Great works of art can deepen our understanding of the world around us. As we confront the current events shaping this period in history, art can offer solace, clarity, and perspective. Through Art for This Moment, MFA staff, artists, and others share objects from across our collections that carry personal significance and global resonance.
Under the Wave off Kanagawa (the Great Wave)
Tamar Avishai
How often do we appreciate the tremendous power of an ocean wave? Not often, I realize, while I sit in a rocking chair in my suburban Cleveland home…
St. Francis Supported by an Angel
Claire Dettelbach
My love for art has always been informed by an interest in how people across time think, feel, celebrate, grieve, and love. I view art as the tangible…
Powder Horn
Alexandra Moleski
The first time I ever visited the Museum of Fine Arts, I was only a few weeks into my first semester of college. I was new to Boston and more…
The Ghetto
Matthew Whiman
What is it about the Eldridge Street Synagogue, a remarkable vestige of New York City’s Jewish past, that makes me think of Samuel Bak’s painting The…
Caresse Maternelle
Sunny Kennedy
In 1866, when Mary Cassatt was 22 years old, she made a life-defining choice. Unsatisfied with the depth of opportunities afforded to women studying…
Virgin and Child
Frederick Ilchman
Art needs to be seen. I believe a work of art becomes truly complete when a viewer is part of the equation. Without someone observing the artist’s…
Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—7th Avenue Style
Megan Bernard
I didn’t grow up going to art museums. My parents never took me, but that didn’t mean they didn’t bring art into my life. Art was all around me in my…
The Departure of the Pilgrim Fathers from Delfshaven on Their Way to America
Matigan Holloway
When I was in second grade, my class spent the fall preparing for a play: a kid-friendly, historically inaccurate depiction of Christopher Columbus…
HiiiPoWeR: Hues of Revolution
Chenoa Baker
“I be off the slave ship building pyramids and writing my own hieroglyphs.” —Kendrick Lamar, “HiiiPoWeR” While working as an advisor on the exhibition…
Tiningo’ si Sirena: A Conversation with Gisela Charfauros McDaniel and Antoinette CHarfauros McDaniel
Marina Tyquiengco
Håfa Adai—hello! I recently spoke with artist Gisela Charfauros McDaniel and her mother, scholar Antoinette CHarfauros McDaniel, to discuss Gisela’s…
Raven Steals the Moon
Julia Joyce
Here is how I explain the layout of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to visitors in a hurry: “It’s separated by area of the world.” Except, it is not…
Silhouette Geometrique
Oleksandra Kovalchuk
Over the last few weeks, coming to the MFA has helped me find some peace while an outrageously cruel war goes on in my homeland, Ukraine. Each time I…
Known and Unknown
Benjamin Weiss
History is slippery. We like to think of the past as being made up of a knowable series of events that time and study have neatly sorted and sifted by…
Virginal (Muselar)
Bobby Giglio
A musical instrument is the anticipation of something. Sinuous strings and thin soundboards, carefully carved air ducts and hollow tubes, membranes…
Portrait of a Man and Woman in an Interior
Christine Evers
“Stories and objects share something, a patina. . . . Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed. . . . But it…