When Stephen Coit (MBA 1977) attended Harvard College, the portraits he saw on the University’s walls could best be described by three adjectives: “Male, pale, and episcopal[e],” in the words of Harvard University Senior Admissions Officer David Evans.

In 2002, when the Harvard Foundation Portraiture Project launched, Coit (with a successful career as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist behind him) was selected to be the project’s artist. Since then, he has contributed 26 portraits that more fully capture the full range of diversity in the Harvard community, from the Reverend Peter Gomes to Chester Middlebrook Pierce, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School who was the first African American to be a full professor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“I tell many people that want to go into the arts that business school is fabulous training,” Coit told the Harvard Gazette. “It gives you so much flexibility, so much conceptual strength, so much interpersonal strength. And ever good artist is an entrepreneur.”

Coit, who in recent years has taught a portrait workshop during Wintersession, says that he uses the case method approach: “I would always ask my subject, what do you want to say in your portrait? What is the message for future generations? …In a way, each of the portrait artists in my class are writing a case about the subject.”

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