Breaking the Frame: Women Artists in the Harn Collections.) While researching...
Some of you may recall Rania Matar’s photographs in my 2016 exhibition, Aftermath: The Fallout of War. Rania’s annual return-visits to Beirut (her hometown) yielded moving, memorable images of war’s aftermath. Among them, her towering portrait of a war-torn street in Beirut, followed by shattered apartment interiors, and hopeful refugee children...
Gold is pride. —Zeynab Ly Commenting on her mother’s gold jewelry in Good as Gold exhibition, in conversation with Amanda Maples. Lush bouquets of gold flowers in baskets woven of gold threads adorn a suite of jewelry from Senegal now on display in the Harn’s exhibition Peace, Power and Prestige: Metal Arts of Africa (ill....
This year marks the 85th Anniversary of the founding of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) which employed roughly 8.5 million Americans during the Great Depression when as many as 25% of the workforce was unemployed. Established in 1935, the WPA created a series of relief programs, from public works projects—such...
In 1997, I read the debut novel The God of Small Things by Indian writer Arundhati Roy. Its central characters are two children (fraternal twins) and woven through the story are plot twists that show just how much the small things affect their behavior and the momentum of their lives. It...
After a month of being homebound due to the pandemic, I reached out to the artist Didier Viodé, curious about his response to this global phenomenon. Years ago Viodé emigrated from the Republic of Benin to France where he has established his career as a sequential artist, video artist and painter....
The Harn Museum of Art collection includes nine hand-colored engravings from one of Maria Sibylla Merian’s (German, 1647–1717) most important publications on the natural world, the Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (or Insects of Suriname). Merian was an artist, naturalist, and scientist who published books containing lush illustrations of flowers, plants, insects, birds and other animals....
Museums are full of objects that have had past lives. Lives that include ownership, display, exhibition history, and sometimes food! Working in the Asian wing and working with traditional religious art at the Harn Museum of Art, random thoughts about incarnations in everyday life often come to me. When I refer...
