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Public Programs
The Institute: your destination for the past, present, and future of art.
Connect to the latest thinking about the arts from ancient times to tomorrow’s prospects. Become part of the conversation, keep up with our events calendar (further down this page) and choose from our extensive range of lecture series, special lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and conferences. Enjoy our video archive to catch up with previous events. Many of our lectures are broadcast live.
2018 Calendar
- September
- Tuesday, September 11, 2018, 6:30pm
Speaker: Gayatri Sinha
Title: Other Feminisms: Four Indian Women Artists
LEARN MORE about "Other Feminisms: Four Indian Women Artists"About the Lecture: Beginning in 1985, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh and Madhvi Parekh organized exhibitions of their work in Bhopal, Bombay and Delhi, designing their own installations and commissioning catalogues. Three decades later they are viewed as the first if not the only women’s artist collective in South Asia. Coming together in their 40s, and working in an intensely patriarchal society, they addressed domestic and bodily experience along with political issues. Drawing from images of the female figure in Indian myth and history, they created a model for a new, transnational feminism.
Each artist developed her own unique language: the Chinese scroll and Persian-Indic miniature in Nilima Sheikh, painted rotating Mylar ‘prayer-wheels’ in Nalani Malani, the figure of the middle aged woman as witness in Arpita Singh, and an invented folk style in the work of Madhvi Parekh. Working individually and collaboratively, they combined grass roots feminism, classical Indian art, artisanal materials and theater design, defining an alternative artistic tradition, outside the canon of modernism, that could embody women’s experience.
About the Speaker: Gayatri Sinha is an art editor, critic and curator. Her primary areas of enquiry are in gender in contemporary and classical art, media and South Asian social history. She has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Lady Shriram College, and the Bhau Dajji lad Museum, and is the founder of criticalcollective.in, India’s first web based archive and news magazine on art.
Her edited volumes include: Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists (Marg, 2010), Art and Visual Culture in India 1857- 2007 (Marg Publications, 2009); Indian Art: an Overview (Rupa Books, 2003), Expressions and Evocations Contemporary Women Artists of India (Marg, 1996). She has written monographs on Krishen Khanna, Himmat Shah and M F Husain, and is currently editing a volume on modern and contemporary photography.
She has curated exhibitions in New Delhi, Mumbai, Frankfurt, Liege, Newark, Minneapolis, Shanghai, and Seoul, including: Part Narratives, 2017; Diary Entries, 2015; Water, 2013; Ideas of the Sublime, 2013; Cynical Love: Life in the everyday, 2011; Looking Glass: The Existence of Difference, 2010; Constructed Realities, 2010; Failed Plot, 2009; Public Places, Private Spaces: Contemporary Photography and Video Art in India, 2007-2008, Watching Me Watching India, 2006; Middle Age Spread: Imaging India 1947–2004, 2004; Vilas: The Idea of Pleasure, 2000; Woman/Goddess, 1998-2001; The Self and the World, 1997. http://www.csgsnyu.org/
This program has been co-sponsored by NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
- Wednesday, September 12, 2018, 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York Lecture
Speaker: Lisa Trever, Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor of Pre-Columbian Art, Columbia University
Title: Pre-Columbian Art History in the Age of the Wall
LEARN MORE about "Pre-Columbian Art History in the Age of the Wall"Abstract: In an era of renewed politicization of the US southern border, and with federal calls for nearly 2000 miles of border wall construction, what are the stakes of Pre-Columbian art history in the United States in 2018? In this talk, Trever exchanges the language of walls and borders for metaphors of intellectual horizon lines and evidentiary wells. She addresses the multilayered potential of Pre-Columbian art history during a time when the scholarly work of humanistic recognition of indigenous America’s past and present bears an especially heavy weight of representation. Her talk concludes with discussion of examples of contemporary artists who are using the forms of Pre-Columbian art as renewed muses for artistic expression and social activism. - Monday, September 17, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: South & About - Thursday, September 20, 2018, 6:30pm
Speaker: Maria Stavrinaki, Associate Professor of History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the Université Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne
Title: Henri Matisse & Joan Miró: Two Moments in the Disjunctive Genealogy of Prehistory
LEARN MORE about "Other Feminisms: Four Indian Women Artists"Abstract: The slow and difficult revelation of prehistory in the second half of the 19th c. raised two kinds of reaction in modern artists. On the one hand, a realist reconstitution, supposed to fill the gaps in archaeological knowledge and to give life back to fossils and images ; on the other, a disjunctive genealogy seizing the void of the origin, responding to the stupor triggered by the prehistoric artifacts and finding in this stupor the justification of the role that art could play, now as then, in individual or collective life. In the first case, the present was wiped out to the benefit of an atemporal reconstitution ; in the second, it asserted itself as a difference in repetition. Inaugurated by aestheticism, this second approach was adopted by some among the most interesting artists of the 20th c., such as Matisse and Miró. By focusing on a few paintings, we will try to understand the unique and irreplaceable functions of the signifier « prehistory » in the relation of these artists to history, technology and the medium of painting.
