Art Around Campus
From a fine arts gallery to the library, Haverford has many venues where students and the community can enjoy art.
Norman Turner: A Survey
Norman Turner discusses his exhibit at the Cantor
Fitzgerald Gallery. (6:27)
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There are numerous galleries on campus, including the museum-quality Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, allowing Haverford to host major exhibitions as well as to show student and faculty work. James House serves as the student center for the arts, and Lunt Café, a student-run coffee house, provides a performance space for student and non-student musical performances.
The Sharpless Gallery and Special Collections are both located in Magill Library, Haverford’s open-stack library. A wide variety of exhibits are shown in the Sharpless Gallery, including work by Haverford alums, and rare works from the private collections of alums. Many exhibits contain works from Haverford’s extensive Special Collections — the photography collection alone contains approximately 3,000 images created by more than 100 artists. Other works of art in Special collections include hundreds of art prints by such artists as Cezanne, Hiroshige, Kandinsky, Miro, Piranesi and Picasso and paintings by Cornelius DeMann Delft, Egbert van Heemskerk, Maxfield Parrish and Charles Willson Peale, as well as works of sculpture and artifacts both ancient and modern. Quaker photographs, silhouettes, drawings and paintings depicting Quaker individuals, Friends Schools and Colleges, Meetinghouses and miscellaneous groups constitute some of Haverford’s Quaker-specific art holdings and support new research into Quaker aesthetics.
Additionally, the John B. Hurford ’60 Humanities Center coordinates many of the arts initiatives on campus and integrates the arts into the overall Haverford experience. The Humanities Center supports student endeavors through the Student Arts Fund and sponsors regular activities like Dialogues on Art. The Center also promotes artistic programming through a steady stream of exhibitions across campus, by supporting the Artists in Residence program, and through the Virtual Museum.
Student initiative and activity also play a major role in the liveliness of the arts at Haverford. There are more than 50 arts-related clubs and organizations at Haverford, ranging from the Bi-College Jazz Band to the Mixed Media Art Group, Black Squirrel Records to the Haverford Review, Dancing Under the Influence of Music to the Film Club. There are multiple improv comedy troupes, journals, music groups, and theater companies, and some have claimed that there are more a cappella groups at Haverford per capita than at any other college in the world.