Exhibition Explorer

Critical Printing

2026-01-24 - 2026-05-10

Organized by Laura Muir

Venues

Harvard Art Museums, 2026-01-24 - 2026-05-10

With its unexpected juxtapositions among little-known prints, this installation is designed to generate experimental thinking. In the related course (AFVS 215), taught by Jennifer L. Roberts (History of Art and Architecture) and Matt Saunders (Art, Film, and Visual Studies), students explore printmaking as both makers and scholars. Moving between the studio, the seminar room, and the museum, they learn multiple print techniques and study fundamental themes in the history and theory of printmaking.The subsections of the installation, which cut across the grain of the course syllabus, consider prints in a field of matter, space, energy, and time. Prints can slip between dimensions and open portals between worlds. Prints can store and release energy or hold fluid substances in suspension. Prints can host a burst of biological imagination or offer an encounter with the silent eternity of stone. In the unorthodox groupings on these walls, new approaches to the medium and new avenues for research are waiting to be discovered.The University Teaching Gallery serves faculty and students affiliated with Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. Small-scale, semester-long installations are mounted here in conjunction with undergraduate and graduate courses, supporting instruction in the critical analysis of art and making unique selections from the museums’ collections available to all visitors. This installation is made possible in part by funding from the Gurel Student Exhibition 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.