Director’s Foreword

Lentz, Thomas W.

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Director’s Foreword

Thomas W. Lentz

Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Exhibitions such as Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge embody the best of what we envision for the Harvard Art Museums when they reopen following the renovation now under way. The new building will be a teaching machine for training students and emerging scholars in art history, visual thinking, curatorial practice, and conservation science. Consistent with that vision, this exhibition...

Author

Thomas W. Lentz

PublisherHarvard Art Museums

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00097.004

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16358

Director’s Foreword

Thomas W. Lentz
Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard Art Museums

Exhibitions such as Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge embody the best of what we envision for the Harvard Art Museums when they reopen following the renovation now under way. The new building will be a teaching machine for training students and emerging scholars in art history, visual thinking, curatorial practice, and conservation science. Consistent with that vision, this exhibition from its inception has utilized the extensive resources of the university: faculty members and collection curators were called upon to provide expertise, and campus collections were mined for their riches. Interns and graduate students from disciplines as disparate as history of art, history of science, and English literature conducted research and wrote entries on individual objects for the catalogue. The preparation for this work came through both an interdisciplinary seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center and a class taught jointly by a curator and a professor. Harvard undergraduates who participate in the Student Guide program spent an extended training period learning about the exhibition and will offer tours to both their peers and the public. While on view at Harvard, the exhibition will be featured in a range of classes across departments. Through outreach to faculty, staff, and students, we’ve worked to integrate the exhibition as deeply as possible into the fabric of the Harvard community.

We know that intimate contact with artworks engenders critical thinking about materiality, form, and style, and teaches the foundations of the language for their description. Through their enhanced facilities, including extensive galleries for curricular use and an enlarged study center complex, the Art Museums will soon be able to offer more widely the experience of curatorial practice and exhibition making, teaching interns and students how to spatialize an argument through the placement of objects.

In combining curatorial and pedagogical endeavors, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge points the way, and I would like to commend Susan Dackerman, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, for her leadership. From her appointment as print curator in 2005, she has found new and innovative ways to connect the work of the Harvard Art Museums with the teaching and research that takes place across the university. Through this engagement, she and her collaborators have identified strategies that offer the art and ideas that shape this exhibition to both academic and public audiences.

The exhibition’s innovative installation features interactive components, a catalogue that embodies the voices of established and emerging scholars, a website that animates the early modern prints and instruments it demonstrates, and myriad programs that encourage the broadest possible public to think about the relationship between art and science in the sixteenth century.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has provided us with the means to introduce what we’ve learned to a wider public. A series of gallery tours, lectures, symposia, school programs, and web-based and printed materials will help interpret the exhibition for different audiences. We are grateful to the Endowment for its generous funding of this project, and to other good friends of the Harvard Art Museums who have also made substantial contributions toward bringing this exhibition to life: Mrs. Arthur K. Solomon, Lionel and Vivian Spiro, Walter and Virgilia Klein, Julian and Hope Edison, Novartis on behalf of Dr. Steven E. Hyman, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Barbara and the late Robert Wheaton, the Goldman Sachs Foundation, and an anonymous donor.

It is difficult to find partners for exhibitions such as Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge. Such projects are tough to describe, expensive to produce, and can seem beyond the interest of all but specialists in the field. Fortunately, the director and curators of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University were able to grasp what would emerge from the mix of prints, books, instruments, and scholars that this project comprises. David Alan Robertson, Ellen Philip Katz Director of the Block, senior curator Debora Wood, and art history professor Claudia Swan recognized the public appeal and teaching possibilities such an exhibition would offer to the Evanston and greater Chicago community, and have worked with us on its development and presentation. It is a great pleasure and privilege to have them share this project with us.

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