Art on Campus

See the full HDS Community Impact Fund Report.

The renovation of Swartz Hall honored HDS’s rich past while revitalizing the campus in keeping with the School’s contemporary goals: furthering multireligious education; nurturing diversity, inclusivity, and belonging; and addressing climate change through the lens of religious traditions. It's fitting, then, that the art chosen for the recently restored building—as well as some of HDS’s existing art—intentionally reflects the Divinity School’s educational and ethical aspirations. Led by the Swartz Hall Art Committee, HDS has acquired several pieces of art that enrich the School with their beauty as well as their deep significance.

In September 2022, HDS held an unveiling ceremony for an original work by Ramona Peters, an artist and Mashpee Wampanoag tribal member. The piece, an ahkuhq or cooking vessel titled “Earth Bound,” is described as an animate clay-being consisting of clay derived from shell, rock, minerals, memory, experience, and ancestral DNA (animal, plant, human), and shaped by Peters. Commissioned by HDS and the Swartz Hall Art Committee, with support from the Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund, the vessel now sits on permanent display inside Swartz Hall. During the unveiling ceremony, Dean David Hempton spoke about the Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, which outlined, among other things, Harvard’s disregard for its Indigenous neighbors, particularly the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. These legacies of Indigenous slavery and colonialism persist in Massachusetts and across the United States. Hempton said that in welcoming “Earth Bound,” the HDS community acknowledges “that the Indigenous insights infused into its body—insights into how to relate with this Indigenous place and with Indigenous nations here and beyond—are imperative for our educational mission.”

Another notable recent art exhibit was one by Maisie Luo, MTS ’22. Her show, the visual component of her MTS senior paper, was displayed in one of Swartz Hall’s galleries, where some of the pieces remain on view. Titled A Year of Being With, the show comprised a series of beautiful and moving paintings in which Luo shares her experience of being present with others, including the animals she depicts. “After painting the animals,” she writes, “I often wonder how they are doing and what they are experiencing as climate change worsens.” Luo incorporates both human-made trash and natural elements into her work, showing the human impact on many species. In one painting, a North Atlantic Right Whale lies tangled in fishing nets made from phone cords and plastic netting for fruit. Another shows a bowerbird in a nest strewn with plastic caps from discarded COVID-19 test kits. Her self-portrait, “River of Tears,” depicts her “deep grief and love” for the many people and animals who are suffering due to climate change. A Year of Being With echoes an area of increasing focus at HDS: exploring the role of the humanities when navigating the climate crisis and making space for climate grief.

Other meaningful pieces of art are displayed throughout Swartz Hall. In 2021, the Divinity School’s chapel was renamed for Preston N. Williams, the Houghton Professor of Theology and Contemporary Change Emeritus, in honor of the extraordinary impact of his leadership, teaching, and service. In concert with the renaming, Williams’ portrait was moved from the Braun Room to just outside the chapel that bears his name. Two custom rugs based on the design of Gee’s Bend quilts adorn the walls near the James Room and the HDS Commons Cafe, paying homage to the generations of women from the Gee’s Bend community who have been quilting since the early 1800s. When Swartz Hall reopened after its two-year renovation, the poet Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, wrote a poem called “I Say to the Double Doors” for the occasion. The poem has since been printed on an acrylic panel, which now hangs in the tower lobby of Swartz Hall. And Susan Swartz, who with her husband Jim Swartz helped to make the building’s renovation possible, contributed her dazzling painting, “Heaven,” which beautifully complements the other pieces of art in the building.

—by Sarah Rubin; Photo credits: Anthony Trujillo and Justin Knight