Maria Stavrinaki is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the Université Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her work focuses on the relations between art, human sciences and politics. Her recent publications include Dada Presentism : An Essay on Art and History (Stanford University Press, 2016) ; Le sujet et son milieu : huit essais sur les avant-gardes allemandes (Mamco, 2017) ; Contraindre à la liberté : Carl Einstein, les avant-gardes, l’histoire (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte/Les presses du réel, 2018). She is currently working on a book about « prehistorical modernity » and is cocurator of an exhibition on the same subject at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (opening 2019). - Monday, September 24, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Looking Closer: Conservation in the Museum
The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of presentations by current art conservation students about their summer experiences in museum laboratories and libraries.
LEARN MORE about "Other Feminisms: Four Indian Women Artists"PAPER, BOOK, AND PHOTO CONSERVATION
Rachel Mochon
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Katherine Parks
American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY
New-York Historical Society, New York, NY
Catherine Stephens
Historic Book Structures Workshop, Wilmington, DE
American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY
New-York Historical Society, New York, NY
PAINTINGS CONSERVATION
Kristin Holder
A Portable Triptych by a Follower of Duccio from the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, TN: Freeing the Panels from their Cradles and a Historic Reconstruction of the Original, Conservation Center, New York, NY
OBJECTS CONSERVATION
Andy Wolf
The Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH
TIME-BASED MEDIA
Taylor Healy
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
A question and answer session will follow the first three presentations and again after the last. Please join us for a light reception in the Loeb Room at the conclusion of the evening's program. - Wednesday, September 26, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Christine Poggi
Title: Stage at the Edge of the Sea: Picasso's Scenographic Imagination
This event is only open to the Institute's Community - Thursday, September 27, 2018, 6:30pm
Greek and Roman Seminar
Speaker: Francesca Spatafora, Director of the Archeological Museum in Palermo “Antonino Salinas.”
Lecture Title: Colonial Encounters’ in Archaic Western Sicily
Please note that this lecture will be in Italian
- Friday, September 28, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Speaker: Cheng-hua Wang, Princeton University
RSVP: chinaprojectworkshop@gmail.com
- Tuesday, September 11, 2018, 6:30pm
- October
- Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Silberberg Lecture Series
Speaker: Anthony Vidler, Professor of Architecture, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, Cooper Union
Lecture Title: Architecture After the Rain: The Surrealist Turn in the Post-Atomic Era
LEARN MORE about Anthony Vidler's lectureAbstract: This lecture will investigate the strange and quite unprecedented turn towards post World War I Surrealist thought after the 1960s in Britain, and its relation to the deferred “shock” of World War II and the need to find other ways to counter modernism (and post-modern “Brutalism”) while registering the new realities of the Cold War.
Professor Anthony Vidler received his professional degree in architecture from Cambridge University in England, and his doctorate in History and Theory from the University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. Prior to his deanship and professorship at the Cooper Union, Professor Vidler taught at the Princeton University School of Architecture from 1965 to 93 and at UCLA from 1993 to 2001. His curatorial work has encompassed French Enlightenment architecture and postwar architecture in Britain. The recipient of awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Professor Vidler has published numerous books including Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Regime (MIT Press, 1990), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (MIT Press, 1992), Warped Space: Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (MIT Press, 2000) and Histories of the Immediate Present: The Invention of Architectural Modernism (MIT Press, 2008). - Thursday, October 4, 2018, 6:00pm
Speaker: Pope.L, Artist
LEARN MORE about Pope L.Description: The Institute of Fine Arts is delighted to invite you to an artist talk with Pope.L, in a show and tell concerning several of his major projects over the last few years. Pope.L is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create art works in various formats, for example, writing, painting, performance, installation, video and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applies some of the same social, formal and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race and community. The goals for his work are several: joy, money and uncertainty—not necessarily in that order. 'One thing after another (part two)' is currently on exhibition at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York City, until October 27, 2018. Additional recent projects include: ‘One thing after another’, La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2018), 'Brown People Are The Wrens In The Parking Lot', University of Chicago (2017), 'Flint Water', What Pipeline, Detroit, Michigan (2017), 'Whisper Campaign', Documenta 14, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017) and 'Claim', Whitney Biennial, New York City for which he was awarded the Bucksbaum Prize (2017). - Friday, October 5, 2018, 10:00am - 6:30pm
Contemporary Art and the Crisis of Globalization
LEARN MORE about "Contemporary Art and the Crisis of Globalization"This conference will address the ways that resistance to globalization has affected contemporary art. Beginning in the 1990s, many global biennials favored a postcolonial and multicultural aesthetic, rooted in diasporic experience, emphasizing inclusion, diversity, and hybridity. Since then, rising inequality, religious and ethnic conflicts, drug wars, mass migration, and a revival of populism and nationalism have revealed the limitations of globalization. Within the art world, the postcolonial model has increasingly been called into question. Many critics, artists, and activists have signaled a desire to break with the ongoing legacies of colonial ways of seeing and knowing. These participants in the art world, many of them indigenous, see neoliberal models of progress and development as profoundly destructive, and are challenging neoliberal, statist agendas in both the Global North and the Global South. By engaging such responses, this conference will explore how contemporary art mediates larger geopolitical forces, even as it is also determined by them.
