Katharine Lane Weems - Works at Harvard

Works At Harvard

Weems's works have an important place in many public spaces in the Boston area. Her largest project was to provide the art at Harvard University for the Biological Laboratories built in the early 1930s. Funded by a $12 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the labs were state of the art. It was decided that such a lavish facility should have art that would be equally striking, and Weems was chosen to carry out a number of projects.

First, she made the carved bronze doors at the entrance to the labs, now the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, (MCB). Next, she executed a series of friezes showing over 30 kinds of wildlife. This involved using pneumatic drills to carve images of animals in brick at the top of the buildings. She combined realistic and Art Deco styles and relied on a large group of construction workers to carry out the project. The economics of the Great Depression made it possible to carry out this project on a grander scale than would otherwise have been the case. Wages were lower, workers plentiful, and raw materials cheaper.

In preparation for this project, she studied animals at the Bronx Zoo in New York City and also Japanese and Chinese treatments of animals, especially those found on Han Dynasty tombs. She had also studied ancient Egyptian and Indian artistic presentations of animals.