The urgencies of this moment bring the importance of our work at the Harvard Art Museums into sharp focus. Through insightful exhibitions, vibrant events, and dynamic conversations, we cultivate curiosity, open inquiry, constructive dialogue, and the free exchange of ideas. Thank you for being part of the community that brought so much joy, learning, and enthusiasm to this institution in fiscal year 2025 (July 1, 2024–June 30, 2025). The initiatives captured below are a direct result of your generous involvement.

Art as Inquiry

Works of art continually invite new ways of seeing, offering us the opportunity to understand varied life experiences, forms of expression, and ways of being. Through timely acquisitions, exhibitions, and changes in our galleries, the collections offer myriad ways to engage with the world.

Through our exhibitions, we explored questions of national identity through the lens of race, migration labor, history, and memory in Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation; witnessed an artist’s deep engagement with and representation of her local community through her art in Joana Choumali: Languages of West African Marketplaces; uncovered the highly personal yet inherently collaborative nature of art collecting in The Solomon Collection: Dürer to Degas and Beyond; and investigated curatorial and conservation insights into an artist’s innovative techniques in Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking.

“As much as I love oblique conceptual noodling—hints, whispers, riddles, suggestions—the subject, and the moment, demand something more stark, and the exhibition obliges.”

From “Seeing the US in Germany’s Mirror,” Murray Whyte’s review of Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation, The Boston Globe, November 21, 2024

Among our acquisitions were Emma Amos’s landmark monoprint series Odyssey, which renders a century of African American experience within the artist’s family in Atlanta; Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Port of Tangiers (Entrance to the Customs House), which complicates our understanding of orientalism in 19th-century painting; a bronze coin of Stratonicea (present-day Türkiye) portraying the emperor Septimius Severus, which shows how historical figures could be officially erased from the public record (a process the Romans called damnatio memoriae, or “condemnation of memory”); and Henrike Naumann’s room-sized sculptural installation work Ostalgie, which examines the introduction of consumer capitalism to the former socialist East Germany and the rise of neo-Nazi extremism after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

See a complete list of fiscal year 2025 acquisitions →

Discover past and current exhibitions →

Read about a transformative gift of prints and paintings by Edvard Munch →

 Material Matters

The Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies is a premier training ground for conservators and scientists; it is where the Harvard Art Museums preserve, interpret, and strengthen the collections in our care.

Kenneth Noland’s Karma is a monumental painting that depicts strikingly blue chevrons on an unpainted, unprimed cotton duck canvas. In September 2024, 60 years after its creation, Karma underwent cleaning for the first time—outside on the Harvard Art Museums lawn, no less.

The treatment procedure—called aqueous light bleaching—uses the sun’s rays as well as water to brighten and even out the tones across a painting, lessening the appearance of stains and the overall darkening of a canvas. Karma was one of 4,706 objects that underwent conservation treatment in the Straus Center in fiscal year 2025. Admittedly, not all treatments were as uncommon as this one.

“It was an unusual thing to take a painting outdoors, and there was a really fearless problem-solving energy in the museums that went into making it a success.”
Ellen Davis, Associate Paintings Conservator, Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies

Community Hub

At the intersection of public access and higher education, the Harvard Art Museums invite everyone to embrace inquiry, dialogue, and new perspectives on art and ideas.  

Across 50 galleries of art on 3 floors, the museums opened our doors to over 320,000 visitors in fiscal year 2025, an increase over the previous fiscal year and double the number of pre-pandemic annual visitors. Through free admission and other initiatives, we have carved out a welcoming foothold into Harvard at large, providing a bridge for the public to experience all the university has to offer.

To increase access to our collections in ways that resonate within our communities, the museums have made improvements to the visitor experience and expanded our overall offerings. In one striking example, the tours delivered by the Ho Family Student Guides (paid Harvard undergraduates who create original, research-based tours) increased by 66 percent over the previous year. Free multimedia content and audio tours on Bloomberg Connects also help people make the most of their time at the museums.

Hear from our curators, discover highlights, and learn about current exhibitions on Bloomberg Connects →

Whether you’re someone who is studying for the U.S. citizenship exam using art from the galleries, a visitor on a Student Guide Tour about the politics of historical drinking vessels, a coffee enthusiast in need of a pick-me-up at Jenny’s Cafe, a young reader joining Second Saturdays Story Time, or a family who wants to help weave a community tapestry in the Materials Lab, all are welcome. The museums tell stories from across the world while being part of the fabric of the city.

Ways of Making

By pulling back the curtain on artists’ creative processes, we come to understand how they wrestle with ideas and shape their work.

An emphasis on artistic practice is in our DNA as a teaching and learning museum, and fiscal year 2025 marked an amplification of explorations into ways of making: In the Annual Student Lecture, Rosana Paulino talked about her practice as a material form of research and resistance; Yoshida Ayomi, fourth generation in the Yoshida family of artists, shared how she pushes the boundaries of Japanese printmaking techniques; photographer Susan Meiselas gave a talk about her approach to her series 44 Irving Street; and Joana Choumali spoke about her multimedia photographic practice.

Meanwhile, in the museums’ Materials Lab, working artists and experts guided participants in hands-on experimentation and collaborative, interdisciplinary inquiry that considered artists’ choices and the material life of artworks over time. To name a few, these sessions featured local artist Jessamy Shay, who taught a workshop on visible mending in conjunction with the exhibition Joana Choumali: Languages of West African Marketplaces; Fellow for Indigenous Art and member of the Choctaw-Apache Tribe Katherine Santos, who gave a workshop on the intersection of weaving and storytelling in many Indigenous nations; and Dutch painter Nard Kwast, who offered a daylong course in 17th-century still-life painting.