Speakers include
David Joselit, CUNY
Saloni Mathur, UCLA
Naeem Mohaiemen, Artist
Jennifer Ponce de León, University of Pennsylvania
Jolene Rickard, Cornell University
Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, Cleveland Museum of Art
Xiaoyu Weng, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Schedule of Events
10:00am
Welcome and Introduction of the first panel (Rob Slifkin & Andrew Weiner)
10:10-11:00
Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, “Between the Margins and Altermodern: African Art and Global Contemporary”
11:00-11:50
Xiaoyu Weng: "Whose resistance? Poetry and Place Afar”
11:50-12:40
David Joselit, “Curated Cultures”
12:40-1:00
Panel discussion and Q&A moderated by Rachel Price
1:00-2:20
Lunch
2:20-2:30
Introduction to second panel (Pepe Karmel)
2:30-3:20
Saloni Mathur, “The World, the Art & the Critic: Global South Conjunctures”
3:20-4:10
Jennifer Ponce de Leon, “The Art of Rebellion in the Fourth World War”
4:10-4:30
Coffee break
4:30-5:20
Jolene Rickard, “The Global Indigenous Return – TO THE BUSH”
5:20-6:10
Naeem Mohaiemen, “A missing can of film”
6:10-6:30
Panel discussion moderated by Brynn Hatton
6:30-7:30
Reception
RSVP required for "Contemporary Art and the Crisis of Globalization" -
Wednesday, October 10, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Latin American Forum
Title: Complexities and Complicities of the Gaze: A Conversation between Milagros de la Torre and Prof. Shelley Rice
LEARN MORE about Shelley Rice's talkAbstract: In this conversation, Milagros de la Torre and Shelley Rice, Tisch School of the Arts will talk about the artist’s career in the field of photography and the development of her artistic practice. Placing as a central theme the complexities of the gaze, the speakers will explore some of the topics developed in the artist’s work dealing with the construction of memory, and how these processes form individual and collective identities in Peru and other Latin American countries. -
Thursday, October 11, 2018, 6:30pm
Annual Selinunte Presentation
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Monday, October 15, 2018, 6:00pm
Series: Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor in Conservation and Technical Studies Lecture
Speaker: Harriet Stratis
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October 16, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Cook Lecture
Speaker: Dr. Dorothy Kosinski, The Phillips Collection
Title: ‘Artists help God create the world.’ Markus Lüpertz at The Phillips Collection/ Journeys and Return with Orpheus
LEARN MORE about Dr. Dorothy Kosinski talkAbstract: This lecture unpacks the importance of staging the first museum retrospective in the USA of famed contemporary German artist, Markus Lüpertz. The Phillips, America’s first museum of modern art, was founded in 1921 as ‘an intimate museum combined with an experiment station’, the first forum in the nation’s capital devoted to contemporary artists and their antecedents in the 19th century. The Phillips boasts a history of ‘firsts’ -- often the earliest museum to purchase an artist’s work, or the first museum to stage a one-person exhibition. This exhibition is consistent with that bold history. The exhibition project confronted the question of why the artist’s work, so celebrated in Europe, continues to be under appreciated in the States, while touching on issues about market forces, tides of criticism, museum politics, and varying cultural traditions. Above all, The Phillips is a museum that celebrates the enduring vitality of painting, and the Lüpertz exhibition speaks elegantly to that tradition. For Kosinski, Lüpertz’s deep knowledge of mythological and literary traditions, as well as his love of storytelling, resonated powerfully with her formation at the Institute of Fine Arts, with the direction and instruction of Gert Schiff and Robert Rosenblum, among others, who so richly laid forth the traditions of German and British painting. Lüpertz’s insistent poetic allusions in his painting appealed, too, to Kosinski’s exhaustive exploration of mythological-artist paradigms including Orpheus, and to her decades-long career as a curator crafting compelling narratives.
