UNDOING
HARVARD ART MUSEUMS
REFRAME. REFRAME. REFRAME.
“The Harvard Art Museums’ new ReFrame initiative aims to reimagine the function, role, and future of the university art museum. ReFrame shines a light on difficult histories, investigates untold narratives, and experiments with different approaches to storytelling. The initiative seeks to inspire, challenge, and connect museumgoers, asking visitors to think about which artists, which groups of people, and which cultures are seen or unseen. Ultimately, the initiative is designed to build community around these experiences with the museums’ collections.”
Looted matter hangs like misplaced corpses on empty walls and stands in as facsimiles for lost worlds, consumed and converted pasts. We attend the temple and bathe in its spirit, expecting its prayer. A prayer that translates and rewrites itself from its original language to new knowledge. Take it in. Savor the transmutation of buried histories and lived realities into the curated whispers of glass cases and gilded frames. Each artifact, each brushstroke, speaks volumes in absence, telling stories of bodies displaced, of lives transformed into objects, and of contexts erased. To enter the halls of the Harvard Art Museums is to tread on the thin membrane between what is preserved and what has been pillaged, what is celebrated and what has been silenced.
The ReFrame initiative promises to confront these fissures, to challenge the long-standing norms of institutional curatorship, and to interrogate what it means to hold, display, and study art in a space laden with historical violences. It compels us to ask: who does this knowledge serve? Whose gaze shapes the narrative? Whose stories are sacrificed at the altar of aesthetic appreciation?
Art objects, amassed through colonial expeditions, imperial conquests, or dubious exchanges, are presented not just as relics of the past but as living entities caught in the afterlife of extraction. Their presence in this space is a testimony to the entanglement of beauty and brutality, of reverence and erasure. They bear the weight of cultures frozen and fractured for the sake of scholarship, their contexts displaced, their meanings reframed to fit an academic agenda.
To reframe is to disrupt this stasis. It is to acknowledge the museum as a site of power, where decisions about visibility and value are inherently political acts. It is to return to the artifacts their voices, to let them speak not as static remnants but as dynamic participants in a broader dialogue. Through the ReFrame initiative, we are invited to dismantle the facades of neutrality and objectivity and to reckon with the museum’s complicity in histories of domination.
Yet, the work of reframing cannot stop at acknowledgment. It must lead us to action—action that moves beyond recontextualization to repair. What does it mean to steward these objects responsibly, to confront the ethical and material implications of their acquisition? How do we reconcile the past with the present, and what does justice look like for communities whose stories have been co-opted and commodified?
The Harvard Art Museums offer an opportunity to engage in this work of care and accountability. To navigate its halls with this ethic is to refuse passive consumption and to demand active participation in the untangling of the narratives that have been tightly woven around these objects. It is to resist the temptation to see the museum as a sanctified space and to instead see it as a contested ground where the work of truth-telling begins.
We stand, then, not as passive viewers but as active witnesses, questioning, challenging, and reframing what it means to hold and display art in an institution born of coloniality. The museum becomes not just a repository of objects but a living archive of struggle, resistance, and possibility. The act of reframing, then, is not an endpoint but a starting place—an invitation to unearth, unmake, and ultimately remake the stories that have shaped our understanding of art, culture, and humanity itself.