Past Events
& Exhibitions

The virtual exhibition Accompanied: The Artworks of Marilyn Pappas and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman presents a pair of artists whose work was transformed by an abiding friendship. Pappas and Slosburg-Ackerman, both fellows at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute in the 1980s, have sustained a conversation over four decades about artistic endeavor, studio practice, and pedagogy. The artists were members of the founding group of the Brickbottom Artists Building—one of the country’s first artist-developed live-work buildings—and are professors emeriti at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. They have continued to work in adjoining studios for more than 30 years and have taught generations of artists.

View this digital exhibition on the Long 19th Amendment Project Portal.

No single person sits more squarely at the intersection of transnational struggles for freedom than the controversial political activist and pioneering philosopher Angela Yvonne Davis. Her arrest, incarceration, and trial formed one of the most widely debated legal cases in world history. Because she sparked worldwide movements that changed the 20th century, Davis was “freed by the people” well before her trial came to an end.

Pine in the Sand tells a story about unpredictable change while highlighting the often overlooked maintenance and infrastructure enlisted to preserve and stabilize the environment.

Willie Cole’s Beauties are haunting, full-scale prints made from crushed and hammered ironing boards, each named after a woman from the artist’s family and cultural history. Cole has used irons and ironing as central motifs in his work for 30 years, evoking everything from African masks to slave ship diagrams to the routines of domestic servitude. In this special installation, the gallery will be lined wall to wall with the Beauties. Standing silent—like sentinels, tombstones, shrouds, or windows—the prints will open a space for confronting anew the whole range of often contradictory energies running through them: resistance and oppression, beauty and violence, labor and forbearance.

Clarissa Tossin RI ’18 expands on her fellowship project with a newly commissioned exhibition that considers the ecology of an uncertain future. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction trilogy Xenogenesis (1989), in which the Amazon becomes the site for a new civilization of alien-human hybrids, Tossin speculates on a postapocalyptic world following ecological collapse. Pairing DIY plastic recycling techniques with the materials and practices of Amazonian aesthetic traditions, she highlights the contemporary footprint left in the geological sedimentation of the earth. These new works consider indigenous knowledge in relationship to the environment while also resembling ruins of a world yet to come.

Anna Von Mertens uses the structures of quilting and drawing to examine the frontiers of human understanding. In this exhibition, commissioned for the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Von Mertens explores the life and work of Henrietta Leavitt, one of the women “computers” hired a century ago to study glass-plate astronomical photographs at the Harvard College Observatory. Leavitt searched for patterns among these glassy stars, and her findings provided a unit of measurement for galactic distances and led to our current understanding of the shape of the cosmos. Von Mertens’s meticulous stitches and intricate graphite marks reimagine Leavitt’s patient work, exploring the potency of single, measured actions as units of understanding.

The Radcliffe Institute presents a solo exhibition featuring a selection of elements of Bouchra Khalili’s work from Foreign Office, consisting of a digital film of the same title, a group of photographs, and a silkscreen print, titled The Archipelago. The exhibition’s combination of artistic elements suggests an alternative historiography of utopian movements—working in concert, they invite reflection on potential gestures of resistance for the present and the future. 

Feminist Archaeology, an exhibition created by Jennifer Bornstein RI ’15, is an interdisciplinary art project consisting of an original video projection with accompanying prints and sculptures. The exhibition explores various strains of feminism that the artist has experienced both personally and through her research and that have been somewhat at odds with one another over time.

Altered Gazes foregrounds women as creators and consumers of countercultural content. In addition to materials from our growing collection of comics, zines, erotica and pornography, and other alternative publications, the exhibition features materials from the Ludlow Santo Domingo Collection, one of the largest gatherings of underground, alternative, and pop-culture publications in the world.

A public art installation by John Wang ’16, winner of the biennial Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition

Overlay, an exhibition created by the multimedia artist Xaviera Simmons for Harvard Radcliffe Institute, uses text-based video, photographs, and soundscapes to feature characters rooted in stories and historical narratives found in the archives of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

Over the past four decades, the phrase “Title IX” has become practically synonymous with women’s sports. The events leading up to Title IX’s passage in 1972 and the struggle ever since to figure out how to implement the law fairly demonstrate how athletics became part of the broader political and cultural struggles of contemporary American life.

In this exhibition, the visual artist and filmmaker Lamia Joreige uncovers the different facets of Nahr Beirut (Beirut River), with its recent and rapid transformations from dumping ground to a place scheduled for ambitious development. After the River invites reflection on the interwoven narratives of the river, its surroundings, and the people who live and work there.

Working with vibrating walls, a livestreaming weather report, and architectural models from schools for the blind, this exhibition explores sensory experience through differing modes of perception. The artist Wendy Jacob challenges the viewer to place touch on an equal footing with sight. The title comes from the Beaufort Wind Scale, which relates wind speed to observed conditions at sea or on land.

The Blackwells were a multigenerational family of abolitionists, entrepreneurs, educators, musicians, doctors, writers, expatriates, suffrage supporters, and women’s rights activists.

