Harvard Art Museums, Materials Lab: Harvard College Rising Scholars Program Workshop

Location: Harvard Art Museums, Materials Lab, Cambridge, MA

Date: Summer 2023

Ages: Incoming Harvard first year undergraduate students

This workshop was offered to students enrolled in the Harvard College Rising Scholars Program, which is a is a year-long program offered to an invited cohort of academically ambitious incoming Harvard College students who attended high schools that offered them limited college-level academic enrichment opportunities. The Materials Lab, which serves as an environment for art making as a means of learning and knowing with a focus on art materials, offers teaching and research opportunities for students and faculty as well as public workshops. It was great to return to the Materials Lab, where I led workshops as a Graduate Student Teaching Fellow in 2019-2020, and I am very grateful to Francesca Bewer who stewards the Materials Lab for inviting me back to lead this workshop.

Following a lecture with an interdisciplinary focus, I shared samples of pigment-making rocks and minerals, as well as dye making plants, and other rare and noteworthy color materials. After a paint making demonstration, we invited students to make paint of their own with the “Medieval method” of mulling pigment into watercolor paint with gum arabic. The Materials Lab provided paper and supplies for the activity, and encouraged students to make watercolor paintings with their paint inspired by the exhibition that was on view at the time “American Watercolors, 1880–1990: Into the Light”