Harvard Art Museums New Commission from Do Ho Suh

The Museums that comprise the Harvard Art Museums—the Fogg, the Busch-Reisinger, and the Sackler—when joined together form an incomplete oeuvre of art historical narratives. With the merger of the Harvard Art Museums within the former Fogg Museum in an adaptive reuse space redesigned by Renzo Piano, the multiplicity of memories, artworks, and institutions, beckons for a contemporary site-specific installation that reflects the complexities of the merging of these institutions.

Do Ho Suh's work, airy and impermanent, yet monumental and haunting, reflects the imperfections that comprise the contemporary institutional arrangement of the Harvard Art Museums. Works from first societies, pre-Columbian cultures, and sub-Saharan Africa, for example, are vastly underrepresented in this collection, themselves incomplete categories and vestiges of empire.

Suh's work, Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home, is a life-size reproduction of two homes he lived in at different points of his life—his traditional Korean home, and his apartment in Providence, RI when he moved to America. Scanned using 3-D photogrammetry and reproduced in purple fabric while nested within one another, the work provides an evocative framework for a new commission that could examine the fraught histories of the Art Museums in relation to other institutions like the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology or the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. This work, which would be powerful when installed in the atrium of the Museums, could serve as a starting point for encouraging the Harvard community and a broader public to investigate, question, and perhaps reformulate the institutional positioning of the Harvard Art Museums, so that its collection more accurately reflects the multiplicity of cultures that comprise the artifacts within Harvard’s broader holdings.  

Do Ho Suh, Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home, 2013