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Lowe Art Museum to host two major exhibitions on Afro-Cuban art curated by Alejandro de la Fuente

The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami will present two complementary exhibitions on Afro-Cuban art from May 1 to Sept. 12, 2025, both guest-curated by Alejandro de la Fuente, director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University. "El Pasado Mío/My Own Past" features 43 Afro-Cuban artists from the 1820s to the present in an amplified version with 83 works, while "Afrocubanismo: Highlights from the Ramón and Nercys Cernuda Collection" focuses on early 20th-century Afrocubanista works, including pieces by Wifredo Lam.

Is this art Celtic? It’s complicated.

The Harvard Art Museums have launched "Celtic Art Across the Ages," a first-of-its-kind exhibition that challenges traditional Eurocentric narratives focused on Greece and Rome. Spanning from the Iron Age to the modern Celtic Revival, the show features objects like the abstract Heidelberg sandstone head and the bronze Dea Artio sculpture to highlight a visual language defined by ornamentation and deconstruction.

‘A love letter to drawing’

Harvard Art Museums has opened a fall exhibition titled “Sketch, Shade, Smudge: Drawing from Gray to Black,” featuring around 120 works from the 19th to 21st centuries by artists including Pablo Picasso, John Singer Sargent, Edgar Degas, Piet Mondrian, and Georges Seurat. The show focuses on drawings in chalk, charcoal, graphite, and crayon, curated by conservator Penley Knipe and curator Miriam Stewart, who spent over a year selecting rarely seen pieces from the museum’s collection. Highlights include a fragile Degas charcoal drawing, “After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself,” which underwent conservation treatment, and a display of materials such as a box of vine charcoal owned by Sargent. The exhibition also features videos of the curators experimenting with historical techniques, like erasing with bread, and includes a hands-on drawing area styled after a 19th-century academic studio.