At 50, a building still dares
Edward Lloyd was perched on a stepladder in the Sert Gallery, a third-floor exhibition space at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. He had just a few hours to put the finishing touches on “circa 1963,” a show of 15 artists in vogue during the years of vinyl dinette sets, the Kennedy White House, and airplanes with ashtrays. Among the artists’ work in the bright little show is that of Roy Lichtenstein, Yoko Ono, Ben Shahn, and Josef Albers. “It’s an unusual show for us,” said David Rodowick, the curator, the center’s interim director, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), and the chair of the VES program. Most exhibits at the center feature works that go back a decade at most. The exhibit, which is on display through Oct. 14, officially opens a yearlong celebration of the center, a modernist building on Quincy Street that turns...