Speaker Bio: Dr. Dorothy Kosinski is the Vradenburg Director and CEO of The Phillips Collection, a role she has served since 2008. Prior to joining The Phillips Collection, Dr. Kosinski worked at the Dallas Museum of Art, where she served in a number of capacities from 1995 to 2008, last as Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture. From 1985 to 1997, she lived in Basel, Switzerland and was the curator of the Douglas Cooper Collection of cubist art. She also served as an independent curator of major exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; The Kunstmuseum Basel; The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; and The National Gallery in Prague. Dr. Kosinski has written and edited many books and catalogs on a variety of art topics including 19th Century Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism, 20th Century sculpture and contemporary art. In August 2013, Dr. Kosinski was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Council on the Humanities. In December 2017, she was recognized by the Ambassador of Italy with the Order of the Italian Star, a distinction recognizing her outstanding contributions to the arts and promotion of Italian culture. She currently serves on the Board of the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and the Gwendolyn Morris Cafritz Foundation. Dr. Kosinski received a BA from Yale University and an MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. -
Wednesday, October 17, 6.30pm
Series: Medieval Art Forum
Speaker: Leslie Bussis Tait, Educator for Museum Teaching, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Title: Romanesque Art in the United States: Collecting, Display, Reception
RSVP required for Tait's lecture LEARN MORE about Leslie Bussis Tait's talk
Abstract: The acquisition of Romanesque art by American collectors and museums was most active in the early decades of the twentieth century. Early collectors such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, J. Pierpont Morgan, George Grey Barnard, and Arthur Kingsley Porter were influenced by their exposure to European monuments and the desire to establish a cultural equivalence in the United States. Parallel to the growth of U.S. museums, major universities fostered the scholarship of medieval art, with Meyer Schapiro writing the first dissertation in the U.S. on a Romanesque topic. The exhibition of architectural fragments in a contextual setting, such as The Cloisters, as well as increasingly ambitious museum exhibitions brought Romanesque art to broader audiences. No longer limited to Americans who were able to travel abroad, Romanesque art now displayed in the U.S. would have a profound impact on generations of scholars, students and artists through to the present day.
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Thursday, October 18, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Time-Based Media
Title: Programmed: Conserving Concepts
Speakers include: Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of Digital Art, Whitney Museum of American Art
Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research, Whitney Museum of American Art
RSVP requiredfor "Programmed: Conserving Concepts" LEARN MORE about "Programmed: Conserving Concepts"Description: The talk explores the challenges of preserving works for the Whitney Museum's exhibition Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018, which establishes connections between instruction-based works of conceptual, video, and computational art. Ethical and practical matters involved in conserving and exhibiting analog and digital works will be discussed with a focus on maintaining the integrity of their concept and experience. -
Friday, October 19, 2018, 6:00pm
Great Hall Exhibition Opening
Graphic Objects: Elaine Lustig Cohen’s Sculptural Works
RSVP requiredfor the Elaine Lustig opening LEARN MORE about "Elaine Lustig"The Institute of Fine Arts at NYU Great Hall Exhibition Series is pleased to present Graphic Objects: Elaine Lustig Cohen’s Sculptural Works, a solo exhibition featuring works by artist and graphic designer Elaine Lustig Cohen.
The exhibition illuminates Lustig Cohen’s ventures beyond the picture plane, presenting a selection of reliefs and box-like sculptures. Less familiar than her graphic designs and public commissions, the sculptural works on view reveal Lustig Cohen’s interdisciplinary approach to art making. These objects transcend the boundaries between fine art and graphic design, form, and function. At the same time, the sculptures encapsulate the artist’s playful mobilization of geometric abstraction on three-dimensional forms.
Graphic Objects opens on October 19, 2018 and is on view through February 24, 2019. The exhibition runs in conjunction with Masterpieces and Curiosities: Elaine Lustig Cohen at the Jewish Museum, open until August 11, 2019.
Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927–2016) was widely celebrated in her life as a graphic designer, artist, art dealer, and archivist. Her multifaceted accomplishments encompass pioneering design projects that extended the aesthetic vocabulary of European modernism into an American context, including commissions with clients such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Jewish Museum, and architects Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, and Richard Meier; to exhibitions as an artist at Bard College, Exit Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Mary Boone Gallery (first solo show by a female artist); to founding the influential Upper East Side bookstore Ex Libris, specialized in avant-garde publications and ephemera. She enjoyed a renewed interest in her practice in later years, including receiving the 2011 AIGA Medal for her life’s work in design, as well as mounting exhibitions at LACMA, Los Angeles (2016); The Glass House, New Canaan (2015), P!, New York (2014), and Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University London (2017).
The exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Valeria Napoleone XX. It was curated by Francesca Ferrari, Kolleen Ku, Emily Shoyer, and Chao Chi Chiu. -
Monday, October 22, 2018, 6:30pm
Conservation Center: Summer Project Series 2018
La Dolce Villa! Student Projects at La Pietra
The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of presentations from current conservation students about their projects at Villa La Pietra, NYU's campus in Florence, Italy.
Rsvp requiredfor La Dolce Villa! LEARN MORE about "Elaine Lustig"Sarah Montonchaikul & Taylor Healy
Wet cleaning of a tapestry from the Camera Blu
Andy Wolf & Taylor Healy
Conservation of a group of statues in the Villa gardens
Kristin Holder & Emma Kimmel
Stabilization and inpainting of paintings from the Camera Blu
Katherine Parks
Preventive conservation project including light monitoring, climate assessment, and proposals for strategies Book survey, treatment and rehousing
Rachel Mochon
Treatment of works of art on paper
Kristin Holder
Acton Catalog Project
A question and answer session will follow the first three presentations and again after the last. Please join us for a light reception in the Loeb Room at the conclusion of the evening's program. -
Tuesday, October 23, 2018, 6:30pm
Title: Staging Franco's Victory as Reconquest: The 1940 Exposicion de la Hispanidad
Dr. Miriam Basilio, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies NYU
RSVP requiredfor Miriam Basilio's lecture LEARN MORE about Mariam Basilio's talkAbstract: Administrative documents, contemporary books and articles, and memoirs of participants provide evidence of how Franco’s regime awarded images, exhibitions, and memory sites a important role in its propaganda campaigns. The “Exposición de la Hispanidad”, opened in Madrid’s Retiro Park on October 12, 1940 celebrating the so-called Día de la Raza and Franco’s victory. The organizers drew on various modern display strategies indebted to Italian Fascist exhibitions and approaches designed to encourage responses drawing from Catholic devotional practice. I demonstrate how exhibition strategies presenting the war as a new Crusade to recuperate Spanish imperial and religious traditions were adopted after the war to legitimize the new regime and its aspirations for imperial conquest during World War Two. -
Wednesday, October 24, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: Works in Progress
Speaker: Prita Meier
Title: The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast
This event is only open to the Institute's Community -
Friday, October 26, 2018, 6:30pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Speaker: Yijun Wang, Columbia University
Title: Suzhou Style, Guangzhou Artisans?
Locating Suzhou Style at the Interface of Texts, Materials, and Craft Cultures
RSVP: chinaprojectworkshop@gmail.com -
Tuesday, October 30, 2018, 6:00pm
Series: PCSNY
Speaker: Rex Koontz, Professor of Art History and Director of the School of Art, University of Houston
Title: Classic Central Veracruz Art in Mesoamerican Art History RSVP required for Rex Koontz' lecture LEARN MORE about Rex Koontz' talkThis presentation surveys key aspects of the art of Classic Central Veracruz, including the yoke/hacha/palma complex and the monumental center of El Tajín, in the larger context of Mesoamerican art history.
The art of Classic Central Veracruz (Mexican Gulf Coast, ca. 100–1000 CE) is best known through a remarkable elite portable sculpture tradition (the "yoke/hacha/palma" complex) and the monumental art of El Tajín. In their analyses of both the portable sculpture complex and the art of Tajín, scholars have stressed the central role of the Mesoamerican ritual ballgame. The ballgame, in turn, is understood as a largely static set of practices and symbolism across Mesoamerica. This static view of the ballgame, its related objects and the capital city of El Tajín is giving way to a more variegated historical understanding of the history of the yoke/hacha/palma complex as well as the slow emergence of El Tajín out of a heretofore little discussed regional culture. This presentation will summarize some of the more important aspects of this recent work and attempt to put that work in the context of larger issues in Classic period Mesoamerican history.
- Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 6:30pm
- November
- Friday, November 2, 2018
Norman Kleeblatt at Work: Conversations on a Curatorial Practice
RSVP required for "Norman Kleebatt at Work" [opens in new window] LEARN MORE about "Norman Kleeblatt at Work: Conversations on a Curatorial Practice"Abstract: Norman Kleeblatt (MA Art History, Diploma in Conservation, IFA ‘75) is a curator, art historian, and critic, especially renowned for his well-crafted and broad ranging yet highly personal exhibitions. Since the 1980s, his shows have introduced new discursive frames for modern and contemporary art and society in Europe and the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. He recently stepped down from his position as Chief Curator at the Jewish Museum after a tenure of over forty years at the institution. This symposium will be an opportunity for scholars and artists to reflect on and discuss Kleeblatt’s most influential exhibitions, including The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice (1987), Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities (1996), and Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976 (2008) among many others, as well as his rethinking of art and cultural history, exhibition and institutional models. The afternoon will consist of two thematic sections, each with papers and panel discussions, followed by a conversation with Kleeblatt.
