Museums & Collections

Discover treasures from Harvard’s museums and special collections, from ancient artifacts to modern art.

Smiling woman stands beside a large skull in a display cabinet.

Don’t Call Stephanie Pierce A Paleontologist

From competing in youth gymnastics to studying tetrapods, the Harvard curator has always chased her curiosity.

by Laurel M. Shugart

Purple spruce cones

An organismic biologist praises reawakening to the natural world

Re-engaging with nature alongside the director of the Arnold Arboretum

by William Friedman

A detailed 1598 map of Iceland, with monstrous sea creatures in the surrounding waters and polar bears on ice flows.

How cartographers filled “empty” space with animals

The era of imaginative mapmaking

by Marina N. Bolotnikova

Artist Shen Wei in his studio amid his large-scale abstract paintings

“Shen Wei: Painting in Motion”

“Shen Wei: Painting in Motion,” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

by Nell Porter-Brown

Zoom-like grid of colorful portraits of people in pandemic-era face masks.

“This is Not a Gag,” MASS MoCA

Richard Nielsen: “This is Not a Gag,” at MASS MoCA

by Nell Porter-Brown

Photo of the entrance to the Peabody Museum

Peabody Museum Discovers Possible Slave Remains in Its Collections

“We must begin to confront the reality of a past in which academic curiosity and opportunity overwhelmed humanity,” Harvard president Lawrence Bacow wrote. 

by Marina N. Bolotnikova

A photograph of art historian Cassandra Albinson next to a photograph of a portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour applying pink rouge to her cheeks

Harvard Portrait: Cassandra Albinson

A curator takes a fresh look at portraits of aristocratic European women.

by Jonathan Shaw

Philanthropist Edwin Binney with Helen Willard, curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection

Edwin Binney, 3rd

Brief life of a philanthropic art collector: 1925-1986

by Madison U. Sowell

An historic photograph from Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library archives shows the 1936 exhibition on women scientists—in this case, folders of their published scholarship.

Radcliffe’s 1936 exhibit celebrating women in university life

“Women in Science” on display

by Alona Bach

Ornate eighteenth-century dress with wide hooped skirt

Peabody Essex Museum fashion exhibit

Highlighting 250 years of women in fashion

by Nell Porter-Brown

Three people in 1950s New York

Robert Frank at the Addison Gallery, Andover, Massachusetts

“Robert Frank: The Americans,” at the Addison Gallery of American Art

by Nell Porter-Brown