Dear Reader,
The Harvard Undergraduate Art Journal is proud to present our Spring 2025 Issue! Selected from almost 100 submissions from across the globe, the contributions in this third issue were chosen as worthy examples of undergraduate work in art and art history. Contributors reach across time and medium, and from art practice to art history, with unique answers to a shared question: Why (and how) do we turn to art to define community identity?
Madelyn McKenzie’s Self-Portraits and Bryan Defjan’s Unquiet Bodies, for example, explore (in)visibilities of self within and outside of queer communities, while Melanie Veveçka reverse-engineers Motra Tone’s resistant manipulations of visibility in Albanian identity under Ottoman rule.
Rachel Howe’s wearable metalwork marks the shared community of human experience and the natural world that pins us all together—an interconnected and enduring relationship echoed in the analysis of Mylène Michaud’s cyber-natural knitworks by Rebecca Bennett.
Political and spiritual community identities signaled through material culture are also on display from Vermont to the Soviet Union: Julia Wojtkowski illuminates the layered messaging of divine and royal power in the Sainte-Chapelle’s stained glass program, Thomas Scheetz investigates the political jockeying baked into nineteenth-century Bennington ceramic vessels, Katy Jean Turner explores how political identity-imagining was expressed in stereotypes of the Jewish community and conceptions of the “Other” in early twentieth-century Prague, and Clark Louis turns to visual expressions of Soviet ambition through the case studies of Tatlin’s Monument and Rodchenko’s photography.
For the twenty-first century, Zhiyin (Leah) Wang’s installation asks what it means to forge identity and community in a digital, othered world. Both Navi Tshibambe’s pottery and Jordan Francesca Moyd’s photography look to preserve modern community in remembrance, incubating shared moments that fully hatch only as memories grounded in the work of art.
Across this issue’s wide array of topics, the Spring 2025 contributors demand that we slow down to consider the ways in which we sculpt, print, knit, photograph, and carve out our identities in search of community—for our part, publication of the Harvard Undergraduate Art Journal would be impossible without the support of its own communities. My utmost gratitude is owed to the Harvard Department of History of Art and Architecture and our faculty advisory committee, and especially for the unfailing support of Marcus Mayo, HUAJ Staff Advisor, and Emily Ware, HAA Director of Administration and Operations. I’d also like to extend my deep appreciation for HUAJ’s editorial team, who generously donated time from a busy semester to attend to each submission with care and enliven the journal with new and generative perspectives.
On behalf of the Spring 2025 team, thank you for being a part of our readership community. We hope you enjoy this issue of the Harvard Undergraduate Art Journal!