Past Events
& Exhibitions

In Their Own Voices celebrates the power of defining oneself while highlighting the lifework and legacies of Black women whose papers are held in the Schlesinger Library. The featured collections give viewers an opportunity to listen to, view, and read about the experiences of Black women in their private and public lives.

The exhibition Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis presents artworks that treat water not as a commodity to be exploited but as a cyclical, life-giving, life-dissolving, and inert but innately alive spiritual force—a view widely shared among Indigenous communities, especially in the Global South.

Solidarity! Transnational Feminisms Then and Now exhibition features 50 years of transnational feminist collections held at the Schlesinger Library. Through a rich array of materials—including posters, newspapers, photographs, and memorabilia—Solidarity! explores the promises and limits of global feminist solidarity from the 1970s until the present.

For this exhibition, Mary Lum has created an artist’s book and installation featuring photographs of temporary constructions made from a palette of broken vintage letterforms. The small constructions carry ideas about language coming into being and piling up on itself. Fragments are rearranged in attempts to communicate, to form something whole and understandable, against backgrounds of varying colors.

Join cartoonist Cara Bean for an in-person and hands-on visual thinking and mindfulness workshop. Participants will review the basics of communicative and idea-generating drawing and develop skills needed to doodle as a form of play and problem solving.

Join comics educator and cartoonist Dan Nott for an all-ages drawing workshop exploring visual metaphor and the unique power of combining words and pictures. Nott will provide an overview of his work and artistic process, and facilitate an activity on using basic drawing to depict complicated ideas and experiences.

The Age of Roe exhibition examines the political, cultural, and societal landscape of reproductive and women’s rights in America. It reevaluates the legacy of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision through the work of those who have defined the debate about reproduction in the past five decades and uplifts stories of women, people of color, and communities that have been affected by the ruling.

Quarantine Public Library is a repository of one-page books made by artists, free for anyone to download, print, and assemble—to keep or give away. Tracy Honn and Katie Garth will present their collaborative project and talk about its origins, reception, and outcomes, as well as their approach and collection curation.

Join curator Meg Rotzel for a tour of the exhibition Drawing Us Together: Public Life and Public Health in Contemporary Comics. Learn about the topics raised in the exhibition and how comics are capable of telling stories across time, experience, and identity; and create your own zine.

This interactive exhibition—anchored by wall-sized graphics from the Center for Cartoon Studies’ graphic guides to the US healthcare system and democracy—includes a library of over 80 comics spanning the genres of memoir, historical narrative, graphic novel, and informational guide. The comics included in this exhibition illustrate who has the power to make decisions about our lives and our health, and how those decisions affect individuals and communities over time, often determined by class, race, gender, and zip code.

Throughout the 20th century, the marketing and design of menstrual products often stigmatized menstruation as an unmentionable bodily affliction. Menstruation was wrapped in euphemism: that time of the month, a weakness, a nuisance. “Feminine hygiene” products offered sanitation, invisibility, and freedom—but at what cost? Out for Blood: Feminine Hygiene to Menstrual Equity shows how marketing and social norms around menstruation create a cultural construct with power to shape people’s lives. 

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.

Dario Robleto’s exhibition for the Radcliffe Institute examines the 19th-century origins of the pulse wave as a graphic expression of internal life. He explores the profundity and confusion of this early moment, when ineffable emotional and sensory experiences first became visible as data.

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.