Although Harvard’s community is forever in flux, she herself endures. Like the centuries of those who came before us and have passed on, soon we will not be here. Only she will be. Yet, despite our transience, it is we who now must define her to the watching world.
There was a burden the media pointed to us to carry these past months: We were asked to hold ourselves to a higher standard and make sense of the chaos of our time. But how can we meet this demand if we cannot first make sense of each other? How might we do so now, weary with the weight of the fall almost passed?
After spending years working in the world of fashion and aesthetics, I’m convinced a possible way to do this lies in rousing the visual arts from its fitful sleep at Harvard. This is a call for affiliates to cultivate community by paying attention to our student artists and investing time and resources into our lost student visual art movements.
Art creates the conditions for community. It creates connection and crafts a coherent, shared narrative that transcends differences. Through art, we can experience new ways of seeing each other; we can exchange ideas and express our sense of shared humanity to combat prejudice and divisiveness. An article in The Crimson from 1947 chronicled a Harvard student art show following World War II. Juxtaposed with student works depicting the violence of war scenes were paintings showcasing the healing hills of their homes. In shared stories of suffering and salvation, the students of the forties strengthened their bonds through the human penchant for creation. It seems then that the connective power of art has been known for generations on this campus, long before research in 2022 from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health showed scientifically the benefits of art on our well-being.
Unfortunately, we are at a moment where participation in student visual art has waned, particularly at large events with the potential for broad appeal across the University. We’re therefore missing out on a vital mechanism to create community. Uncommon on Harvard’s campus are discussions about visual art, and even more uncommon is the sharing of it.
This lull is not the first of its kind: Our collective attention to student visual art has ebbed and flowed. In the winter of 1974, The Crimson ran a piece called “A Visual Motley,” in which it was written that, “interaction with an audience is just as important to the visual artist as it is to a performer. Unfortunately, many of Harvard’s student artists don’t experience that kind of interaction.”
A revitalization of the arts at Harvard was spearheaded in 2008 by President Drew G. Faust. She led the Task Force on the Arts, arguing that arts remained peripheral on campus. In its report that year, the Task Force stated art’s importance in helping construct new forms of social practice. The report noted that “the culture of modernity depends upon the collaboration of the art of ‘making’ and the art of ‘thinking.’”
In response to the Task Force, the second annual Harvard Students Arts Show was held in 2010, covered enthusiastically by The Crimson. 2018 was the last year that the show was covered by The Crimson, now run under the name of Harvard Student Art Collective, and as a part of Harvard’s “ARTS FIRST Festival.” There was a turnout of over 700 people. In 2022, there was no coverage at all, and a desolate-looking Facebook page cites an attendance of 51. This past spring, there was no Facebook post, but an Instagram post advertising the show garnered just 14 likes. It was no longer a part of the ARTS FIRST Festival, which was dominated by the performing arts instead. Because of the current lack of enthusiasm for this collective project on campus, I fear that this coming year’s school-wide show will fare no better. I also fear that we will continue to fail to reap the community-enriching benefits that the visual arts has to offer us if we don’t make a change.
I am hopeful that with the requisite awareness, a collective shift is possible: There is still a pulse to the Harvard student visual art movements across campus, if only we can shock the slow-beating heart. Although most notably lacking is the strength of a collective movement, not to mention a dearth of work reflecting queer and trans experiences, there is a trend of disparate student art movements popping up. In 2022, The Harvard Psychedelics Club Fall hosted a successful show in collaboration with the Signet Society, featuring art from Harvard community members. The Harvard University Black Arts Collective seems to be thriving in its own right, holding events this year for student artists to celebrate community through shared creation. The proliferation of several of these smaller movements leads me to believe that it is possible to garner broader communal participation in the visual arts.
By paying attention to our artists across Harvard’s schools, by strengthening student art movements that currently exist as well as building new ones as a collective, we might craft a closer community. This is nowhere near a totalizing solution in the quest for cohesion. Yet, art still has some role to play. It is a brave thing to submit ourselves in this act of faith, to seek the sublime together: It’s been said that we cannot discover new oceans without first losing sight of the shore.
This is not art for its own sake: In the art, there lies a strategy for forging forward. We can come together in a gallery space and allow ourselves to make sense of each other and the world, to create a shared narrative through art.
Now, walking through campus on the verge of winter’s birth, seldom do friendly glances meet. Breath hangs bone-white in the air. The cold moon speaks in a tone more cynical than ever. This mood might be par for the course during finals season. But I still allow myself to be bewitched by the beauty of where I am, awash in the realization that I love the people who pass me. We are a community. We must now do the work of defining ourselves as such, perhaps in the way our forebears did nearly a century ago following the Second World War: through the creative act.
Savannah Huitema, J.D. ’25 (shuitema@jd25.law.harvard.edu) is a second-year Harvard Law School student and model.