VISUAL SCIENCES
A brief walk away from the Harvard Museum of Natural History rests the Harvard Art Museums. Comprised of the Fogg Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, and Arthur M. Sackler Museum, the recently renovated building unites the once-physically separate museums under one roof—a move similar to how the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture publicly connects its six museums. This character of collaboration is consistent throughout the Harvard Art Museums’ programming, both within the art museums themselves and across the campus. “We see our role at the Art Museums as, first and foremost, showcasing and exploring our own collections,” says David R. Odo, the museums’ director of student programs and research curator of university collections initiatives. “But we really want to have a broad conversation across the history, meaning, and role of art.”
For Odo, such conversations can occur by means of Harvard’s rich, interdisciplinary collections. Already the Harvard Art Museums has a University Collections gallery, a room to exhibit artifacts from other museums at Harvard; the current display is an installation of African art. Additionally, the Harvard Art Museums has various programming planned in collaboration with other museums, such as the ongoing “What’s Light Got to Do With It?” lecture series which draws on expertise and work from the Harvard Art Museums, the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and the Harvard Brain Science Initiative. “We’re just very interested in creating a dialogue between our art collections and other collections on campus,” Odo says.
One such dialogue is currently in the works between Ethan W. Lasser, curator and newly named head of the division of European and American Art, and the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. Lasser is curating an exhibit on the Philosophy Chamber, a historical collection that includes scientific instruments and other extraordinary materials. Set to open in 2017, the exhibit seeks to reassemble the portraits, prints, books, and non-Western artifacts in Harvard Hall from mid-18th to the beginning of the 19th century. According to Gauvin, the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments has loaned various instruments, including an 18th-century orrery designed by Joseph Pope, for Lasser’s exhibit. Gauvin adds that this give and take is mutual: the Art Museums will be providing the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments with a portrait of John Winthrop by John Singleton Copley that features Winthrop’s observation of the transit of Venus.
According to Lasser, this combination of art and artifacts from different collections allows the museums to tell a fuller story. “Both HMSC and the Art Museums are really enthusiastic about doing collaborative programming because we all believe in [pairing] objects in our collections to affect people’s ways of thinking,” Pickering says.
As the curators and directors mention, these affected ways of thinking range from a novel way of observing an object or image to a consideration of the intersection between art and science. Gauvin notes that many of the older scientific instruments, constructed out of rich materials like glass and bronze, are actually quite beautiful—echoing sentiments made by Jim Hankin, director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, about the scientific sketches of organisms, such as Jacques Burkhardt’s watercolors of fish. “People often think about arts and sciences as being very distinct disciplines, but I think that’s a misunderstanding, that there are a lot of commonalities between art and science,” Hankin says. “By doing collaborative activities, we’re helping to restore a more realistic picture between the two areas.”
THE LANGUAGE OF CURATION
Last spring, graduate and undergraduate students and scholars convened on Harvard’s campus for the Harvard Curatorial Innovations Series. Organized by both the Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, the series was comprised of a lecture and two days of in-depth conversations with internationally renowned curators. The curators for last spring were Leah A. Dickerman ’86 from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Thomas C. Rockwell from the Exploratorium in San Francisco. According to Galison, the conversation dealt with curating new kinds of shows as well as the relationship between exhibiting the arts and exhibiting the sciences. While the previous year’s series had featured only Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of contemporary art exhibit dOCUMENTA (13), iterations to come plan to bring in two curators from different fields. “Our new model is to have someone from the art world and someone from the science museum world,” Galison says. “They have much to teach each other. It’s a really interesting combination.”
The curatorial innovation series reflects not only the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and the Harvard Art Museums’ joint commitment to educating through the combination of disciplines but also to the similarities between the museums’ operations. For instance, Gauvin says that the Strauss Center for Conservation and Technical Studies has been helpful in allowing his staff to understand and categorize their collection; in particular, he cites the use of X-ray analysis for metals and carbon-dating. This focus resembles that of the Harvard Art Museums on using the Strauss Center to preserve and study their own objects.
In not only programming and interests but also in curation, the differences between the Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture have become more minute. “At the end of the day, we’re doing the same thing: [We’re] trying to understand these materials objects and display them in space,” Lasser says. “We speak a similar language even as our specialities are very different.”
ONE WORLD, NINE MUSEUMS.
Three years after its formation, the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture has found direction in its pursuits. While on paper it coordinates the public activities and the face of its affiliated museums, in practice the consortium strives to eradicate the fragile boundaries between Harvard’s museums. In a community where sharing collections was already a norm, the creation of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture has only added to a legacy of collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking. It is a legacy reflected by the physical merger of the Harvard Art Museums, by the combination of collections across three museums in the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and even by Harvard’s commitment to a liberal arts education. “There’s a real push these days at Harvard to integrate activities across disciplines, and that applies to the museums as well,” Hankin says.
Schechner agrees. “The move on campus is to encourage students to look more closely at material culture, to mingle things from different collections, and to realize the value of them is not simply restricted to their discipline,” she says.
To that end, the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and its affiliates seek to approach museums and their supposed genres in different ways by emphasizing the importance of museums in merging disciplines. “The museums have such a huge potential role to play in the Harvard community and sometimes that role can be overlooked,” Manuelian says. “We’re hoping to raise that profile…[to] get more access and improve the undergraduate experience, the graduate students’ experience, and the visitor’s experience.”
Pfister agrees that the museums have an important role in education, one that has yet to completely flourish. “I think the museums should become a part of the fabric [of Harvard],” he says. And as the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture grows and makes its presence known, it seems to be an ever more possible goal.—Staff writer Ha D.H. Le can be reached at ha.le@thecrimson.com.