Tag: Arts

  • Nation & World

    Aykroyd honored, student groups featured

    Dan Aykroyd has got Cultural Rhythms and blues. As celebrity emcee of the 24th annual Cultural Rhythms Festival and the Harvard Foundation’s Artist of the Year, a bespectacled Aykroyd dazzled the audience.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    When Boston was the hub of the literary world

    Matthew Pearl, author of “The Dante Club” and “The Poe Shadow,” wove an engaging tale of Boston’s literary legacy — one significantly and curiously shaped by 19th century copyright laws.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Office for the Arts announces its spring 2009 grants

    More than 800 students will participate in 40 projects in dance, music, theater, and multidisciplinary genres at Harvard University this spring, sponsored in part by the Office for the Arts (OfA) grant program. Grants are designed to foster creative and innovative artistic initiatives among Harvard undergraduates.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Dance, music, literature celebrate human rights

    Human rights are all about history, politics, and the law — right? Not entirely. The arts have a role to play. Literature, music, dance, and other forms of creative expression often convey oblique stories of injustice and trauma. They also inspire humans to embrace the human rights implicit in every act of creation.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Vivid images, stern warnings mark Ice Age ‘rock’ star’s talk

    Oohs and ahhs greeted slide after slide as English author and freelance scholar Paul G. Bahn presented “The Shock of the Old: New Discoveries in Ice Age Art” at the Yenching Institute Feb 26.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A call for student artwork

    The Harvard Art Show, a new student organization, is now accepting submissions of original student artwork to be exhibited, shared, and sold to the Harvard community and greater Boston area. The show, produced by Harvard students and made possible with support from the Office for the Arts at Harvard, will be held May 4, 2009,…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Philosophers expand meaning of ‘space’

    Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher of science, published “The Poetics of Space” in 1958. It was a meditation on the intimate and resonant places that are the cradle of memory — things like a child’s first house, chests, drawers, nests, shells, and corners.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Carpenter Center hosts its architect(s)

    The Carpenter Center for the Arts is currently presenting a daring exhibition of the work of artist William Pope.L titled “Corbu Pops.” The Carpenter Center is the only building in North America designed by the modernist genius Le Corbusier (“Corbu” to his friends).

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Beauvoir as intellectual, politico, sexual theorist

    Simone de Beauvoir would likely have had a lot to say at a slightly belated 100th anniversary of her birth on Feb. 20 at the Barker Center as a collection of great minds gathered to discuss her great ideas.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Mothers in fiction, mothers in fact

    In 1930, the French author Colette published the novel “Sido” and bound the first copy with swatches of blue fabric cut from her late mother’s favorite dress.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Exploring ‘Patterns’ in architecture

    Establishing links between otherwise disparate cultural, intellectual, and technological categories has long been the job of the architect, an arbiter of aesthetic connection. Who else can create a bond between the Parthenon and a sports car, bricks and B movies, octogenarians and the color orange?

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Hasty Pudding donates $10K to Cambridge Public Schools

    For the sixth year in a row, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals presented a check for $10,000 to the Cambridge Public Schools (CPS) for the promotion of arts education. Since its inception in 2002, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals Fund for Cultural Enrichment has subsidized tickets for thousands of Cambridge students to attend theatrical performances, cultural events,…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    ‘Egg & Nest’

    World-renowned photographer Rosamond Purcell’s photographs of exquisitely elegant eggs and remarkable nests are on view at the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s new exhibit, “Egg & Nest,” on display through March 15.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Briggs-Copeland reading features poets Klink and Richards

    Tonight (Feb. 19) at 7, Houghton Library hosts Harvard’s first Briggs-Copeland Poetry Reading. The event, held in the Edison and Newman Room, will feature readings by Joanna Klink and Peter Richards, two of Harvard’s six Briggs-Copeland Lecturers. Bret Anthony Johnston, director of the creative writing program in the Department of English, will provide an introduction.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Woodberry curator named Bynner Fellow