Matika Wilbur, a member of the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes and the creator and director of Project 562, selects a group of striking photographs from among the thousands of portraits she has taken in recent years. Written narratives and audio of the interviews she conducted as part of her project accompany the photographs. Elders, activists, educators, culture-bearers, artists, and students have shared with Wilbur their realities as Native women. They convey how ancestral and contemporary identities shape their lives and hopes in Indian Country.

There should be a fancy text here.
There won’t be. Sorry. I’m not fancy.

I’d rather get on my knees and talk with children
I’d rather talk to strangers whose language sometimes I can’t understand
I’d rather sense people, little and not so little, beyond language
I’d rather share the beauty of silence between two souls
I’d rather protect the sensuality and the precious way children improvise the world I’d rather spend time building a shack with a four-year-old than socialize
I’d rather, you’d rather, we’d rather. . . 

In here, I’ll gently ask you to take your shoes off, and if you got holes in your socks, who cares, I do very often.
And when you take your shoes off, try to also take your armor off—for here, you can roll on the carpet, lay on the bed, draw on the walls, hide in the closet, sit in silence, gaze into the joy, the sadness, the way children are in and out of the world they live in, with and without us.

—Valérie Massadian

“A Language to Hear Myself”: Feminist Poets Speak celebrates the ways that feminist poets fashioned words and ideas into a powerful form of personal and political expression.

This installation is unique in that its material is drawn from recordings of the acclaimed jazz pianist, composer, and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer. The sound material, improvised and recorded in collaboration with Reiko Yamada, has been digitally processed and programmed specifically for the exhibition.

Reflective explores the relationship among decisions, actions, and results. The movements of a visitor in the intimate, darkened gallery space is detected by motion capture sensors, which alter the sound quality of the precomposed piece, making the experience more disturbing or pleasant. Each visitor experiences a unique version of the piece, which is four minutes long. 

From Renaissance medical manuals expounding the health and mood-influencing qualities of foods, to the first cookbooks by women, the books in this exhibition open windows into understanding the people who produced and used them.

This exhibition is only the second ever in the United States dedicated to teamLab, which has been acclaimed by critics for its ability to digitally generate sophisticated and dreamlike worlds. In teamLab at Radcliffe: What a Loving and Beautiful World, Chinese and Japanese characters appear on the walls of the gallery. When the viewer’s hand touches a character, an image of the meaning of the character emerges and interacts with images generated from other characters. The result is a colorful, multisensory space that continuously evolves as the images that are released from the characters influence one another.

This exhibition explores Kent’s teaching, artistic process, career, and activism, all of which disrupted the dichotomies of fine/commercial art and religious/secular art.

This exhibition provides historical evidence on the topic of gender violence and documents the experiences of women who have survived domestic abuse and sexual violence.

This exhibition features diaries, letters, and firsthand accounts from four years of Civil War that offer intimate glimpses into the lives of men and women affected by the strife.

Judy Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen in Chicago, Illinois, on July 20, 1939, the oldest child in a family of secular Jewish liberals. Her father, Arthur, conveyed a passion for social justice and a belief that the purpose of life was to make a difference. 

Friedan's assertion that women needed meaningful work to be fulfilled propelled her book to the best-seller list and began a national conversation about gender equality.

The documents and memorabilia of Denison House, the Lebanese Syrian Ladies' Aid Society, the North Bennet Street School, and the Window Shop showcase the diversity of the immigrant experience in Boston and the changing socio-political context in which the groups operated.

The exhibit features the lives and work of four women from the late 19th century through the end of the 20th century, who were dedicated to democratic change and expanding the rights and freedoms of women and all Americans. From traditional methods of lobbying legislators and holding elected office to grassroots public demonstrations and teach-ins, these women exemplified American civic responsibility. 

The Radcliffe College Archives at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America are a uniquely valuable resource for the study of women in higher education, the Harvard-Radcliffe relationship, and the lives of the many remarkable women affiliated with Radcliffe College. The archives chronicle Radcliffe College from its beginning as the Harvard Annex in 1879 through its transition to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 1999. The Library's resources about Radcliffe College were used to create this exploration of the complicated story of women at Harvard University, and an evolution toward equality. 

Women on the Clock: Hard Work and Low Wages showcases the everyday experiences of women who work for an hourly wage. Organized into five sections—service industries, factory and mill work, clerical and office work, non-traditional trade jobs, and organizations that fought against discrimination in the workplace—this exhibition uses diary excerpts, letters, surveys, photographs, and audio-visual recordings to illustrate women workers’ trials and triumphs.

Forty years ago a small group of women in Boston, frustrated by a lack of useful medical information, began an enterprise to educate themselves and others about their bodies. The fruit of this endeavor, which took shape in an ongoing process of discovering and sharing knowledge collectively, was the ground-breaking Our Bodies, Ourselves, a publication that was subsequently translated and adapted into more than 25 languages, and made available around the globe.

Though she wrote and lectured extensively on reforming marriage and the family, Charlotte Perkins Gilman rued the attention and notoriety that her own marriages and family life unavoidably attracted.