Hide and seek
Where in the University does a 100-year-old tortilla, an early American plow, a carved Angolan spoon, or a student toga belong? And why does it belong there? An offbeat new exhibit, drawing on material collected at Harvard over the centuries, aims to answer those questions, challenging viewers to explore the notion of how Western thought categorizes a wide array of objects, and what can be gleaned from those classifications. “Tangible Things,” curated by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor, and Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator and senior lecturer on history, highlights and questions the modern Western intellectual categories that distinguish art from artifact, specimen from tool, and the historical from the anthropological. The exhibition features nearly 200 objects culled from across the University. “We have all of these interesting objects, and we wanted to get people thinking about what kinds of questions they would ask when they were brought together. Why...