The Institute: Events

Tuesday, January 30, 2018, 6:30pm
Speaker: Dr. Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya, Curator for North Africa and Iberia, Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar
Title: Visualizing Pilgrimage: Images of Mecca and Medina in the Collections of the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha
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Abstract: Islamic pilgrimage routes have influenced the production of manuscripts, not only for those intended to be transported by pilgrims, but also for commercial transactions related to the pilgrimage itself. Pilgrimage and the mobility of the pilgrims has encouraged the development of manuscripts of several genres. These have played a role not only in the canonization of the rituals but also in the standardization of the sacred places’ representations and in the use of such manuscripts as instruments of devotion. Based on examples of representations of Mecca and Medina in manuscripts conserved in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, this lecture will attempt to demonstrate the variety of images of the holy sites – whether executed on scrolls, bound volumes or talismanic documents – as well as the different functions of such illustrations.

Dr. Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya is the Curator for North Africa and Iberia at the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar, where she curated several exhibitions including Hajj – The Journey through Art (2013 - 2014) in collaboration with the British Museum, Qajar Women (2015) and Imperial Threads: Motifs and Artisans from Turkey, Iran and India (2017-2018). She completed her Ph.D. in Islamic Art History and Archaeology at the Pantheon Sorbonne University in Paris and is specialized on the Western Mediterranean, manuscripts and pilgrimage-related devotional materials in the Islamic world. For the 2017-2018 Academic year, Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya has been undertaking a research project in Harvard university as a post-doctoral research associate, as part of the Aga Khan Programme for Islamic Art and Architecture. Dr. Chekhab-Abudaya taught Islamic Art at undergraduate and graduate levels for four years at the Pantheon Sorbonne and INALCO (2007-2011).

Tuesday, January 30, 2018, 5:30pm
Series: Works in Progress
Speaker: Colin Eisler on Durer's Genius of Syphilis: Melencolia I.
This event is only open to the Institute's Community

February

Friday, February 2, 2018, 6:30pm CANCELLED
Due to unforeseen circumstances, Salvatore Settis will not be able to be here on Friday, February 2, 2018 and the event has been cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Series: Greek & Roman Seminar
Speaker: Salvatore Settis, Scuola Normale Superiore
Title: "The Materiality of the Divine: Aniconism, Iconoclasm, Iconography”

Monday, February 5, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Works in Progress
Speaker: Julia Pelta Feldman on Charles Simonds and the 'Clay World'
This event is only open to the Institute's Community

Wednesday, February 7, 2018, 6:00pm
Series: Medieval Art Forum
Speaker: Lucretia Kargère, Conservator, The Cloisters Metropolitan Museum
Title: Romanesque Polychrome Wood Sculptures: A New Wave of Technical Studies in Europe
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Abstract: The scientific analysis of polychrome wood sculptures has developed exponentially in the last thirty years, revolutionizing our knowledge of the techniques employed in medieval times. Our understanding of Romanesque polychrome wood sculptures is still partial, admittedly behind the study of architectural sculptures. Despite their age and condition, a clear impetus to examine these objects is rising in a number of European countries revealing highly colorful works of art.
The lecture’s focal point is the technical examination of a group of French Romanesque sculptures both at The Metropolitan Museum and in France, as it fits into wider questions of typology, aspects of style and influences, dating, and workshop practices in Europe. The long material history of these objects challenges their study, but close examinations divulge significant clues as to their original aspects, relations to other arts, original liturgical functions, re-uses and adaptations.

Thursday, February 8, 2018, 5:30pm
Title: First Annual Gayle Greenhill Photography Lecture
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Monday, February 12, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Artists at the Institute
Speaker: Rachel Rose
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Abstract: Rachel Rose (b. 1986) is among the foremost artists working with and in video today. Guided by research into such topics as vast as 19th century park design, cryogenics, to the American Revolutionary War, modernist architecture, and the sensory experience of walking in outer space, Rose’s work pinpoints what it is that makes us human, and how we seek to alter, enhance, and escape that designation.