Participants:
Daniel Belasco, Executive Director, Al Held Foundation
Maya Benton, Consulting Curator, International Center of Photography, New York
Mel Bochner, Artist
Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Lisa Corrin, Director, Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University
David Joselit, Distinguished Professor, Art History PhD Program, CUNY Graduate Center
Deborah Kass, Artist
Mischa Kuball, Professor for Public Art/Spaces, Academy of Media Arts Cologne
Rhonda Lieberman, Writer and Artist
Courtney Martin, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Dia Art Foundation
Steven Nelson, Director of the African Studies Center and Professor of African and African American Art History, University of California, Los Angeles
Lucy Partman, PhD Candidate, Princeton University
Joan Rosenbaum, Former Director, The Jewish Museum, New York
Ken Silver, Silver Professor of Art History, New York University
Robert Slifkin, Associate Professor of Fine Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Joan Snyder, Artist
Calvin Tsao, Principal, Tsao & McKown Architects
Followed by a reception.
This program has been co-sponsored by the Al Held Foundation, New York. - Saturday, November 3, 2018, 4:30pm
The Art of Music: Concerts by NYU Steinhardt Strings
RSVP requiredfor the Art of Music [opens in new window] LEARN MORE The Art of Music: Concerts by NYU Steinhardt StringsThe Institute of Fine Arts and Steinhardt invite you join us for an afternoon of classical music at the Duke House featuring students from Steinhardt's Department of Music and Performing Arts.
Program:
Ludwig van Beethoven Violin Sonata No. 10 in G Major, Op. 96 Meghan Todt Williams (Steinhardt MM '13), violin Markus Kaitila (Steinhardt MM '20), piano
Antonín Dvořák Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor, Op. 90, “Dumky” Zoe Dweck (Steinhardt BM '20), violin Julia Choi (Steinhardt BM '21), cello Isidora Vladic (Steinhardt MM '19), piano - Monday, November 5, 2018, 6.30pm
Speaker: Antony Eastmond, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
Title: The Limits of Seljuk Art
RSVP required for Antony Eastmond's talk [opens in new window] LEARN MORE about Antony Eastmond's talkAbstract: The arts of the Caucasus were transformed in the course of the thirteenth century, with the incorporation of many structural and decorative elements that are indebted to Seljuk art. However, it is possible to trace an invisible frontier beyond which those elements are not seen. This lecture will explore the nature of that frontier, and its role in the construction of regional identities.
About the Speaker: Antony Eastmond is AG Leventis Professor of Byzantine Art History and Dean & Deputy Director at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. His most recent book, Tamta’s World (Cambridge, 2017), examined questions of gender, biography and art in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus on the eve of the Mongol invasions. He also works on Byzantine ivories and the definition of art in the Byzantine periphery. -
Tuesday, November 6, 2018, 6:30pm
Speaker: Eric Michaud
Lecture Title: The Offspring of the Image. How Images improve the Italian People
RSVP about Eric Michaud's talk LEARN MORE about Eric Michaud's talkAbstract: What role do painted or sculpted images play in human reproduction? We know the extent to which theories of art, from the Hellenistic period all the way to the 19th century, have accorded importance to the notion of an “ideal of beauty” capable of guiding the human species towards its “physical and moral perfection,” as the men of the 18th century would have said. In this way the fabrication of images, by which the West has never ceased to redefine its own humanity, has constituted the most remarkable of propaedeutics to modern biotechnology.
About the Speaker: Eric Michaud, b. 1948, is Directeur d’études at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, where he has been a faculty member since 1998. He holds the Professorship for Histories and Ideologies of Contemporary Art. Prior to joining the Ehess he was Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at the Marc Bloch University, Strasbourg (1972-1998). He served as a Visiting Professor at the The Johns Hopkins University, at Duke University, at the University of Virginia and at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires.
He completed his PhD at the University of Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne in 1976 and his Doctorat d’Etat in 1995 at the same University. His research interests lie in the relationships between art, politics, propaganda and the anthropological notion of race.
