Happy City News has a joyful homecoming to share. On October 23, the Harvard Art Museums open Alfonso Ossorio: Line and Lineage, a focused exhibition that traces the artistic lineage of Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990) through a body of work that still resonates across generations. It runs through April 11, 2027, in the museums’ Modern and Contemporary Art galleries in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston.
Born in the Philippines, Ossorio studied art history at Harvard and soon after moved to New York City, where he became an influential figure in the post–World War II American avant-garde. Through a focused selection of works and archival materials, the exhibition explores his recurrent subjects, his material experimentation, and the development of line in his prints, drawings, and wax-resist paintings, charting both continuities and innovations across a six-decade practice.
The show also puts Ossorio in dialogue with the artists he influenced, learned from, and inspired. It is organized in conjunction with Knowledge Is Myth: Chimeric Continuities, on view October 1 to December 13, 2026, at the neighboring Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; works by Ossorio and by contemporary duo Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien appear in both exhibitions. Talks led by the exhibition curators will be hosted by both venues throughout the run, and a companion publication brings new scholarship on Ossorio’s works on paper. It is a warm invitation to rediscover an artist whose line keeps connecting generations.
Photo: Sdkb, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Harvard Art Museums atrium)
