‘Poetic Urbanisms’
A daytime visitor to Arts @ 29 Garden will feel the serenity of Harvard’s newest space for art making. It’s spacious, open, and sunny. But through Feb. 28, that serenity will be shaken a little by “Poetic Urbanisms,” the first formal art exhibit there. The show’s photographs, flickering moving images, projected text, and shelves of chained books reveal overlooked city spaces: curbsides, scaffolding, battered signage, and benches too inaccessible for sitting. The effect is creative unease, the dissonance that art often inspires. The exhibit, funded by a grant from the Harvard University Committee on the Arts, is in part the culmination of two years of courses taught by Svetlana Boym, a Harvard professor of comparative literature and member of the 2008 Harvard University Task Force on the Arts. Her courses explored archaeology as a metaphor for modernity, a quest to go beneath the surface of the modern city that drew on both art...