Following a lively stream of people, we stepped into the Carpenter Center last Friday, April 26, to be met with a mesmerizing assortment of art in practically all forms. We walked through the massive gallery alongside artists, students, and professors, taking in the vibrant and breathtaking pieces that filled the space. The event—the Spring 2024 Art, Film, & Visual Studies (AFVS) Open Studios and Senior Thesis Exhibition—celebrated art that students worked on throughout the course of the semester.
Spread out across five levels, the event showcased work from all AFVS Spring 2024 studio classes as well as AFVS 2024 Student Film Screenings and the Senior Thesis Exhibition, which will be on display from April 26 to May 23. Separated by courses, their corresponding workspaces became transformed into galleries and showcased a collection of each student’s chosen artworks. These final portfolios vary in style, from realism to abstract, and in medium, from paintings to sculpture to film. Although these students have aptitudes for different styles, the diverse artwork displayed exhibits their talent and work ethic.
One of the classes on the second floor, AFVS 35: Building Thought: Sculpture Course, displayed more avant-garde art: its aim was for students to pull from any desired materials to create sculptural representations of meaningful topics. Some examples of the pieces in this class include a sculptural arm made from wires and USB cords, a stained-glass mosaic mural laid on the floor, and a model of an antique house from the Caribbean made from wood, metal, paint, paper, and concrete.
Cameron Hosein ’25, an artist in the class, explained that, in the course, “most people tend to relate it to some part of their identity or some political thing that is going on in the world.” His work, A Model of an Old Caribbean House, incorporates his own cultural identity. “I’m from Trinidad and Tobago, so my inspiration has been a lot of works from back home,” he explained. As an AFVS concentrator, he also spoke about his experience incorporating cultural identity in previous art classes. “I do a lot of Caribbean works. Even when I did painting classes, I did the same thing, trying to recreate that.” Hosein plans to complete an AFVS thesis and stated, “My thesis will be sculptural. I’m doing a mixture of a magazine-type thing and sculpture.”
Next door, artworks were featured from AFVS 124K: Abstraction, which focuses on exploring and learning to create abstract art. This course is initially more exercise-based than AFVS 35, which does more long-term projects, so the artwork in this gallery is much more plentiful. Each student has five or more artworks up, and the interpretation of abstract art again is widespread. Callum Diak ’25, a Human Evolutionary Biology concentrator whose first art class at Harvard was AFVS 124K, said he decided to take this course for a new academic experience that was different from his biology workload. “I feel like if you step too far into one realm or one field, your way of interpreting the world is maybe a little focused on that field and how that field tackles it,” he said. “I would kinda want to look at the world in a different way.”
Even though Diak has not taken an abstract class before, the structured first half of the course helped him investigate a topic of interest: distorting circles. “My goal was basically to look at a circle. You can’t change the shape of a circle—you can’t tilt it or anything—but you can change so many other things about it, like transparency, color, how solid the edges are.”
The third floor, perhaps the most busy, exhibited works from AFVS 24: Painting, Smoking, Eating and AFVS 215: Critical Painting. Works that were not stand-alone were grouped together as a collection, divided by their name. One artist present, Bridget Sands ’24, did not characterize herself as an artist but decided to apply to an AVFS class during her senior spring and ended up taking Painting, Smoking, Eating, taught by Matt Saunders. The class is centered around and inspired by Philip Guston, an artist who “used to paint, eat, and smoke, all together,” as Sands put it, and “paints anything in his life.” She explained that each week they were given different prompts that their art had to respond to.
On the wall in the back hung Sands’ collection of work that included pictures of dogs, sports events, Guinness beers, and the Eliot House Courtyard. “I started to think of things in my life that were special and I would want represented,” she explained in regards to how she chose the subjects, intending for the work to go in her apartment post-graduation. Matt Saunders, the class’s professor, echoed the same sentiment, explaining that he gives “very open assignments which [students] can shape in different ways based on their interest.”