Thursday, February 15, 2018, 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society Lecture
Speaker: Joanne Pillsbury, Andrall E. Pearson Curator of Ancient American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Title: From the Heart of the Andes: On Creating Golden Kingdoms

Friday, February 16, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Speaker: Susan Naquin
RSVP: chinaprojectworkshop@gmail.com

Tuesday, February 20, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Works in Progress
Speaker: Ann Macy Roth will discuss "Working and Watching: Active and Passive Representations in Egyptian Art"
This event is only open to the Institute's Community

Tuesday, February 20, 2018, 6:30pm
Samothrace Lecture
Speaker: Bonna Wescoat, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History, Emory University; Director of Emory University and NYU Excavations, Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace

Monday, February 26, 2018, 6:00pm
Series: Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor in Conservation and Technical Studies Lecture
Speaker: David Saunders, British Museum
Title: "Seductive Light, Destructive Light: Balancing Presentation and Preservation of Works of Art"
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Tuesday, February 27, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Silberberg Lecture Series
Speaker: Whitney Davis
Title: The Dancer and the Dance; or, The Projection and the Projected
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Abstract: Writing in the English language in New York City in 1897 and 1943 respectively, the anthropologists Franz Boas (born in 1858 in Minden, Westphalia) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (born in 1908 in Brussels, Belgium) – both later identified with sustained, powerful, and politically influential critiques of racialism in general anthropology and in American and United Nations public policies – stated fundamental principles of their ‘art histories’ in bravura (and highly tendentious) readings of the languages, visual cultures, and performance traditions of the indigenous peoples of the ‘North Pacific’ coast of present-day British Columbia, especially of the Kwakwakw’wakw people (‘Kwakiutl’) and their mask-dancing ceremonies (partly suppressed in Canadian outlaw of the potlach). This lecture examines the multilingual exchanges and inter-translations in question as the determinative context for two of the most influential proposals about the very nature of the ‘languages of art’, widely applied throughout world art history – Boas’s theory of projection and Lévi-Strauss’s ‘structuralist’ method.

March

Thursday, March 1, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Greek & Roman Seminar
Speaker: Alessandro Pierattini, University of Notre Dame
Title: "The Temple Before the Order: The Origins of Greek Temple Architecture”

Thursday, March 8, 2018, 6:00pm
**Due to unforeseen circumstances, the event on Thursday, March 8, 2018 has been rescheduled to a later date. Please check back soon for more updates. We apologize for the inconvenience.** Series: Pre-Columbian Society Lecture
Speaker: Simon Martin, Senior Research Specialist, University of Pennsylvania Museum
Title: Entangled Tesserae: Looking at Classic Maya Political Society

Sunday, March 18, 2018, 5:00pm
Title: The Songs of Claude Debussy on the One Hundredth Anniversary of his Death with Sylvie Robert & Steve Beck
This event is sold out

This event is canceled due to snow
Wednesday, March 21, 2018, 11:00am
Series: Works in Progress
Speaker: Kent Minturn will present "The Political Unconscious of Art Brut Materials"
This event is only open to the Institute's Community

Wednesday, March 21, 2018, 6:00pm (Rescheduled to April 4th)
Series: Medieval Art Forum
Speaker: William J. Diebold, Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History, Reed College
Title: Displaying ‘German Greatness’ in Nazi Germany: The Middle Ages in the Exhibition 'Deutsche Größe' (1940-1942) and its Legacy
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Abstract: Although it is not well known, the cultural-historical exhibition Deutsche Größe (“German Greatness” or “Grandeur”) was the most important museum display of the Nazi era. The show’s subject was the history of Germany from the early Middle Ages until the assumption of power by Adolf Hitler. Deutsche Größe was supported at the highest levels of the Nazi Party and its presentation of history was frankly ideological, but the show expressed that ideology through a series of ambitious and innovative display techniques. This lecture presents the exhibition, describes how it came about, and how it worked to shape an understanding of history that would serve Nazi goals. Special attention is paid to Deutsche Größe’s display of the art and culture of the Middle Ages, an area of history that was especially fraught and problematic for the National Socialists, and to the legacy of Deutsche Größe in several more recent German museum exhibitions (ranging in date from 1977 to 2006).

Tuesday, March 27, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Silberberg Lecture Series
Speaker: Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum
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An Inadequate History of the Projected Image

This lecture proposes a re-examination of the history of the projected image in American art since the 1960s, foregrounding darkness and black space as challenges to the whiteness of the gallery in political as well as formal terms. How can a multi-ethnic history of the moving image in contemporary art redefine the stakes of what constitutes cinematic space? How do issues of the body, identity, and subjectivity in historical projective installations read differently at a moment in which a new generation of moving image artists is challenging the norms of technological power and control, and re-configuring our relationship to self-representation, subjectivity, gender, and race?

