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Opening Celebration: The Bauhaus and Harvard

Herbert Bayer, American, Design for a Multimedia Trade Fair Booth, 1924. Opaque watercolor, charcoal, and touches of graphite with collage of cut, printed, and colored papers on off-white wove paper. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of the artist, BR48.101. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Special Event M. Victor Leventritt Lecture

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

This event was livestreamed on our Youtube channel.

Join us to celebrate the opening of our latest special exhibition, The Bauhaus and Harvard, on view February 8–July 28, 2019.
 
Following an introduction to the exhibition by curator Laura Muir, Berlin-based artist Judith Raum will present a lecture-performance titled “Fabric in space, fabric out of space.”
 
Raum’s installations and videos aim to both reconstruct and deconstruct the functional fabrics developed in the Bauhaus weaving workshop. Her artistic research illuminates the context of their production and explores how it was formed by prejudices about the textile as a female medium and by contesting political ideas, from communism to radical nationalism, which affected existing notions of how to live and—consequently—how to design. In this lecture-performance, Raum will evoke the figure of Bauhaus weaver Otti Berger, whose archive is housed in the Busch-Reisinger Museum.
 
Founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, and closed just 14 years later, the Bauhaus was the 20th century’s most influential school of art, architecture, and design. Harvard University played host to the first Bauhaus exhibition in the United States in 1930, and went on to become an unofficial center for the Bauhaus in the United States when founding director Walter Gropius joined Harvard’s Department of Architecture in 1937. Today, the Busch-Reisinger Museum houses the largest Bauhaus collection outside Germany, initiated and assembled through the efforts of Gropius and many former teachers and students who emigrated from Nazi Germany, including Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Lyonel Feininger, and László Moholy-Nagy.

In conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, The Bauhaus and Harvard presents nearly 200 works by 74 artists, drawn almost entirely from the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s extensive Bauhaus collection.

The opening celebration is free and open to the public, but tickets to the lecture are required. Tickets may be acquired in person, by phone, or online for a small fee through the Harvard Box Office, beginning at noon on Tuesday, January 29. Limit of two tickets per person. For more information, please visit the Harvard Box Office website. (Update: Tickets to the lecture are now sold out.)

The lecture will take place at 6pm, in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway; seating for the lecture will begin at 5:15pm.

All museum galleries will remain open from 5 to 9pm. Guests are invited to view the exhibition on Level 3, to visit the collections galleries, and to enjoy a festive reception in the Calderwood Courtyard following the lecture.

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.
 
Support for the lecture is provided by the M. Victor Leventritt Fund, which was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard Class of 1935. The purpose of the fund is to present outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and Greater Boston communities.

Support for this project is provided by endowed funds, including the Daimler Curatorship of the Busch-Reisinger Museum Fund, the Charles L. Kuhn Endowment Fund, and the Care of the Busch-Reisinger Museum Collection Fund. The accompanying publication is supported by the Harvard Art Museums Mellon Publication Funds, including the Carola B. Terwilliger Fund. In addition, modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.
 
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