Past Events
& Exhibitions

During her 2019–2020 fellowship at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Gala Porras-Kim researched how items from the Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá, a Maya site in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, arrived in the collections of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Precipitation for an Arid Landscape grows out of that research, presenting new work that explores how sacred objects may continue to perform their original functions once they enter museum collections and are subject to institutional paradigms of classification, conservation, and display.

Today’s American political landscape showcases a diversity of strong female candidates, the culmination of a proud but contested history of women running for political office. This exhibition, drawn from the Schlesinger’s collections, presents a diversity of candidates and the struggles that they continue to face in the press, on the campaign trail, and once in office. Nevertheless, they persist. 

Tomashi Jackson combines a practice based in painting and printmaking with archival research in the histories of law, urbanism, and social justice. Her work plumbs the intersections between the formal languages of visual art (color, composition, layering) and the political languages driving the histories of segregation, voting rights, education, and housing in the United States. By activating these shared motifs of art and policy, her work brings the full power of both traditions to bear on historical engagement and critical action.

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.

The Lily League is part of a series of exhibitions referred to by EJ Hill as “lessons.” The Lily League borrows its name from the Black Star calla lily. Initiated during Hill's Radcliffe fellowship year, each of these lessons include a declarative chalkboard.

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