Edited by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Elizabeth M. Rudy; With contributions by Trent Barnes, Samuel Ewing, Sarah Grandin, Ashley Hannebrink, Laura Kenner, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Sarah Mirseyedi, Marina Molarsky-Beck, David Pullins, Elizabeth M. Rudy, Harmon Siegel, Sean Wehle, and Oliver Wunsch

 

This publication is just one result of a recent collaboration between the Harvard Art Museums and Harvard’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture. Students from two seminars co-taught by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, the William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts, and Elizabeth M. Rudy, the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Associate Curator of Prints, were charged with helping organize a curricular exhibition that would illuminate drawing’s emergence into modernity over the 18th and 19th centuries. The project has yielded the exhibition Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium (on view at the Harvard Art Museums in the University Research and Teaching Galleries, January 21–May 7, 2017), an accompanying catalogue, and a digital tool.

Graduate students who participated in the Fall 2015 seminar developed a conceptual framework for the exhibition, helped select objects to study within that framework, and wrote the essays that appear in the catalogue. These essays, presented in a non-traditional, non-chronological way, are arranged within three main sections—medium, discourse, object—with several sub-categories under each.

In the Spring 2016 seminar, a group of undergraduates further developed the exhibition by helping finalize the display of objects in the gallery (which mirrors the organization of the catalogue) and by writing object labels for the digital component of the project.

This project is supported in part by the Gurel Student Exhibition Fund and the Mellon Publication Funds at the Harvard Art Museums.

Available on the Art & Architecture ePortal