Wednesday, March 28, 2018, 6:30am
Series: Works in Progress
Speaker: PhD Candidate Daniella Berman will present a portion of her dissertation "Aesthetics of Contingency: History and the Unrealized Paintings of the French Revolution"
MThis event is only open to the Institute's Community

Thursday, March 29, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Artists at the Institute
Speaker: Lee Ming Wei
Watch online

Friday, March 30, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Speaker: Daniel Greenberg

April

Tuesday, April 3, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Works in Progress
Speaker: Hiroko Ikegami
Visiting Professor Hiroko Ikegami will present "Pop in Japan: Embracing America, Contesting Empire"
This event is only open to the Institute's Community

Wednesday, April 4, 2018, 6:00pm
Series: Medieval Art Forum
Speaker: William J. Diebold, Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History, Reed College
Title: Displaying ‘German Greatness’ in Nazi Germany: The Middle Ages in the Exhibition 'Deutsche Größe' (1940-1942) and its Legacy
LEARN MORE

Abstract: Although it is not well known, the cultural-historical exhibition Deutsche Größe (“German Greatness” or “Grandeur”) was the most important museum display of the Nazi era. The show’s subject was the history of Germany from the early Middle Ages until the assumption of power by Adolf Hitler. Deutsche Größe was supported at the highest levels of the Nazi Party and its presentation of history was frankly ideological, but the show expressed that ideology through a series of ambitious and innovative display techniques. This lecture presents the exhibition, describes how it came about, and how it worked to shape an understanding of history that would serve Nazi goals. Special attention is paid to Deutsche Größe’s display of the art and culture of the Middle Ages, an area of history that was especially fraught and problematic for the National Socialists, and to the legacy of Deutsche Größe in several more recent German museum exhibitions (ranging in date from 1977 to 2006).

Thursday, April 5, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Greek & Roman Seminar
Speaker: Milette Gaifman, Yale University
Title: “The Two-dimensional and Three-dimensional in Greek Painted Pots.”

Monday, April 9, 2018, 6:30pm
IV Annual Artist Discussion: Display Cases at the Institute of Fine Arts
Artists Nona Faustine, Kit White, and Anton Würth demonstrate a reverence for history in their practice of photography, painting, and printmaking. They will discuss their practice in the fourth Annual Artist Discussion for the exhibits in the Display Cases at the Institute of Fine Arts. Curator Lisa A. Banner moderates.
Watch live

Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Works in Progress
Speaker: PhD Candidate Jennifer Buonocore will present "Dan Graham: Possible Poems, 1966-1969"
This event is only open to the Institute's Community

Thursday, April 12, 2018, 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society Lecture
Speaker: Sarahh Scher, Visiting Lecturer, Salem State University

Friday, April 13, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Speaker: Meimei Rado
RSVP: chinaprojectworkshop@gmail.com

Monday, April 16, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: New York Renaissance Consortium
Speaker: Lorraine Karafel, Assistant Professor of Art and Design History, Parsons School of Design, and Interim Director, Parsons/Cooper-Hewitt MA Program in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies
Title: Raphael: Designs for Tapestries

Wednesday, April 18, 2018, 7:00pm
Title: Curating Global Contemporary Art: A Conversation with Lynn Zelevansky
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Description: For the last thirty years, Lynn Zelevansky has been a leader in expanding and questioning the categories of modern and contemporary art. She has curated groundbreaking exhibitions of individual artists like Cildo Meireles (1990), Guillermo Kuitca (1991), Gabriel Orozco (1993), Yayoi Kusama (1998), and Hélio Oiticica (2016-2017). Her 1997 survey Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism introduced global artists such as Mona Hatoum, Jac Leirner, and Rachel Whiteread to an American audience. In 2004, Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-1970s presented varieties of postwar abstraction hitherto ignored in the United States, from Brazilian Neo-Concretism to the German “Zero” group. In 2009, she co-curated Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea. Speaking with NYU professor Pepe Karmel, Zelevansky, an IFA alumna (MA 1987), will discuss the challenges of curating global contemporary art, and her own journey from the Museum of Modern Art to the Los Angeles County Museum to the Carnegie Museum of Art, where she served as Director for the years 2009-2017.

Thursday, April 19 - Friday, April 20, 2018
Third Annual Symposium of Latin American Art
Super/Natural: Excess, Ecologies, and Art in the Americas
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Monday, April 23, 2018, 6:00pm
Series: Samuel H. Kress Lecture
Speaker: Rupert Featherstone
RSVP Watch live

Tuesday, April 24, 2018, 6:30pm
Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lecture
Speaker: Lowery Sims
RSVP watch live

Wednesday, April 25, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Works in Progress
Speaker: Günter Kopcke
This event is only open to the Institute's Community
This event has been postponed. Please check back for updates.**

Thursday, April 26, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Annual Alumni Careers Panel
This event is only open to the Institute's Community

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Please join us in conversation at our Annual Alumni Careers Panel with four Institute graduates about their life and professional careers.

