Animals in Brick and Bronze: Katharine Lane Weems, Biology, and the Harvard Biological Laboratories Building,...

Between 1930 and 1937, the Boston-based artist Katharine Lane Weems (1899-1989) designed and executed a complex architectural sculpture program for the façade of the Biological Laboratories building at Harvard University. Harvard biology faculty and administrators looked to the Biological Laboratories, funded in 1928 by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and constructed between 1930 and 1931, as an opportunity to unify the increasingly fragmented biological research and teaching affiliated with the university and to argue for the importance of modernized facilities as critical to the future of the experimental life sciences. During the design process, Weems collaborated with naturalists associated with Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, Thomas Barbour and Harold J. Coolidge, who took control of the exterior sculpture program for the laboratory. Over a seven-year period, Weems drew on her expertise as an animal sculptor and her interest in modeling animals from life to design and execute an "educational exhibit" on the building façade. Her sculptures brought natural history display practices and traditions of animals on exhibition in zoological parks into conversations about the architecture of the university laboratory. Weems carved four animal group friezes and thirty-four individual animal portraits into brick; crafted three bronze door panels depicting organisms from the sea, land, and air; and created two, massive three-ton bronze Indian rhinos, Bessie and Victoria, to stand guard at the laboratory's threshold. Weems' animal sculpture program represents a tremendous artistic achievement for a woman artist. It also offers a novel lens with which to re-examine efforts to unify the biological sciences before the evolutionary synthesis and to re-consider the enduring impact of animals on display on public understandings of science.