CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The Harvard Art Museums announce the landmark gift of 206 works on paper by acclaimed artist Edna Andrade, generously donated by the Edna Wright Andrade Charitable Trust. In conjunction with this major gift, the museums have also acquired two additional works by Andrade—a painting and a collage—further enriching the representation of her technique across media. The acquisitions mark the first works by Andrade to enter the museums’ collections and have made Harvard an important center for the study of her art. Spanning Andrade’s career, the drawings and prints that compose the gift underscore how her artistic practice and teaching are linked to Harvard University and highlight the ways in which her study of mathematics, astronomy, botany, and architecture formed the foundation of her abstract compositions. A selection of these works will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Edna Andrade: Imagination Is Never Static, on view August 30, 2025 through January 4, 2026 in the University Research Gallery (Level 3) at the museums. An array of public programs accompanies the exhibition, including an opening lecture with artists Crystalle Lacouture, Odili Donald Odita, and Dyani White Hawk on Thursday, September 18, at 6pm, and multiple gallery talks and tours.

Over the course of her seven-decade career, Edna Andrade (1917–2008) became a pillar of the Philadelphia arts community and was celebrated for her exacting geometric compositions that chart many of the defining moments in abstraction throughout the 20th century. During her education at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the 1930s and in the earliest years of her decades-long career in teaching—first at Newcomb College in New Orleans from 1939 to 1941, and later at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia from 1957 to 1982—Andrade experienced the radical changes in arts pedagogy that were taking place across Europe and the United States. At Newcomb, she taught alongside Robert (Robin) D. Feild, who transformed the curriculum there with the ideas he had learned while collaborating with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. During World War II, she worked as a designer for the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA), and after the war, she was a draftsperson at an architecture firm. In 1979, while at the University of the Arts, Andrade helped found Form Forum, an interdisciplinary group that brought together architects, physicists, artists, botanists, philosophers, and others to discuss patterns and structures in nature, science, and art.

Fueled by curiosity, Andrade integrated into her work lessons gleaned from mathematicians, architects, scientists, and fellow artists, as well as from observation of the natural world. Geometry became the thread connecting these fields of study, and it offered endless possibilities for the development of her compositions. Drawing was the foundation of Andrade’s art and was fundamental to her approach to painting, her designs for public space, and her process for experimentation.

The acquisition represents defining facets of Andrade’s oeuvre, from the figurative drawings she made during her student days in the 1930s, to her geometric work from the 1960s–80s, to the still-life sketches she made in the 1990s, to her studies of nature, which spanned her entire career. Together, these works narrate a shifting approach to arts education across the 20th century, one that moved from the direct representation of the material world to an experimental interpretation of the structures and patterns found in mathematics, nature, and architecture.

“We are thrilled to acquire this large group of works by Edna Andrade directly from her estate,” said Mitra Abbaspour, the Houghton Curator and Head of the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums. “It was the visual and spatial complexity of her compositions that first seduced me. But in the course of researching her life and art, I have come to be equally enamored by her indomitable spirit, commitment to lifelong learning, voracious curiosity for different fields of study, and determination that art could serve as a connective tissue between different ways of thinking. I was interested in bringing this work into the context of a campus, where expertise is developed similarly through the study of multiple disciplines.”

Madeline Murphy Turner, the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Drawings at the Harvard Art Museums, added, “The acquisition and presentation of Andrade’s work greatly enhances the museums’ distinguished collection of works by Bauhaus artists by illustrating how ideas from that school migrated to the United States and spread through arts education. Andrade, as both an artist and an educator, infused Bauhaus principles with her own perspective as a working woman, creating a distinctive approach that enriches our understanding of this artistic legacy.”

The exhibition Edna Andrade: Imagination Is Never Static includes over 75 drawings, prints, and paintings by Andrade and focuses on works from the 1960s–80s, when she was a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and closely involved in Form Forum. Presenting polished drawings alongside sketches that reveal her thought processes in action, the exhibition is organized into seven sections that highlight the ways Andrade’s interest in various fields of study sustained her artistic imagination. Highlights on view include the painting Pale Star (1972), seventeen sketches from her Philadelphia Festival Study portfolio (1975), four drawings from her series Studies Based on Navajo Designs (c. 1980), and a later collage, Triptych Acadia (1992). Key loans from the artist’s estate and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania include a selection of her teaching notes, fliers for Form Forum programs, and design plans for public buildings around Philadelphia drawn by Andrade. Additionally, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has loaned the painting Night Sea, from 1977. The exhibition was curated by Abbaspour and Turner with Bridget Hinz, Senior Curatorial Assistant for Special Exhibitions and Publications.