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Online Opening Lecture: Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970

A blue-saturated photograph of a desert landscape at night with a winding road in the foreground and mountains in the background.
Sim Chi Yin, Singaporean, Mountain range surrounding the Nevada Test Site, from the series Most People Were Silent, November 2017. Archival pigment print. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Fund for the Acquisition of Photographs, 2020.181. © Sim Chi Yin; image courtesy of the artist.

Lecture

This event was recorded. Please view the lecture on our Vimeo channel.

In this virtual lecture, curator Makeda Best will introduce our latest special exhibition, Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970, on view at the Harvard Art Museums from September 17, 2021 through January 16, 2022.

Devour the Land explores the unknown and often hidden consequences of militarism on habitats and well-being in the United States. Featuring approximately 160 photographs across 7 thematic groupings, the exhibition reveals the nationwide footprint of the U.S. military, the wide network of industries that support and supply its work, and the impacts of—and responses to—this activity.

Speaker:
Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Division of Modern and Contemporary Art

This talk will take place online via Zoom. Free admission, but registration is required. To register, please complete this online form.

Please read these instructions on how to join a meeting on Zoom. If you have any questions, please contact am_register@harvard.edu.

Please note that closed captioning is available during this program. A video recording of the talk will also be available on the museums’ YouTube channel at a later date.

The Harvard Art Museums will reopen to the public on Saturday, September 4, 2021. Reservations are required for all visits and can be made up to three weeks in advance, beginning Friday, August 20. Please visit the museum website for more information.

This exhibition is made possible in part by the generosity of the Terra Foundation for American Art and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Publication Fund and the Rosenblatt Fund for Postwar American Art. Related programming is supported by the M. Victor Leventritt Lecture Series Endowment 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.