Featured series 
Tag: Arts
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Arts & Culture
Arts In brief
A.R.T. PRODUCTION UP FOR TOP AWARD LOCKWOOD, JUILLIARD STRING QUARTET TO EXPLORE BEETHOVEN
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Arts & Culture
The story behind ‘Storied Walls’
In March 2001, Bill Saturno, a newly minted Harvard Ph.D., was in Guatemala searching for recently uncovered hieroglyphics as a research associate of the Peabody Museum. It turned out that his guides were overbooked and his planned expedition had to be canceled. As a sort of consolation prize, the company offered Saturno a three-hour Land…
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Campus & Community
RMJM gift supports integrated design program at GSD
Despite the current building boom, many recent graduates from architecture and engineering schools are choosing to pursue more lucrative careers in high-tech and management consulting, rather than building and design. This trend, according to design professionals, could have major consequences for the construction industry. As part of an effort to address it, a recent $1.5…
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Arts & Culture
Panel discusses paucity of designing women
Women in Design, a student group at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) that aims to increase the visibility of women in the field, kicked off its four-part spring symposium, “Progress in Process,” Thursday night (March 13) with a panel discussion on where women in architecture are now and where they are headed. Department…
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Arts & Culture
With old forms, improvisation, Bielawa creates ingenious anachronism
Manhattan composer Lisa Bielawa is a Radcliffe Fellow this year. Her tiny studio on Concord Avenue is spartan: white walls, a piano, a violin, two chairs, a table strewn with music staff paper. On one side is the glow of a computer. On the other is a single window, with a blur of trees beyond.…
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Campus & Community
Harvard graduate student takes good cause and good friend on the road
What’s a 15-year-old boy, confined to a wheelchair with a fatal form of muscular dystrophy, to do on his summer vacation? Take a 7,000-mile road trip across the country with 11 friends. So thought Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) student Logan Smalley Ed.M. ’08, who organized the trek and then captured it in his…
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Arts & Culture
Conference brings out pacific potential of African hip-hop
Harvard and hip-hop. One is the famous university, the other the music style marked by rapping, rhyming, and a synthetic backbeat. Both begin with the letter “h.” Nothing else in common, right? Wrong. Harvard last week (March 13-15) hosted a three-day conference on African hip-hop, a musical style that experts say not only makes audiences…
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Arts & Culture
Thriving cities ‘connect smart people’
In a fast-paced lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Thursday evening (March 6), Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, explained what he called the “central paradox” of cities in the postindustrial age.
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Arts & Culture
Mining a trove of old ballads gives women a new voice
In the mid-1930s, Milman Parry, a professor in the Department of the Classics at Harvard, traveled throughout Yugoslavia to research and record folk songs. Assisted by his former student Albert Lord, Parry spent 15 months on the road and returned to Harvard with innumerable texts and sound recordings of more than 1,500 epic songs. Their…
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Arts & Culture
A series of concerts by Fromm Players marks 60 years of electronic music
The names Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Haydn are etched in a ring near the ceiling of Harvard’s Paine Hall. It’s an open question whether these classical masters would have recognized the music performed there last week (March 7-8). But at least one performer is certain that they’d understand.
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Arts & Culture
Synchronized effort rescues collection
Heavy rain Saturday night (March 8) caused a large drainpipe to rupture in Pusey Library. More than 500 gallons of water poured into the Harvard Theatre Collection stacks and seeped through the floor, flooding the three levels beneath it. At risk were hundreds of original drawings of costume and set designs, hand-painted theatrical backdrops, and…
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Arts & Culture
Celebrating thirty years at helm of choruses at Harvard
“It’s one of those great moments in Western music. It’s the highest level of the compositional technique of Bach, one of the most difficult [pieces] to sing,” said Jameson Marvin, director of choral activities and senior lecturer on music at Harvard University. Marvin will conduct the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, an undergraduate chorus, along with musicians…
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Campus & Community
Gallery seeks submissions
The Harvard Neighbors Gallery is now accepting portfolio submissions from eligible Harvard-affiliated artists (including current or retired full- or part-time faculty and staff and their spouses/partners).
