About | Harvard Undergraduate Art Journal

Our Mission

As an undergraduate peer-reviewed art and art history journal, the Harvard Undergraduate Art Journal strives to platform and encourage high-quality examples of undergraduate contributions to art history and the visual arts. We exist as a unique, accessible opportunity for students to showcase their research and art at the undergraduate level.

History

Founded in 1988, the original Harvard Art Journal published five issues of undergraduate, graduate, and faculty work, with a twenty-fifth reunion edition published in 2018 spearheaded by Paula Hornbostel (AB ‘93). In Spring 2024, the journal returned — adapted, expanded, and refashioned, beginning again with Volume I. The publication now focuses on undergraduate work, including contributions in the visual arts as well as art history.

The Harvard Art journal welcomes submissions from graduate students, professors, and undergraduates. The first issue will be coming out at the beginning of April, and the editorial board is still accepting essays, which may have been submitted for coursework. Submissions should be handed in at the Circulation Desk in the Fine Arts Library. For more information, contact Roger de Montebello at 498-5574.

A call for submissions for the Harvard Art Journal in 1988 (left).

As such, the theme of the inaugural issue is “Looking Back; Looking Forward:” We look to the history of this journal as we revive and revise it for the future, and we seek to elevate art historical voices of the future by publishing quality undergraduate work. In addition, this issue includes a conversation with Professor Felipe Pereda about the history and future of Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture ahead of its 150th anniversary. The cover image — a stylized elevation of the Harvard Art Museums courtyard — was selected to represent the past, present, and future of art at Harvard in the original 1927 Fogg Museum design with the twenty-first-century Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s forward-looking renovation and expansion.

This issue contains student work on modern conservation practice based in original artist ideas, Christ and the body in a medical anthology manuscript, notions of subjectivity in a work by Monet, sacred symbolism in Armenian liturgical textiles, and five exceptional works of visual art.

The journal’s revival and publication have been facilitated by many individuals, to whom special thanks are owed: To Marcus Mayo, for serving as the journal’s staff advisor and an invaluable support at every step of the process; Tom Batchelder, for encouraging and advising this project since its inception; to Paula Hornbostel, for sharing wisdom from the first and second iterations of the journal; and to our faculty advisory committee and the Harvard Department of History of Art and Architecture, for making the Harvard Undergraduate Art Journal possible.