Museum Spotlight: Harvard Art Museums / Busch-Reisinger Museum

We love telling stories about our amazing network of participating museums and the art they have brought into their collections through Museum Exchange. One of our recent favorites is how our partners at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, which is part of the Harvard Art Museums, has incorporated art donations into their programming.

The Busch-Reisinger’s mission is to champion and record the achievements of German artists and, since our early days in 2021, they have used our services to find appropriate works to augment their collection.

Lynette Roth, the Daimler Curator at the Busch-Reisinger, was an early adopter of Museum Exchange, first pursuing a signature painting and sculpture by Thomas Scheibitz back in 2022. Roth has said of the partnership:

Over the last few years, generous gifts made possible by Museum Exchange have significantly strengthened the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection of contemporary art and directly supported our teaching and research mission. Eberhard Havekost’s Television Light (2007), for example, was featured in our permanent collection galleries and played an important role in Harvard’s course “Introduction to Contemporary Art” in our Art Study Center. Yngve Holen’s Butterfly (2016) is now on prominent view as part of our special exhibition Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation, which takes an unprecedented look at German art after 1980.

Curatorial fellow Jackson Davidow giving a gallery talk; in background left: Eberhard Havekost, Television Light, 2007, oil on canvas, 63 x 43 1/4 inches. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg.

As with so many of our academic museum members, the use of art to facilitate teaching has been a primary criteria behind the works selected by the Busch-Reisinger. It is worth noting that our donor community often responds enthusiastically to the notion of students interacting with art in this way. Occasionally we also happen upon alumni connections between our institutional partners and our donors, adding another layer of significance to the gift. The Busch-Reisinger and other university art museums have benefitted from those fortuitous circumstances on a regular basis.

We have really valued our partnership with the Harvard Art Museums over the years and in addition to the gifts mentioned here, several others are still in process and will be made public as they are completed. 

If you enjoyed this peek into the impact of our work, please consider subscribing to our newsletter (in the signup below) to hear more stories about the productive partnerships forged within our museum network and the gratifying results that Museum Exchange gifts continue to produce for museums, audiences, and donors alike.

Yngve Holen, Butterfly, 2016, aluminum, 102 3/4 x 59 7/8 x 21 1/4 inches. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.