The main building contains 204,000 square feet (19,000 m2) of space for public exhibitions, classrooms, conservation and research labs, and other related functions.

The renovated building at 32 Quincy Street united the three museums in a single facility designed by architect Renzo Piano, which increased gallery space by 40% and added a glass, truncated pyramidal roof.

[3] The renovation added six levels of galleries, classrooms, lecture halls, and new study areas providing access to parts of the 250,000-piece collection of the museums.

[15]) The Fogg Museum is renowned for its holdings of Western paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, photographs, prints, and drawings from the Middle Ages to the present.

The museum's Maurice Wertheim Collection is a notable group of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that contains many famous masterpieces, including paintings and sculptures by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh.

Italian Renaissance period paintings — Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Gherardo Starnina, Cosme Tura, Giovanni di Paolo, and Lorenzo Lotto.

American paintings — Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale, Robert Feke, Sanford Gifford, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Man Ray, Ben Shahn, Jacob Lawrence, Lewis Rubenstein, Robert Sloan, Phillip Guston, Jackson Pollock, Kerry James Marshall, and Clyfford Still.

In the fall of 2021, the Harvard Art Museums launched the "ReFrame" initiative, with the goal of promoting greater representation and presenting more perspectives within their exhibits.

[19] The Busch-Reisinger is the only museum in North America dedicated to the study of art from the German-speaking countries of Central and Northern Europe in all media and in all periods.

The Hall continues to house the Busch–Reisinger's founding collection of medieval plaster casts and an exhibition on the history of the Busch–Reisinger Museum; it also hosts concerts on its Flentrop pipe organ.

[2] Since at least 2018,[28] critics and protestors have called for Harvard to remove the "Sackler" family name from the building and the museum, citing its connection to the aggressive marketing of the addictive drug OxyContin.

[29][30][31][32] This argument is rebutted by activists, who charge that Arthur Sackler promoted Valium and set up an unethical system of marketing drugs that continued after his death.

[citation needed] After its completion in 1984, the building received widespread press coverage,[39] with general acknowledgment of its significance as a Stirling design and a Harvard undertaking.

[8] Stirling employed an inventive design in an effort to let the museum peacefully co-exist with neighboring buildings in an area that he termed "an architectural zoo".

In front of the entrance to the Sackler building, two monolithic reinforced concrete pillars still stand, which were originally intended to support the connector structure.

In January 2019, after undergoing an 18-month renovation, the Sackler building was re-opened as an educational and research facility containing no significant public exhibition spaces.