Arts & Culture
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Everything, everywhere, all at once (kind of)
There’s never a shortage of creativity on campus. But during Arts First, it all comes out to play.
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Acclaimed poet receives Arts Medal
Kevin Young ’92 reflects on what took root at Harvard and how it’s grown
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DuVernay on exploring racism, antisemitism, caste in ‘Origin’
Despite horrors, film ‘a collection of love stories’
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Arts First to kick off biggest festival yet
Departing longtime leader reflects on two decades of growth
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Art from a long-dead civilization springs back to life
Moving experience at the Museum of the Ancient Near East adds ‘layer of mixed reality’ to exhibits
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All the world’s a stage
Richard Sennett urges revitalizing public life, spaces, politics by creating spaces that engage imagination
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Bringing sanity to clarity
Professor Steven Pinker talks about his latest book, “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.”
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A close glimpse of James Baldwin
Houghton Library recently acquired its 3,000th American item, the typescript of an unproduced James Baldwin play — a rich tangle of the author’s obsessions in need of a scholar’s clarifying touch.
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The introspective Laurie Anderson
Performance artist Laurie Anderson delved into her inspirations and motivations as she gave the Music Department’s Louis C. Elson Lecture.
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Up for debate
During two days of programming at the Harvard Art Museums, scholars, students, and the public explored the significance and innovative conservation of Mark Rothko’s Harvard murals. The events highlighted the murals’ return to public discourse and their new role as potential models for the treatment of aged and damaged art.
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Seeing, feeling, being
A symposium will investigate what makes us human, and go beyond philosophy to do it.
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Breaking musical barriers
In a visit to Harvard, Marin Alsop discussed some of the challenges she has faced as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
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A fountain of music
As part of a course on music composition, Harvard students created original works inspired by objects in the Harvard Art Museums collections. Those compositions were recently brought to life by cellist Neil Heyde of London’s Royal Academy of Music at a concert held in the Calderwood Courtyard.
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Soccer’s versatile beauty
Harvard course uses the game of soccer to explore the complexity of the humanities.
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Plotting her return
Author ZZ Packer is spending her Radcliffe year working on her newest effort, a novel titled “The Thousands” that tracks the lives of several families following the Civil War through the American Indian campaigns in the Southwest.
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Making print modern
In an age of bits and bytes and pixels and text on screens, Harvard Design Magazine — relaunched in a new format last year ― fervently embraces the thingness of print, the quotidian actuality of paper and ink.
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Revealed in verse
Henri Cole is working on a new collection of poems while a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
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The wrong way forward
In May, Matt Aucoin’s “Crossing” will premiere with the American Repertory Theater as part of the theater’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.
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A literary colossus
The new Murty Classical Library of India from Harvard University Press, aiming for 500 volumes over the next century, will reveal to the world a “colossal Indian past” of multilanguage literary history from as far back as two millennia.
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The spectacle of Ghungroo
The Harvard South Asian Association’s annual arts showcase, called Ghungroo, is a complex coordinated production that draws hundreds of student performers and delighted classmates in the audience.
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The rule-breaking Sisters Grimke
“Exiled by the sound of the lash” from the slaveholding state of South Carolina, the Grimké sisters came North before the Civil War with rule-breaking ideas on slavery’s wrongs and women’s rights. They represented an antebellum moment in which “women became political.”
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Scrolling through the galleries
A series of virtual tours enables a deep dive into selected pieces at the Harvard Art Museums.
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Legacy of resolve
Escaped slave and abolitionist Lewis Hayden’s work goes on, through the students who receive the scholarship established in his name at Harvard Medical School.
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‘Revolutionary’ writing earns prize nomination
One of the nation’s largest and most prestigious literary awards, the George Washington Book Prize recognizes the best new books on early American history.
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Evaluating the Oscars
Film critic A.O. Scott spoke with the Gazette about the current crop of Oscar contenders, and Hollywood’s trends.
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A.O. Scott reviews himself
In a question-and-answer interview, New York Times film critic and Harvard alumnus A.O. Scott explains his craft, and how he came to it.
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Slavery’s lost lives, found
Historian Richard Dunn talks about his new book, a sweeping historical analysis of life on two plantations in Jamaica and Virginia across the final decades of slavery.
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Toward total war
Experts on World War I gathered for a conference on the “great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.
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Unmasking minstrelsy
A new exhibition at Harvard’s Loeb Music Library, containing items from the Harvard Theatre Collection in Houghton Library, offers visitors a disturbing look at the racist history and enduring legacy of blackface minstrelsy.
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Dimensions of war, including peace
A new Harvard-wide seminar program, slated for three years, takes on a constellation of interdisciplinary issues around violence and nonviolence.
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Flaherty retrospective to include Irish gem
The Harvard Film Archive is launching a retrospective of the work of Robert J. Flaherty, a pioneer in documentary film. “Folklore and Flaherty: A Symposium on the First Irish-Language Film” will be held on Feb. 19 from 1:30 to 4 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive.
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In 1944, Broadway subversion
In 1944, the young and gifted creators of ‘On the Town’ quietly stirred diversity into their groundbreaking musical, Professor Carol Oja recounts in her new book.
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Upholding complexity
Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks returns to the American Repertory Theater with her new play, “Father Comes Home From the Wars.”
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Standing up for ‘Selma’
“Selma” director Ava DuVernay discussed the film with Henry Louis Gates in an event sponsored by Harvard’s Hutchins Center.
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The personal Civil War
Drawn from a series of family correspondence, letters, diaries, and journals, a new exhibit at the Schlesinger Library offers firsthand accounts of men, women, soldiers, and slaves caught up in the Civil War.
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The old, made new
The Harvard Semitic Museum, hosting a retrospective exhibit on its long history and founder David Gordon Lyon, is refurbished, reordered, and increasingly ready for the future.