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Tour: Crossing Lines, Constructing Home

Lili Almog, Muslim Girl #14, 2009. From the series The Other Half of the Sky. Archival pigment print. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Fund for the Acquisition of Photographs, 2019.80. © Lili Almog; courtesy of the artist.

Tour

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

Join Makeda Best, the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, for an in-depth tour of our exhibition Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art, on view September 6, 2019 through January 5, 2020 in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on Level 3.

What does it mean to be displaced from culture and home? What are the historical contexts for understanding our contemporary moment? How does an artist’s work and process embody and engage the narratives of displacement and belonging?

Crossing Lines, Constructing Home investigates two parallel ideas: national, political, and cultural conceptions of boundaries and borders; and the evolving hybrid spaces, identities, languages, and beliefs created by the movement of peoples.

While offering historical context and a consideration of the forces that commonly drive migration, such as political instability, natural disasters, and oppression linked to race, religion, culture, and class, the exhibition presents a more complicated narrative about immigration and displacement than the usual rhetoric that dominates the public sphere and polarizes debate. Crossing Lines unsettles accepted notions of what constitutes a boundary and of what characterizes the migrant or refugee experience—in part by exploring how culture can persist and be embraced despite displacement. Acknowledging passage as a space of both trauma and transformation, the exhibition opens up new ways of understanding the immigrant experience.

Exhibition tours are offered through the run of the exhibition. Visit our calendar for more information about these and other related programs.

Free with museums admission. This tour is limited to 15 people and tickets are required. Ten minutes before the tour, tickets will become available at the admissions desk.

Please meet in the Calderwood Courtyard, in front of the digital screens between the shop and the admissions desk.

The Crossing Lines exhibition is made possible by the Rosenblatt Fund for Postwar American Art, the Agnes Gund Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art, and the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Fund for Photography. Exhibition-related programming is generously supported by the M. Victor Leventritt Lecture Series Endowment Fund, the Nancy S. Nichols Memorial Lecture Fund, and the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. 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.    Â