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Spotlight Tour: Portraiture by 19th-Century Black American Artists, with Sophia Scott ’25

In this photomontage, a young dark-skinned woman in profile and a white marble bust of a man with curly locks of hair and a beard seem to look at each other.
Sophia Scott ’25 and Edmonia Lewis’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1871) meet eye to eye.

Tour

In-Person
Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

This event does not require registration; see further details below.

On this tour, Sophia Scott ’25 will examine the contributions of Black artists whose labor and skill were central to shaping American art, even as the artists themselves remained excluded from many of its spaces. We will look at how these artists navigated the constraints of their time by creating portraits, often of white subjects. These works invite us to reconsider whose stories are seen and valued. The stops on the tour will be Joshua Johnson’s Portrait of a Young Woman (c. 1810–15), Julien Hudson’s Portrait of a Young Woman in White (1840), and Edmonia Lewis’s marble bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1871).

Spotlight Tours offer a chance to explore the collections of the Harvard Art Museums through the eyes of a Harvard student. Free and open to the public, these tours start outside the museum shop on Saturdays and Sundays at 11am and 2pm. Drop in and join the conversation! And find out what the Student Guides are up to anytime on Instagram @harvardarthappens.

Please check in with museum staff at the Visitor Services desk in the Calderwood Courtyard to request to join the tour. Tours are limited to 18 people and are available on a first-come, first-served basis; no registration is required.

The Harvard Art Museums offer free admission every day, Tuesday through Sunday. Please see the museum visit page to learn about our general policies for visiting the museums.

This program is supported by the Ho Family Student Guide Fund.

The Ho Family Student Guide Program at the Harvard Art Museums prepares students to develop original, research-based tours of the collections. Through their training, Student Guides gain knowledge of the collections and develop skills in critical thinking, visual analysis, public speaking, and leadership.

The Harvard Art Museums are committed to accessibility for all visitors. For anyone requiring accessibility accommodations for our programs, please contact us at am_register@harvard.edu at least 48 hours in advance. Please include the name and date of the program in the subject line of your email.