Spotlight Tour: Fabrics of Art, with Varya Lyapneva ’26

On this tour, Varya Lyapneva ’26 will explore the role of fabric in the history of painting and sculpture, looking closely at three works. They are Red and Pink (1925), a painting commissioned from Georgia O’Keeffe by the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company; Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen (1880), a sculpture that radically incorporates diverse materials, including a real tulle skirt; and Mama Ocllo (1835–45), a painting from Spanish colonial Peru that depicts the mythic Inkan queen credited with teaching Inka women how to weave cloth.

Spotlight Tours offer a chance to explore the collections of the Harvard Art Museums through the eyes of a Harvard student. Free and open to the public, these tours start outside the museum shop on Saturdays and Sundays at 11am and 2pm. Drop in and join the conversation! And find out what the Student Guides are up to anytime on Instagram @harvardarthappens.