Museums & Collections

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

An illustration of a green leaf being hit by a beam of light and bouncing off the leaf and then becoming a color prisim

Harvard’s Plant Collection Meets Space Science

Light-based analysis of botanical collections link plants to Earth’s changing climate.

by Jonathan Shaw

A colorful Byzantine funerary tunic fragment depicts faces and vegetal patterns with a border of gemstones.

Byzantine Beauties

Textile treasures from Dumbarton Oaks

by John S. Rosenberg

Images from the Ballets Russes

Elegant photographs of dancing’s stars

by Nell Porter-Brown

A grinning woman in traditional Nigerian dress sits cross-legged on the floor surrounded by modern devices, including a power strip, a land-line telephone, and a desktop computer displaying on its screen a duplicate image of the entire montage.

Fatimah Tuggar at the Davis Museum

Fatimah Tuggar explores artisanship and technology, at the Davis Museum

by Nell Porter-Brown

Photo of the colonial-era Fairbanks House in Dedham, Massachusetts

Fairbanks House, Dedham, Massachusetts

Dedham’s Fairbanks House: “the oldest wood-frame structure still standing in North America”

by Nell Porter-Brown

A child’s horse-drawn carriage from 1907

Wenham Museum’s “Equestrian Histories”

Equestrian life and sports on the North Shore

by Nell Porter-Brown

A photograph of an eighteenth-century, three-inch pocket globe in its open case

A pocket globe at the Harvard Archives

Ebenezer Storer’s pocket globe

by Jacob Sweet

The “Rocking Horse Graveyard,” in Lincoln, Massachusetts

New England’s Oddities

Exploring New England’s more unusual sites with J.W. Ocker

by Nell Porter-Brown

Hikers stand in Purgatory Chasm, near Worcester, Massachusetts

Exploring Worcester, Massachusetts, and Purgatory Chasm

Pleasures to explore in and around Worcester

by Nell Porter-Brown

A color-paper collage used by Edwin Land to develop an influential theory of color vision

“Visual Science” exhibit at Harvard

New Harvard exhibit explores “Visual Science: The Art of Research”

by Nell Porter-Brown

Moon Landing 50th Anniversary at Harvard Museum of Natural History

A lunar rock and a moon landing’s fiftieth anniversary prompt a party at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

by Nina Pasquini