His books include Les invasions barbares. Une généalogie de l’histoire de l’art (Paris, Gallimard, 2015 ; English transl. forthcoming), The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (transl. Janet Lloyd, Stanford University Press, 2004), Histoire de l’art : une discipline à ses frontières (Paris, Hazan, 2005), Fabriques de l'homme nouveau, de Léger à Mondrian (Paris, Carré, 1997). -
Thursday, November 8, 2018, 10:00am
BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL MATTERS in Works of Art
Speaker: Barbara Berrie, Head of Scientific Research, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA
RSVP requiredfor BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL MATTERS [opens in new window] LEARN MORE about BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL MATTERSArtists and artisans have always used bio-based materials, such as glues, eggs, cheese, and gums, in their artmaking. In the past, characterization of such materials using only the minute samples that can be spared from works of art has been challenging. In recent decades, however, there have been major advances in analytical methods. These developments have fostered a new understanding of biological systems applied to artmaking. This allows us to pose detailed questions about the use of biological materials in trades associated with artmaking and their roles in works of art. This presentation will give an overview of developments in fields such as proteomics (the study of proteins) and DNA analysis. It will offer some thoughts on how such developments offer insight into artistic skill—paint layering, choice of materials and methods—and technological aspects of artisanal practice—the production of parchment, paint and pigments. Sophisticated analysis of biological materials offers targeted ways to estimate the condition of works of art, from ancient to contemporary, and this understanding may initiate new approaches to conservation treatment. This presentation will explore where the science of biological materials, art history, and conservation can find common ground.
Dr. Barbara Berrie’s work has focused on artists’ materials and methods. Her publications are varied and reflect a wide range of interests and responsibilities. She is particularly interested in painters’ materials and methods, and investigates artists use of color through the lens of scientific analysis.
This public presentation is part of ART BIO MATTERS 2018 whereby a small forum of art historians, curators, conservators, and scientists will explore future directions for the analysis of biological materials in works of art. More information can be found at www.artbiomatters.org. -
Thursday, November 8, 2018, 6:30pm
Speaker: Will Kwiatkowski, independent scholar
Title: Royal Writing: The Architectural Inscriptions of the Bahmani Sultanate
Rsvp required for Will Kwiatkowski's talk[opens in new window] LEARN MORE about Will Kwiatkowski's talkThe rich corpus of architectural inscriptions on the funerary monuments of Gulbarga and Bidar are a largely unexplored source for the history of the Bahmani Sultanate in the 15th-century Deccan region of south India. The often surprising choice of inscriptions on these monuments helps elucidate how the Bahmani dynasty articulated a vision of sacred kingship that was both part of a broader phenomenon across the Islamic world, and was at the same time highly eclectic and innovative.
About the Speaker: Will Kwiatkowski is an independent epigraphist working on Arabic, Persian and Turkish inscriptions. He has published readings of inscriptions for numerous publications of museum and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, the Al-Thani Collection, Qatar, and the David Collection, Copenhagen. - Monday, November 12, 2018, 6:30pm
Conservation Center: Summer Project Series 2018
Digging Deeper: Conservation in the Field
RSVP required for "Diggin "Deeper" [opens in new window] LEARN MORE about "Digging Deeper"The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of presentations by current conservation students about their summer experiences at IFA-sponsored and co-sponsored archaeological excavations. Presentations will include: Nicole Feldman and Emma Kimmel, Archaeological Excavations in Samothrace, Greece Sarah Montonchaikul, The Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, Turkey Nicole Feldman, Selinunte Archaeological Excavations, Sicily A question and answer session will follow each presentation, and please join us for a light reception in the Loeb Room at the conclusion of the evening's program. -
Tuesday, November 13, 6.30pm
Series: Medieval Art Forum
Speaker: M. Michel Tomasi, Professor of Medieval Art, Université de Lausanne
Title: "Cultural Transfer and Artistic Emulation: Rinaldino di Francia, the Lupi Chapel (Padua), and Sculpted Altarpieces in Trecento Italy"
RSVP required for M. Michel Tomasi's lecture [opens in new window] LEARN MORE about M. Michel Tomasi's talk
Abstract: The Franciscan basilica of Sant’Antonio in Padua is known above all for its architecture and its pictorial cycles. The sculptural decoration of the monument has been much less studied. Among the overlooked works is the altarpiece carved in 1379 by Rainaldino di Francia for the altar of the chapel of San Giacomo, founded by the Lupi family, and of which there are now four original statues in the Museo Antoniano. According to the contract, the altarpiece had to follow the model of the one existing on the main altar.
Rainaldino’s work has to be considered in the complex history of fourteenth-century Italian sculpted altarpieces. This lecture shows how the first marble altarpieces were created, not coincidentally, for patrons of French culture, and how the spread of this typology was then favored by a game of emulation or rivalry within the Dominican and Franciscan orders, and how the genre transformed by constant comparison with its pictorial equivalents. The Rainaldino altarpiece will thus be the starting point for a broader reflection on patronage, cultural transfer and artistic exchanges in Trecento Italy.
