Rome, known as the “common fatherland,” was the goal of pilgrims, travelers, and artists from all over Europe. One of the most celebrated was Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), a Venetian who spent his entire career in Rome. He produced on average two etchings a month (fourteen are featured in this installation), and his image of Roman grandeur left an indelible stamp on the European imagination. His vedute (city views), meant for Grand Tour...
The history of art is usually presented as a forward march, with individual works studied as points along a path of progress to the present. This installation—matching the Harvard survey course it accompanies—reverses that familiar direction. The sequence proceeds from recent art back to the Renaissance. This retrospective history of art is meant to capture the point of view of artists themselves, who have, for generations, tried—variously—to preserve,...
Picture it: Saturday afternoons in the late 1970s, on a train bound from Yale University to New York, artist Romare Bearden, jazz critic Albert Murray, and writer Henry Louis Gates , Jr. are bound in deep conversation, pontificating on the nature of jazz – not just as a form of music, but as a fundamental expression of the African-American vernacular. Jazz is not just a sound: it is a state of mind, a way of being, and seeing the relationship between the self and the world.
Now imagine that conversation found its way into a book and took form in a conversation of the visual...