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Arts & Culture
Redman ’91 to be awarded 2008 Harvard Arts Medal
In conjunction with Harvard’s Arts First festival (May 1-4), Grammy-nominated saxophonist, recording artist, and jazz bandleader Joshua Redman ’91 will receive the 2008 Harvard Arts Medal. President Drew Faust will present the award to Redman, who is the 14th distinguished Harvard or Radcliffe alum or faculty member to receive this accolade for excellence in the…
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Campus & Community
Nieman Foundation announces I.F. Stone Award
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University is establishing an award that recognizes journalistic independence and honors the life of investigative journalist I.F. Stone. The I.F. Stone Medal will be presented annually to a journalist whose work captures the spirit of “independence, integrity, courage, and indefatigability” that characterized “I.F. Stone’s Weekly,” published from 1953…
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Campus & Community
Black Students Association honors pair for activism, service
The Harvard Black Students Association honored Robert Lewis Jr., vice president for program at the Boston Foundation, and critically acclaimed actress Gabrielle Union with its Crimson and Black Leadership awards on Feb. 29. Crimson and Black is an annual event at the University designed to showcase the achievements of Harvard’s past black students while addressing…
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Arts & Culture
Exhibit reveals special in the mundane
The new — and, for now, last — exhibit at the Fogg Art Museum, “Long Life Cool White: Photographs by Moyra Davey,” offers a subtle distillation of the mundane into the profound. The retrospective collection of 40 color and black-and-white shots is culled from the artist’s 20-year career and takes its name from a common…
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Arts & Culture
Conscious craft is behind the work of African artists
Zoe Whitley flew in from London last week, and by Friday afternoon (Feb. 29) — going through her notes at a Harvard lectern — she really needed a cup of coffee. Whitley was among more than 15 art scholars, critics, gallery owners, curators, and working artists invited to a public conference Feb. 29-March 1 at…
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Arts & Culture
Mulatu Astatke gives a primer on Ethiopian music, culture
It’s not easy to be a musician in most of the Third World, said legendary Ethiopian composer and musician Mulatu Astatke, who is a 2007-08 Radcliffe Fellow. Music is not typically taught in elementary schools, and in later life, opportunities for musicians are limited by poverty. In Ethiopia “we have beautiful music, beautiful dance, and…
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Arts & Culture
Master artist gives master class
Herbie Hancock radiated coolness — from his hip, all-black attire, to his trademark, slightly tinted glasses, to his deep soulful voice, to his calm, measured delivery. And as unmistakable as his aura of cool was his sincerity. Both qualities and more were on display Friday (Feb. 29) in the junior common room in Kirkland House…
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Arts & Culture
Jazz great Herbie Hancock takes home Artist of the Year
Music legend Herbie Hancock received the 2008 Cultural Artist of the Year Award from the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations at the organization’s 23rd annual Cultural Rhythms celebration, an afternoon and evening of performances from a diverse cultural mix of 29 student groups. Hancock was feted at the first of two shows (March…
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Arts & Culture
Goodfellow Liotta visits University
Film actor Ray Liotta recently (Feb. 25) visited the Harvard Foundation as a special guest. He met with representatives of several student cultural organizations, including the Harvard Italian-American Cultural Society.
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Arts & Culture
New Ph.D. film program launched
The study of moving images has always been viewed through a wide lens at Harvard. Since the beginning, film studies at the University has sought to incorporate a broad range of disciplines in order to appreciate and understand the visual experience. The rich fields of philosophy, psychology, and the fine arts were all mined early…
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Arts & Culture
Hollywood writer wins kudos at Rosovsky Hall
Irreverence was the theme of the evening (Feb. 21) as one of the sharp satirical minds behind the nation’s quirkiest cartoon family addressed a rapt audience at Harvard Hillel’s Rosovsky Hall. Mike Reiss ’81, a founding writer of the animated series “The Simpsons,” gave the crowd what they came for with an hourlong stand-up routine…
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Arts & Culture
Exploring the shadows
“If you wouldn’t tell Stalin, don’t tell anyone else!” In the early years of the Cold War, a billboard near an atomic bomb testing site in New Mexico urged passersby to keep research developments close to the vest. Secrecy was of the utmost importance in that era — and not just in scientific circles —…
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Arts & Culture
Hancock named Harvard Foundation Artist of the Year
The Artist of the Year award will be presented to Herbie Hancock during the Harvard Cultural Festival on Saturday (March 1) in Sanders Theatre. He will receive the award during the afternoon show, which starts at 3 p.m.
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Arts & Culture
E-mail collaboration yields chamber opera
Critics say that composer Elena Ruehr – a Radcliffe Fellow this year – makes music that is challenging, natural, intelligent, and socially aware. She brought all of these qualities to a Feb. 13 presentation on the creative process. “From Novel to Opera,” spliced with musical samples and punctuated by laughter, was a low-key discourse on…
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Arts & Culture
Ancient text has long and dangerous reach
Ask a well-read individual to list the most dangerous books in history, and a few familiar titles would most likely make the cut: Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” Marx and Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto,” Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book.”
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Campus & Community
Man of Year Walken tours the Yard
Actor Chistopher Walken walked the walk through Harvard Yard Friday afternoon (Feb. 15), touring campus with a guide from Hasty Pudding Theatricals.
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Arts & Culture
Man of The Year is man of few words
Actor, dancer, writer, and Academy Award winner Christopher Walken — best known for his big-screen roles as edgy villains — went to pot on Friday (Feb. 15), Hasty Pudding-style.