Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University

04/01/2026

Our Signal and Strata exhibition booklet has just arrived and is now available for free in the gallery!

Generously supported by the Wagner Foundation, it features a commissioned essay by Dr. Madeline Murphy Turner, which brings critical depth, clarity, and formal analysis to the ideas at the heart of this project. The booklet includes a Spanish translation and was designed by Omnivore.

Madeline Murphy Turner is a curator, educator, and art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a focus on gender, ecology, and their intersections with transhistorical politics. She was previously Curatorial Fellow at the Harvard Art Museums.

02/11/2026

It’s finally here! Come see Ximena Garrido-Lecca’s “Restauración de señal: Sensor de color”, 2023, which was delayed in its arrival for our opening night of Signal and Strata (on view through April 5) due to weather-related disruptions, including winter storms locally and shipping delays in Portugal. To learn more about this work and its materiality (Copper plate, patina, stainless steel, aragonite, desert rose, chalcopyrite, quartz, copal, candle, palm brooms, ceramics, lima beans, coca leaves, corn, and copper ropes) and conceptual underpinnings, pick-up a copy of our gallery guide with a commissioned essay by Dr. Madeline Murphy Turner while you’re here.

XIMENA GARRIDO-LECCA (b. 1980, Lima, Peru) lives and works in Mexico City. She has presented solo exhibitions at Canal Projects, New York (2025) and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2025). She has also exhibited at the Sharjah Biennial 16, United Arab Emirates (2025), 12th SITE SANTA FE International, Santa Fe (2025), BOG25 International Art and City Biennale, Bogotá, Colombia (2025), XXIV Bienal de Arte Paiz, Guatemala (2025), the Swiss Institute, New York (2024-25), CAN Centre d’art Neuchâtel (2023), Portikus, Frankfurt (2022-23), Museo Madre, Naples (2021), 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2020), Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA (2019-20), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Lima (2019), Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2018), and Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS), Mexico City (2017), among other venues.

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Free and open to the public
Tuesday–Sunday, 12–5pm

07/13/2020

In collaboration with Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art and ARGOS, we are pleased to stream ‘Evil.80.Empathy?’ (2020), a new video by Tony Cokes. ‘Evil.80.Empathy?’ will be available on each institution’s website from Monday, July 13, 2020, until Sunday, July 26.

A gut punch, a call to action, and a reckoning with complicity, the video animates words recently spoken by Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman, and crackles with a soundtrack by the UK producer and DJ, Caspa.

Goldsmiths and the Carpenter Center presented volumes one and two of Cokes’s solo show, If UR Reading This It's 2 Late Vol. 1–3, between September 2019 and March 2020. ARGOS will open volume three in September 2020.

Tony Cokes, Evil.80.Empathy? (2020) (still). 2:43 min. Video, color, sound. Courtesy of the artist; Greene Naftali, New York; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

07/08/2020

In light of Harvard’s plan for the fall semester, which will restrict access to campus buildings, we regret to announce that our Miho Dohi exhibition planned for September 2020 has been cancelled. We are sad that we will no longer be able to share this exhibition with the public, but we are grateful for the opportunity to spend time with Dohi’s work and learn deeply about her practice.

Our partner in this exhibition, The Renaissance Society, has made their iteration of the show available online along with an audio tour and literary reading, which we encourage you to explore. We want to extend our thanks to The Renaissance Society, to Hagiwara Projects, Nonaka-Hill Gallery, and Galerie Crèvecoeur, and above all to Miho Dohi, for her generosity and for inviting us into her singular sculptural practice.

You may explore Miho Dohi's show at The Renaissance Society here:

The Renaissance Society is a contemporary art museum free and open to the public.

06/23/2020

As an institution that supports living artists, we are dedicated to ideals of experimentation, cross-disciplinary research, and individual expression in pursuit of complex truths. Intrinsic to this purpose is our belief in the basic importance of diverse perspectives and the value of human life over capital. To that end, we feel compelled to support those fighting against white supremacy and state-sanctioned violence.
We are following the leads of and Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign, and raising funds for two organizations: Massachusetts Bail Fund and Black and Pink.

– Donate $50 or more to either of these organizations and we will send you a Carpenter Center tote bag as an expression of thanks.

– Donate $100 or more and we will also send you a book from our catalogue: Tony Cokes, If Ur Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 1–3, Liz Magor: BLOWOUT, or Anna Oppermann: Drawings.

– A donation in any amount will receive a Tony Cokes mini-poster.

Visit our website for more information and instructions on how to donate:

As an institution that supports living artists, we are dedicated to ideals of experimentation, cross-disciplinary research, and individual expression in pursuit of complex truths. Intrinsic to this purpose is our belief in the basic importance of diverse perspectives and the value of human life over...

06/12/2020

We are pleased to share that the recording of our April 9 conversation with Tony Cokes and Christoph Cox is now available online. To accompany the recording, we have also posted an edited transcript of the talk; Cokes's recently commissioned video, ‘Untitled (m.j.: the symptom)’; and a new playlist by Cokes, ‘Of Lies & Liars pt. 3 of 3.’ The edited transcript will also be printed in a limited run, to be made available later this summer. See more here: https://carpenter.center/program/tony-cokes-if-ur-reading-this-it-s-2-late-vol-2

06/02/2020

Excerpt from Tony Cokes, ‘Fade to Black,’ (1990). Video, color, sound. 32:51 min. Courtesy of Tony Cokes; Greene Naftali, New York; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. On view at the Carpenter Center during Cokes’s show, ‘If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 2,’ January 31 – April 12, 2020.

06/02/2020

We stand with the protesters and communities across the country fighting towards social justice and against racism, state sanctioned violence, and white supremacy—in the world and in our own institution.

More immediately, we strive to live up to the values and politics that are so powerfully expressed and generously shared by the artists that we show.

05/29/2020

Steve Schapiro, ‘Stop Police Killings, Selma,’ 1965. Gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 in. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Fund for the Acquisition of Photographs. 2018.115. On view during the 2018 exhibition ‘Time Is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America,’ curated by Makeda Best.

05/28/2020

As we remember Larry Kramer (1935 – 2020) and his activism, we are revisiting a 2009 exhibition at the Carpenter Center that chronicled ACT UP New York, and the compelling graphics produced by the artists and artist collectives within it.

In 2009—the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots—the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Harvard Art Museums presented 'ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993,' an exhibition of over 70 posters, stickers, and visual media that emerged during a pivotal moment of AIDS activism in New York City. The exhibition also featured the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project, a suite of over 100 video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York. See our recent Instagram stories for more images of this exhibition from our archive.

Pictured: Gran Fury, Silence = Death, 1987. Exhibition copy. Neon sign, 48 1/4 x 76 1/2 in. Courtesy of Collection of the New Museum, New York, Purchased with funds from the William Olander Fund.

https://www.instagram.com/ccva_harvard/

05/26/2020

Jules Kardish, ‘Counter-cartography,’ 2020. Collections of Cape Town in a plastic bag. Courtesy of the artist.
The Art, Film, and Visual Studies 2020 Senior Thesis Exhibition: Separation Is Natural is now available online. To view more of Jules Kardish’s project, a complement to the artist’s ethnographic research in Cape Town—as well as the projects of eight other AFVS seniors, visit https://carpenter.center/program