    Woodberry Poetry Room Curator Christina Davis has been awarded one of two 2009 Witter Bynner Fellowships by Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. Davis and the other recipient, Mary Szybist, from Portland, Ore., will each receive a $10,000 fellowship, and both will read from their works in a public event at the Library of Congress on Feb.…

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Prolific poet John Ashbery ’49 will receive 2009 Harvard Arts Medal

    Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery ’49 will receive the 2009 Harvard Arts Medal in a ceremony kicking off the Arts First festivities on April 30.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Elliot Forbes

    At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on December 9, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Elliot Forbes, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Forbes is well known for his revision and critical annotations of Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s Life of Beethoven.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Student work lights up Mass Hall corridor

    These days Mass Hall’s ground-floor main corridor looks more like a contemporary art gallery than simply a prestigious passageway — and that’s exactly how University President Drew Faust likes it.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    VES film features city on the move

    Maxim Pozdorovkin and Joe Bender, graduate students in Harvard’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, respectively, have captured Kazakhstan’s dramatic emergence in a documentary film titled “Capital.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Passion for the Arts’ translates into action

    Harvard University is taking the first steps recommended in December by its Arts Task Force, including finding more gallery space in existing buildings and creating a Web portal that will ease access to seeing, hearing, and learning the arts in practice.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Rubén Blades donates papers, recordings

    He’s attained fame as an award-winning actor and musician, founded a political party and run for president of his native Panama and served as the Panamanian minister of tourism, but now Rubén Blades LL.M. ’85 will add another credit to his resume: Harvard College Library benefactor.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Symbiotic’ Web archive launched

    A new Web archive created by faculty, students, and librarians at Harvard brings original research on Leonard Bernstein and his Boston roots to the public for the first time. The material, which went live on the Web on Jan. 23, was collected during undergraduate seminars and over the course of an international Bernstein Festival at…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    José Ortiz new deputy director of Art Museum

    The Harvard Art Museum announced the appointment of José Ortiz as deputy director, effective March 2, 2009. Ortiz is currently deputy director/chief of finance and administration at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. A skilled and innovative administrator, Ortiz has a strong record of managing world-class cultural institutions, combined with…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Du Bois exhibit a first in U.S.

    The images on the walls of the intimate gallery at 104 Mt. Auburn St. are hauntingly evocative. In “Black Friar,” a hooded figure stares out of the darkness, his gaze intense and unsettled. An opposing image, “Every Moment Counts,” offers a modern approach to Jesus, as a beloved disciple leans against the body of the…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Du Bois Institute gives Houghton Library Masonic certificate

    The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University recently gave a Masonic membership certificate signed by Prince Hall, a minister, abolitionist, and civil rights activist known as the father of Black Freemasonry in the United States, to Houghton Library.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Innovative filmmaking marks VES program

    An intimate relationship between the residents of Harbin city in northeastern China and their mother river, the Songhua. A revealing insight into the personal struggles and national identity of Sudanese potters on the banks of the White Nile. These are the subjects of two ethnographic films premiering Feb. 11 at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Vivid scrolls from Japan tell timeless stories

    For nearly a decade, Melissa McCormick, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, has been absorbed in the study of elaborate works of fiction. The themes she encounters — love, temptation, even family drama — are timeless. The format — narrow horizontal scrolls of mulberry paper, with hand-painted images and columns of calligraphy —…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Houghton to host four major symposia

    The year 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Ballets Russes, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the 300th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson — and all four will be celebrated at Houghton Library.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A visit with musician Hans Tutschku

    Up in the eaves of Paine Music Hall, professor of music Hans Tutschku is hard at work composing in a setting that would make Mozart’s head spin. The space is small but packed with equipment: computer monitors, eight loudspeakers, a turntable, and several mixers and synthesizers with enough levers to land a 747.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Dunster House composer-in-residence ‘Charley’ Kletzsch dies at 82

    Charles F. “Charley” Kletzsch, Dunster House composer-in-residence for more than 50 years, died Jan. 15.

    2 minutes