Arts & Culture

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).

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz hold a microscope to loneliness, in part a symptom of our chaotic contemporary lifestyles, revealing the widespread effects of our disconnection and a culture that romanticizes autonomy.

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. 26.

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.

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.

Radcliffe Fellow Joanne Rappaport gave a glimpse of her work last week (Feb. 4) during a talk at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, where 80 listeners were drawn in by her intriguing title: “Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: The Meaning of Passing in Colonial Bogotá.”

or decades, the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS) has been a major source of information for researchers analyzing the Soviet Union between World War I and World War II. Due to its archaic and often-confusing indexing system, though, the HPSSS has also been a source of frustration for researchers trying to comb through its 61 volumes.

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.”

On Monday (Feb. 9), a team of experts assembled at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (HKS) to examine the history and profound impact of the tall, awkward, self-taught man from rural Kentucky who is credited with bringing about an end to slavery and saving the nation’s cherished founding principle of democratic rule.

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.

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.

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 Christ-like figure whose eyes are fixed on the heavens.

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.

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 and Ethnography.

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 — places her project squarely in late medieval Japan.

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.

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.

How — exactly — does improvisation happen? What’s involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process?

Real earthquakes are slow to build and fast to erupt. Other, metaphorical, quakes, can follow the same pattern — and be just as earthshaking.

When Yvonne Rainer and her fellow dancers took to the stage in the early 1960s, their performances were like nothing American audiences had ever seen. First, there were no costumes. Performers wore T-shirts, casual pants, and sneakers. In place of elaborate leaps and twirls, the dancers engaged in everyday movements like running, climbing, and even falling. And there was little to no emotional drama. The focus was on the body: unadorned, physical, and pure. Rainer — choreographer, dancer, and visionary — had sparked a revolution.

Steve Seidel, the Patricia Bauman Arts in Education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), received the Crystal Quill Award from the Shakespeare Festival/LA Nov. 20 in Los Angeles. The Shakespeare Festival/LA is an arts organization that uses professional theater traditions to “enchant, enrich, and build community.”

Can parents raise moral children without religion? Greg Epstein M.T.S. ’07 thinks so. He’s the Humanist chaplain at Harvard, and has just finished writing a book due out next fall. Its title: “Good Without God.”

Sun Joo Kim’s laugh is as easy as it is infectious. Her cheery nature no doubt comes in handy when she’s conducting her intensive research in three complex languages.

As a graduate student at Oxford, Gwyneth Lewis wrote her dissertation on 18th century literary forgery. But as a working poet for three decades — and this year as a Radcliffe Fellow — she is as far from that fraud as conceivable.

Harvard Art Museum announced the establishment of the Patricia Cornwell Conservation Scientist position at the museum’s Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Funded by a $1 million commitment from best-selling author Patricia Cornwell, the Cornwell Conservation Scientist will play a key role in the analytical laboratory and beyond.