Followed by a reception

Panelists:
Adam Glick (MA ‘09), Associate Director, Annual Fund and Special Projects, Hudson River Park Friends

Marc Hajjar (MA ‘15), Associate Director, Business Development, Winston Art Group

Jessica Pace (MA/Conservation Certificate ‘12), Preventive Conservator, The Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation Department at New York University Libraries

Louisa Wood Ruby (MA ’88, PhD ’97), Head of Research, The Frick Art Reference Library

Moderated by Sanya Mirpuri, second-year Art History MA candidate

About the Panelists:

Adam Glick joined Hudson River Park Friends as Associate Director, Annual Fund and Special Projects in February 2018. Hudson River Park Friends is the designated fundraising partner of the Hudson River Park Trust and is an independent, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to the completion, care, programming, and enhancement of 550-acre Hudson River Park. Adam previously worked as Senior Development Officer at the Brooklyn Museum and served as the inaugural Curator of Mad. Sq. Art, the public art program of the Madison Square Park Conservancy. He has also held positions at the Museum of Modern Art and New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art. He holds an MA in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and received a BA in Music and Art History from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Adam also serves on the Board of Governors of Idyllwild Arts Academy.

Marc Hajjar attended Washington University in St. Louis for his Bachelor's degree and received a Master’s in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute prior to starting at the Institute of Fine Arts. He graduated from the IFA in 2015 with a Master's degree. While in his second year at the IFA, Marc worked in the Bids Department at Sotheby’s New York, where he was part of a small team handling the logistics and administrative processes of a live auction from registering bids to phone bidding. After Sotheby's, he accepted a position to manage the private sales and auction consignments at Winston Art Group, the nation's leading independent appraisal and advisory firm. He currently works in a business development and relationship management role at Winston Art Group while still overseeing select private transactions.

Jessica Pace is the Preventive Conservator at the Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation Department at New York University Libraries. She received her MA in Art History and Certificate of Advanced Study in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center at NYU, and her BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Barnard College. Prior to this role, she worked in objects conservation labs at the Brooklyn Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis in Turkey. Her current projects include devising accessible and economical housing for archival collections, creating training programs in preventive techniques for librarians and archivists, and improving housing and handling of materials during transport.

Louisa Wood Ruby is Head of Research at The Frick Art Reference Library where she runs both the Scholars’ Program and the Digital Art History Lab (DAHL). The Scholars’ Program aims to promote collaboration and facilitate the exchange of ideas and dissemination of new work among independent researchers while the DAHL seeks to increase awareness of methodological and scholarly trends in digital humanities and art history. Louisa received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts with a dissertation on the Drawings of Paul Bril, subsequently published by Brepols. Her articles on Netherlandish art have appeared in Burlington Magazine, Master Drawings, Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art as well as in Festschrifts, symposia proceedings and exhibition catalogs. She is currently working on an online monograph and catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Jan Brueghel the Elder in conjunction with Terez Gerszi of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, which will result in an exhibition at the Rockoxhuis in Antwerp in 2019.

Friday, April 27, 2018
IFA - Frick Symposium
Please check back for more information
RSVP

May

Tuesday, May 1, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Silberberg Lecture Series
Speaker: Emine Fetvacı from the Department of Art and Architecture at Boston University
Lecture Title: The Album of the World Emperor: Cosmopolitan Collecting at the Ottoman Court of the Seventeenth-Century
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Wednesday, May 2, 2018, 6:00pm
Great Hall Exhibition Opening
Jamie Isenstein: Universe of Logs
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The Institute of Fine Arts Great Hall Exhibition Series is pleased to present Universe of Logs, an exhibition of new work by New York based artist Jamie Isenstein. Taking her cue from the artifice of decorative fireplace logs often found within historic house and art museums, Isenstein highlights these seldom noticed objects as a way to consider how these institutions shape our understanding of truth and knowledge. Isenstein also draws upon images of torches depicted in the Neoclassical friezes of the Great Hall to situate these logs in the evolving meaning of torches in our fraught political moment. The exhibition will feature logs from numerous participating New York City institutions.

Thursday, May 3, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Works in Progress
Speaker: Hannah De Corte will present "Painting as absorption. Looking at the textile of the canvas and its properties of absorption"
This event is only open to the Institute's Community

Friday, May 4, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Latin American Forum
Game Changers: Women Artists in 1970s Mexico. A conversation with Magali Lara and Mónica Mayer moderated by Carla Stellweg
Speakers: Magali Lara, Mónica Mayer, Carla Stellweg, Madeline Murphy Turner
RSVP watch live

Friday, May 11, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Speaker: Chenghua
RSVP: chinaprojectworkshop@gmail.com

The Great Hall Exhibitions

The Institute's Video Archive

Archaeology at the Institute