Harvard Art MuseumsHarvard Square, Cambridge
Alfonso Ossorio: Line and Lineage
Tracing the artistic lineage of Filipino-American painter Alfonso Ossorio through a body of works that resonates across generations, in the Modern and Contemporary Art galleries.
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Preview: written before the show opened
The earliest Ossorio on the museum's object list is a 1939 ink drawing of a fantastic sea creature on Japanese paper. The latest is Somatide, a 1990 wax-resist work about a metre tall. In between are five decades of prints, drawings and wax-resist paintings, most from the Fogg's collection.
Ossorio was born in Manila, studied at Harvard and moved to New York, where he joined the postwar avant-garde. The show hangs him beside artists he learned from and traded ideas with, including a small 1954 Dubuffet oil. Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, a duo whose work responds to the church mural Ossorio painted in the Philippines, appear here and at the neighboring Carpenter Center, so you can see both shows in one afternoon before the Carpenter's closes on 13 December.
Admission is free. Curators lead tours of both shows at noon on 28 October, 18 November and 9 December, and paper conservator Penley Knipe explains the wax-resist technique in a gallery talk on 6 April 2027.
Editor's pick
Alfonso Ossorio hung among the artists he drew on and fed back into, in the Modern and Contemporary galleries. Harvard Art Museums charge nothing, so the only cost is the walk from Harvard Square.
Look for
Somatide (1990)
Look for this late board, about a metre tall, built up in watercolour, ink, felt-tip, synthetic paint, pastel and wax.
Frieda Lawrence (1941)
Her name runs in spaced capitals down the right edge of this black and red ink drawing, signed in San Cristobal, New Mexico.
Fantastic Octopus (1942)
An octopus in watercolour and black ink on blue paper, made in Greenwich, Connecticut, early in Ossorio's career.
Christ in Limbo (1950)
The show's lead image, also titled The Harrowing of Hell: a small wax-resist sheet of watercolour and black ink, about 29 cm tall.
Dubuffet's Woman with Uncombed Hair (1954)
A palm-sized oil, about 24 cm tall, by the French painter Ossorio exchanged ideas with during his lifetime.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Locals Who've Seen It All
- Nerding Out
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Image credits
5
- From Iran: A Visual TestimonyAzadeh Akhlaghi, via Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
- Harvard Art Museumsajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- Carpenter Center for the Visual ArtsBobak Ha'Eri via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
- Peabody Museum of Archaeology & EthnologyDaderot, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
- Harvard Museum of Natural Historyajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0