#harvardlibrary

Slides were used to teach history of art and architecture since around 1880s until they were replaced by digital modes such as PowerPoint. Since the founding of the Fogg Art Museum in 1895, the Fine Arts Library has served the needs of teaching faculty, art museum staff, undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and historians at Harvard and around the world. By 1920s, many universities had slide libraries, including Harvard. Since then, over the decades, FAL has acquired over 600,000 slides, mainly from the courses taught by Harvard faculty for teaching.

In the past couple years, the Fine Arts Library’s Digital Images and Slides Collection has been engaged in a large-scale move of our 35 mm slides to off-site storage at the Harvard Depository. 

This collection of over 600,000 slides documents the history of world art and architecture up to the early 2000s. Access for retrieval of items needed by future researchers is being provided through creating HOLLIS records. We have digitized most of the slides, but the archiving of this significant teaching format, nearly in its original arrangement, will serve as a valuable record both of the past art historical interests of faculty and students, and as a tangible reminder of bygone classroom teaching practices.

This facsimile of The Royal Psalter of Sainte-Chapelle, an illuminated manuscript originally made in Paris in the early thirteenth century, is filled with a delightful variety of geometric, floral, and zoomorphic line fillers.

Medieval scribes and artists filled the empty space between lines with humor, providing a break from often serious texts and also creating visual balance and symmetry. We suspect that they must have had a lot of fun creating these quirky creatures.

The Fine Arts Library holds a collection of over 300 full-color facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts from a wide range of periods and traditions. The collection primarily includes religious texts, but representatives of secular works on poetry and literature, astronomy, travel, sketchbooks, and science and medicine are also included.

February is also National Embroidery Month, and we’re excited to show you some cool items we have in the Special Collections. The first one is a hand-embroidered canvas book made by Candace Hicks who collects coincidences from the books she reads and gathers them in her artists’ books and installations.

Hicks created a variant series of hand-embroidered books, copying the form and design of dime-store "composition" books. In this volume, Hicks kept a record of coincidences in the books she was reading and noted every time the word “coincidence” occurred.

This is from a series entitled Albums of notes and the original drawing and paintings relating to Ishimoto Shūen's book "歷世風俗女裝沿革圖考", by a Japanese artist named Ishimoto Shūen (active during the Meiji and Taisho periods), which was published in 1911.

Shūen was a notable interior decorator and art historian, who also possessed fine drawing skills. He created these illustrated resources to show the changes in women’s clothing and hairstyles from ancient times to the Meiji period in Japan. He researched various fashion trends in Japan from old books and paintings, so his illustrations are accompanied with detailed annotations.

The first volume is devoted to women's court attire. The next volume is in three parts: court furniture and boxes belonging to the ladies; makeup, hair styles using ribbon, hair pieces; and ceremonial rituals. The third volume is kamon, Japanese family crests. The fourth volume is devoted to hinagata kimono patterns with a number of fine drawings. The fifth and sixth volumes describe court attire for samurai of different ranks.

In today’s post, we highlight drawings from the first volume on women’s court attire.

Here’s our first post in a series from our current exhibit, “Woven Worlds: The Contemporary Tradition of Storytelling through Weaving.” We will be sharing a series of posts to explore each of the included artworks in more depth.

Rhiannon ‘Skye’ Tafoya (b. 1989) is an interdisciplinary artist from the Eastern Band of Cherokee and the Santa Clara Pueblo Tribes.

She employs printmaking, digital design, and basketry techniques in creating her artist’s books, prints, and paper weavings. Both of her Tribal heritages, cultures, and lineages are manifested in her two- and three-dimensional artworks that range in size from a few inches to a few feet. She is inspired by her family history of basketry and observing her father and maternal grandmother weave baskets from red willow, honeysuckle vine, and white oak. While her inspiration comes, in part, from Cherokee traditions, her artworks are decidedly contemporary, featuring sharp lines and bold colors.

Skye creates to preserve, archive, and share personal and familial stories, cultural knowledge, and the Cherokee language. (from the artist’s website)

Weaving is integral to storytelling across the globe. This exhibit highlights the many ways in which Indigenous and diasporic communities use weaving to support lifeways, record history, and celebrate culture. Weaving is a diverse practice traversing fiber arts, basketry, beadwork, and more. The exhibit is open to Harvard ID holders only.

We can’t begin to express how saddened we are to share the news of András Riedlmayer’s passing on February 9, 2026. He touched so very many, so widely, so deeply, we cannot begin to measure the impact of his remarkable life and career. We can only know how hard it feels to say goodbye to a beloved colleague, mentor, and friend.

András was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1947 and studied at the University of Chicago and Princeton University. In 1985 he became the Aga Khan Librarian and the director of the Documentation Center for Islamic Architecture at the Fine Arts Library where he worked until 2020.

There are so many achievements and accomplishments András made in his life. One notable achievement was being an expert witness for the prosecution on the systematic destructions of cultural heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 and 1996, as well as in Kosovo in 1999. He catalogued years of cultural heritage destruction by Serbian nationalists in the Balkans. András ultimately testified against 14 Serbian and Bosnian Serb officials accused of war crimes and gave expert testimony against Milosevic during the Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

You can read an article and listen to podcast about his work related to the war crimes in the Balkans.

Happy New Year! 2026 is Year of the Horse.

Horse is confident, agreeable, and responsible. They’re also energetic, intelligent, and fit.

What kind of horse are you going to be for the new year?

Following our previous post on historical women’s fashion from Japan, here’s a publication featuring women from the Meiji period. It is illustrated by Ikeda Terukata, who was known for bijin-ga (美人画), which literally means "beautiful person picture." Bijin is a term mostly used to refer to beautiful women; bijin-ga is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings.

This accordion-style publication features colorful illustrations on both sides, depicting women in “today’s style” during the Meiji period.