Visual Arts

Explore exhibitions, artists, and visual works that enrich Harvard’s cultural and academic life.

A vibrant composition of flowers, a bird, and butterflies with a distant manor under a moody sky.

Rachel Ruysch’s Lush (Still) Life

Now on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, a Dutch painter’s art proved a treasure trove for scientists.

by Lydialyle Gibson

Solomon Gate in an open position.

An Innovative Gate for Harvard Yard

At Houghton and Lamont libraries, a creative new entry into the Yard

by Jacob Sweet

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

Head and torso of a man painted by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

A Monumental Book Reveals a Monumental Work of Art

Nicholas Callaway publishes the Sistine Chapel in closeup.

by Lydialyle Gibson

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

A photograph of the border wall stretching toward a mountain in the distance

Photographer Morgan Smith’s Images and Encounters at the Mexican Border

Photographer Morgan Smith ’60 documents life on the precarious precipice between Mexico and the United States.

by Lydialyle Gibson

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

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