Photo Caption: Rainaldino di Francia, sculptures from Sant’Antonio, Padua (photo: M. Tomasi) - Thursday, November 15, 2018
Speaker: Jørgen Wadum, Director of the Centre for Art Technological Studies and Conservation (CATS)
Lecture Title: Mobility Creates Masters - understanding artists’ mobility and early modern trade in artists’ materials.
Rsvp required for Jørgen Wadum's talk[opens in new window] LEARN MORE about Will Jørgen Wadum's talkMobility Creates Masters (MoCMa) is a research network aimed at sharing knowledge, experience and observations on the mobility of artists and their materials in order to understand the development of colored ground layers in paintings 1550-1700. In doing so MoCMa will strengthen the exchange of theoretical and object-related research into painting techniques by joining the forces in the humanities and the natural sciences. Via a combined approach to understanding the impact of the colour of the ground layers on the visual appearance of art works, we will facilitate the appreciation of the influence of materiality on perception for all art lovers.
Jørgen Wadum is Director of the Centre for Art Technological Studies and Conservation (CATS). He held the position as full Professor in Conservation & Restoration at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, 2012-2016. From 2005-2017 he was Director of Conservation at SMK and from 1990 through 2004 he was Chief Conservator at the Mauritshuis, The Hague. He has published and lectured extensively internationally on a multitude of subjects related to technical art history and other issues of importance for the understanding and preservation of our cultural heritage. -
Wednesday, November 28, 2018, 6:30pm
Latin American Forum
Pop América: New Figuration in Brazil and Beyond ca. 1960
rsvp requiredfor Pop America [opens in new window] LEARN MORE about Will Jørgen Wadum's talkParticipants:
Dr. Esther Gabara, E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University.
Dr. Claudia Calirman, Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, in the Department of Art and Music.
Brian Bentley, PhD Candidate in Art History, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
The Latin American Forum is excited to present “Pop América: New Figuration in Brazil and Beyond ca. 1960,” a panel discussion addressing the complexity and diversity of the Pop phenomenon in the Americas. The panel features a conversation between Dr. Esther Gabara (E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor at Duke University); Dr. Claudia Calirman (Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice); and Brian Bentley (PhD Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts).The event takes the exhibition “Pop América,” curated by Dr. Gabara at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and opened on October 4, 2018, as a starting point to problematize the label ‘Pop” in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing especially on the case of Brazilian New Figuration. .
Esther Gabara is the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. A specialist in modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual culture, she teaches a broad range of undergraduate and graduate courses that bring together research, theory, and practice, and introduce students to scholarly and artistic genealogies in the Global South. Gabara was the faculty guest curator of the exhibition, Pop América, 1965-1975, which will travel from the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, 2018), to the Nasher Museum of Art (Duke, 2019), and the Block Museum of Art (Northwestern, 2019). Pop América was awarded the inaugural Sotheby’s Prize for curatorial innovation. Recent publications include essays for Un arte sin tutela: Salón Independiente en México, 1968-1971 (MUAC/UNAM, Mexico), La Raza (Autry Museum of the American West), and Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero (Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery). She published the monograph, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (2008, Duke University Press), and is completing a new manuscript, “Non-Literary Fiction: Invention and Intervention in Contemporary Art of the Americas.”
Claudia Calirman is Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, in the Department of Art and Music. She is the author of Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Duke University Press, 2012), which received the 2013 Arvey Book Award by the Association for Latin American Art. She is a recipient of the Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation and has curated several exhibitions, including Basta! Art and Violence in Latin America (Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College, 2016). She is the author of “Pop and Politics in Brazilian Art” for the International Pop exhibition at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis.
Brian Bentley is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary art of the Americas at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where he received his MA in 2013. He is currently writing a dissertation on Brazilian New Figuration and New Objectivity, 1963–1970. Bentley holds a BA Honours in Art History from McGill University and held Curatorial Assistant positions at NYU's Grey Art Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum. He served as curatorial researcher at El Museo del Barrio and The Whitney Museum of American Art, and co-curated Intimate Matters, an exhibition of work by NYU Steindhardt BFA students, in 2016. His writing is published in Paulo Bruscky: Artist Books and Films, 1970-2013 (Another Space, 2015). He was research assistant for Carolee Thea's On Curating II: Paradigm Shifts – Interviews with Fourteen International Curators (D.A.P., 2016) and Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents (MoMA, 2015). He is currently co-organizer, for the fourth time, of the annual IFA-ISLAA Symposium for Latin American Art.
- Friday, November 2, 2018
- December
- • Please check back in December for an updated schedule.
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