About

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is the center for contemporary art and artists at Harvard University. Plan your visit.

We share our building with the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) and the Harvard Film Archive (HFA).

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts advances contemporary art through exhibitions, artistic collaboration, research, and public engagement that connects artists and audiences within Harvard University and beyond. It is a site of learning, experimentation, and encounter within a living academic environment. Housed within Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, the Carpenter Center’s projects are enriched by the educational mission of the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and the cultural resources of a large research university. 

A center is not defined by what it contains, but by what it brings into relation.  

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is Harvard University’s center for contemporary art — a place where artists, ideas, and communities meet through exhibitions, research, and shared inquiry. As a non-collecting institution, the Carpenter Center remains responsive to the present; it is shaped by artists, the evolving conditions of contemporary practice, and its surrounding learning publics. 

Exhibitions are the foundation of our work. Presented across the Sert and AUX Intermedia Galleries, each project develops in response to the needs of the artist, allowing the Carpenter Center’s spaces to shift in form, scale, and tempo. Rather than presenting a fixed program, the Carpenter Center creates an environment where artistic work unfolds over time in dialogue with students, faculty, and the broader university's ecology. 

A wider constellation of activities gathers around our exhibitions: conversations, residencies, publishing initiatives, study spaces, and alumni exchange. These programs extend artistic ideas beyond the gallery, connecting making, learning, and public life across multiple registers of engagement within the Center, the university, and the contemporary art field. 

Situated within Harvard University, the Carpenter Center acts as a point of convergence, linking artists with students, faculty, collections, and communities across the building itself, the university, and wider artistic and intellectual networks. The Carpenter Center is both an exhibition space and gathering place: a site to encounter art, think alongside others, and to return to over time. 

All exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public. 

All exhibitions and public events at the Carpenter Center are part of a planned and curated program. Initiated and organized by the Carpenter Center’s curatorial staff and their collaborators, the Carpenter Center's program reflects the institution’s specific artistic, thematic, pedagogical, and civic goals. Exhibitions and public programs are the result of extensive research, studio visits, and engagement with colleagues across disciplines. Therefore, we are not able to accept unsolicited submissions of artwork for exhibition or event proposals.