Upstairs, the fourth floor featured AFVS 12: Drawing 1: Drawing as a Visual Language and AFVS 11G: Exploring the Human Form: An Introduction to Figure Drawing. Katarina Burin, who taught AFVS 12 this semester, explained that her class focused on the basics of drawing before letting students choose their own medium. “Drawing can be so many different things, and everyone has a relationship to it… It’s not just being able to represent an object in reality. It’s also your own relationship to a mark, to making a mark,” she said. The other side of the room exhibited AFVS 11G, covered with depictions of the human body that explored and challenged our relationship with it. The class’s final project asked students to create symbolic dissections, where artists chose a body part to visually represent with incisions and unveil its different layers, ultimately connecting it to a symbolic meaning.
A piece by Sally Ann Williams ’27 was particularly interesting; it explored the sexualization of women’s bodies “specifically going through puberty” through a symbolic dissection of the collarbone and torso focusing on the breast. The work included an interactive incision that slides up and down to cover and reveal the inside of the breast, which revealed a colorful depiction of its structure. “Even though women’s bodies might be sexualized, and that’s what you’re fixated on, it’s just what actually is inside and the actual reproductive function,” she explained.
“It’s just a human body—it’s so beautiful but doesn’t necessarily need to be a sexual thing. Being in the nude doesn’t need to be something that has to do with sex.” Williams’ work stood among her classmates’ symbolic dissections that focused on other parts of the body, such as the face, chest, and hands. “Art is just a good way to express yourself and learn about yourself. Especially having something so intimate as the body.”
But, for the seniors with theses, open studio lends special attention to their work as student theses are presented more professionally. Visual theses are displayed in a gallery setting on the third floor that mimics an exhibition of a famous artist at a museum. In this emulated gallery, carefully selected works from artists like Marieta Rojas Agüero ’24 adorn the wall, narrowed down from her extensive portfolio. Agüero shared, “My thesis committee was really helpful in that sense, and I still feel like there’s so much left to do. It’s a good feeling. I want to be a painter, and I don’t think that’s a path that ends if fruitful. Those are the feelings that lead me to choose the pieces I did for the show.”
For the film track of AFVS, senior theses were part of a montage of films in the theater in the basement of the Carpenter Center. Each film was roughly 10 to 20 minutes long and deeply personal in content. Samantha Galvin ’24 reflected on creating a very personal thesis: “Creating my thesis has probably been the most emotional challenge I have had to go through. I know that sounds dramatic, but my film was about my own personal feelings about death and relationships. It often felt like I had to force myself through emotional labor to create, which was another added layer of challenge.” Speaking about how her thesis evolved throughout the year, she shared, “As time went on, I boiled down what I wanted to say, and had to part with a lot of media that I was really in love with… Thesising really helped me thicken my skin as an artist and [I] learned to separate criticism about my art from personal criticism.”
For a non-artist, a few paintings or sculptures may seem like light work compared to what is expected of other concentrations offered at Harvard. However, upon visiting the open studio and hearing the stories of some of the students regarding their artworks, it is doubtless that art is a similarly intensive process. At the end of the day, an art portfolio can consist of just as many hours of work as writing a thesis would. Based on our conversations with the AFVS students who showed off their work, they agreed that they thoroughly enjoyed the process, even though that meant working through occasionally tedious, nonlinear progress. It is refreshing from an academic perspective to reap the rewards from daily achievements, not see a project as a means to completion.
The reception ultimately celebrated each artist’s hard work throughout the semester and invited viewers to engage with the talent of Harvard’s students and their ability to create something meaningful. Studio night is not just a night of entertainment for outside viewers, but also a time to celebrate artists for showcasing their talent as well as revealing vulnerabilities in sharing intimate art. It served as a testament to the AFVS classes, encouraging all students, regardless of their artistic background, to engage with and express their creativity.
A work by Adam Mohamed ’25, composed of a white canvas sandwiched between wood-enclosed glass planes, invited viewers to contribute with an adjacent sign demanding, “Grab a brush & PAINT.” We watched throughout the reception how people, artists and not, took from the laid-out brushes and paint to blissfully add their own expressions. The individual work became an explosion of clashing colors, random lines and objects, words and symbols, and mere strokes—a representation of a collectivity of people in its nonsensical disunity.
We added a squiggle of a brushstroke on our way out.
Lucie Stefanoni ’27 (luciestefanoni@college.harvard.edu) hopes to have her own art gallery in the future.
Meena Behringer ’27 (meenabehringer@college.harvard.edu) cannot draw to save her life.