Director's Message

Welcome to the Harvard Art Museum's new website. Over the past two years we have been hard at work building a completely redesigned site that will help us to better serve our many audiences. Whether you are a student, faculty member, art historian, Art Museum member, neighbor, one of our generous donors, or just an interested visitor, this new site was designed with you in mind. A dynamic, well-designed, and functional website is a vital component of any organization, but its significance is even more essential to us as a leading arts institution and in our role as a university museum, particularly in today's technology-driven environment. While it was imperative to recognize and include all the elements that go into good web design, we strove for much more than window dressing. A thoughtful and uncluttered design, improved functionality and navigation, enhanced technology, and better communication are some of these elements, but one of our primary goals was to create a portal into our collection that would advance our teaching and research mission.

The new digital interface to our collection is without question the most exciting feature of our redesigned site. This new set of tools offers you the ability to search through the collection in countless ways, share your results with friends, colleagues, or classmates, and create your own presentation of objects in our collection. Whether you are a casual browser or a seasoned scholar, I hope you will take the opportunity to explore, research, and learn from the greatest resource we have to offer. From the time the first object was displayed or made available for study in our museum back in 1895, we have been compelled by our mission to make the collection available in as many ways as possible. Now that our objects can be viewed and studied from most anywhere in the world, we continue to define what that mission means in the 21st century.

Thomas W. Lentz
Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director