In the Materials Lab, lecture halls, galleries, and beyond, an emphasis on artistic process is elemental to the enjoyment and appreciation of art.

Museum without Walls

Removing barriers to access—by sharing resources and expertise, offering diverse programming, and presenting cross-disciplinary learning—connects us as global and local citizens.

Our collections are made up of more than 255,000 objects from the ancient past to the present, and they are in constant, active circulation—both physically and online. In fiscal year 2025, we loaned works to over 30 national and international institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Britain, Courtauld Institute of Art, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and Musée du Louvre; while here at the Harvard Art Museums, 33,058 objects circulated in and out of the Art Study Center for viewing and research.

The ideas born from objects in the collections are equally as active. Museum staff presented original research, published books, and collaborated with institutions and leading scholars from around the world. Through the objects we care for and the communities we build, our teaching and learning mission extends far beyond our museum walls.

Take our collections anywhere when you purchase a copy of In Your Hands →

Explore the ancient city of Sardis, the Harvard Art Museums’ archaeological dig in Türkiye and now a UNESCO World Heritage site →

To enjoy our incredible art programs around the world, become a Fellow today →

 Learning by Doing

The Harvard Art Museums are a training ground for generations of leaders in curatorial and conservation fields, employing object-based, interdisciplinary teaching to spur discovery, creativity, and critical thinking across the academic spectrum. Through a participatory approach to learning, students from diverse academic backgrounds gain strong commitments to the listening and looking skills that are critical to civic life.

In fiscal year 2025, faculty from across the university collaborated with the Division of Academic and Public Programs (DAPP) to created course-specific installations, including Art of the Black World, A Colloquium in the Visual Arts, and The Art of Looking: 150 Years of Art History at Harvard. In these courses and beyond, DAPP supported a total of 5,690 Harvard students and 46 distinct Harvard departments, schools, and centers—from the Department of History of Art and Architecture to the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Business School. These collaborations took the form of in-gallery lectures, hands-on making in the Materials Lab, and close-looking sessions in the Art Study Center, a light-filled space within the museums where anyone can request objects to view from the museums’ vast collections. The museums supplemented the student experience further through the inaugural Student Acquisition Program, which invited students to participate in the acquisitions process. The program helps incorporate diverse perspectives in the shaping of the museums’ collections.

In addition to supporting Harvard’s curriculum, the Harvard Art Museums partnered with the nearby high school Cambridge Rindge and Latin School to activate visual art as a teaching tool and nurture museum-going identity among local teens. For high school, college, and postgraduate students around the Boston/Cambridge area, paid internships—generously funded by the Hao Family Internship Fund—fostered intellectual curiosity and created pathways for studying emerging technology, such as the use of AI to recover stolen coins and the exploration of art chatbots for in-gallery use.

“I used to think museums were very simple, that they just displayed whatever they came across. . . . I now know that there are professionals for every role here at the Harvard Art Museums. I know that science and technology play a major role in art conservation. I now know that career paths aren’t linear and my education can take me anywhere.” 
High school participant in the Hao Family Internship Program

Listen to By Teens, For Teens: An Audio Guide on Bloomberg Connects →

At the professional level, curatorial and conservation fellows teach from the galleries, collaborate on special exhibitions and publications, and produce highly lauded installations. Among them are Meaning Makers (on view through December 2025), which looks at how meaning is constructed in Japanese art through visual motifs, poetic allusions, artists’ intentions, and the knowledge that viewers bring to the works; Drawn to Earth: Contemporary Art and Environment in the Americas, which asked how and why artists in the Americas today utilize the practice of drawing to address topics of land, territory, ecological crisis, and our own relationship as humans to the other-than-human world; and Katharina Sieverding: Transformer, which showed Sieverding’s interest in gender as an evolving spectrum rather than a fixed category. Taken together, our galleries and research centers are a locus of innovation, creativity, and collaboration.

Watch the interview (in Spanish) between Madeline Murphy Turner, the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Art and curator of Drawn to Earth, and contributing artist Laura Anderson Barbata on La Esquela →              

Read about the founding of art history as a discipline in the United States at Harvard  →

By the Numbers

While numbers offer only one way to measure success, here are a few significant markers for fiscal year 2025.

→ 320,164 people visited the museums, exceeding last year’s total attendance and indicating the lasting impact of free admission.

→ 1,704,038 website engagements—up 10 percent over fiscal year 2024—underscore our expanding digital reach.

→ 304 public programs—ranging from dynamic lectures to hands-on workshops—included 9,092 participants, fostering curiosity and community connection.

→ More than 1,150 visitors came together for two Family Day events, demonstrating our role as a gathering place for all ages.

→ 222 Harvard courses and programs used the museums in their teaching.

→ 8,908 Harvard student visits with a class reflect the museums’ central role in hands-on academic engagement.

→ 4,706 objects underwent conservation treatment in the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, where conservators preserve the collections for future generations.

→ 33,058 objects circulated in and out of the Art Study Center, fueling research for scholars and visitors alike.

→ 67 works went on loan to over 30 national and international institutions.

→ 103,234 Instagram followers enjoyed original, behind-the-scenes content @harvardartmuseums, an increase of 9 percent over fiscal year 2024.

Thank You

Our work this past year demonstrates the significant rewards of looking closely and thinking deeply through original research, generative learning, and open engagement. This vital work is only possible through your partnership. Thank you!

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