| IN DISCUSSION
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, choose from our extensive range of lecture series, special lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and conferences.
sign up for our mailing listAdvance registration is required to attend Institute events. Please check this webpage for registration and other updates. Many of our recent lectures are available to watch online in our events archive.
2024 Calendar
- September
- Friday, September 6, 6:00 pm
Title: IFA China Project Workshop - Shiqiu Liu “Images of Filial Piety from Liao Tombs in Northeastern China”
Series: China Project Workshop
Speaker: Shiqiu Liu, University of Melbourne moderated by François Louis, Bard Graduate Center
Join us online for the China Project Workshop [opens in new window] - Monday, September 9, 6:00 pm
Title: CLOSE READING: AUTHORS AT THE IFA - Art Unbound from Rome: A Conversation Between John North Hopkins and Josephine Crawley Quinn
Series: Close Reading: Authors at the IFA
Speaker: Josephine Crawley Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University in conversation with John Hopkins, Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art.
learn more about Unbound from RomePlease join the Institute for the first of its Close Readings series in a conversation with John Hopkins, Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art, about their new book, Unbound from Rome: Art and Craft in a Fluid Landscape. Published by Yale University Press in 2024, Hopkins’ book is an investigation of makers, materials and the role that craft communities played in the creation of sociocultural practices in ancient Italy. The book covers some of the period’s most iconic works, including luxury bronze objects; sacred temple sculpture crafted over three centuries, votive offerings, monumental tombs and colossal buildings. A key purpose of the book is to question an idea of Rome that has focused on elite production and the textual record; Hopkins instead calls attention to the lesser-known—often silenced—actors who were integral players. The result is a book that takes as a central tenet the dismantling of imperialist culture-conglomerates, including the notion of a Roman world, Roman period, and Roman Art and promotes instead a world of multiplicity, fragmentariness and co-presence.
Leading a discussion with the Author will be Josephine Crawley Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University.
John North Hopkins is Associate Professor of the art and archaeology of ancient Mediterranean peoples in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. They are author of The Genesis of Roman Architecture (2016, Yale, winner of the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians), Unbound from Rome: Art and Craft in a Fluid Landscape, 650-250 BCE (2024, Yale), and co-editor of Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art (2020 the Menil Collection and Yale) and Forgery Beyond Deceit: Fabrication, Value and the Desire for Ancient Rome (2023, Oxford). They are also director of the Antefixa Project and co-director, of the Quirinal Project, two collaborative cultural heritage research initiatives built through international partnerships with Italian universities, museums and superintendencies of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Josephine Crawley Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Worcester College, Oxford. She has degrees from Oxford and UC Berkeley, has taught in America, Italy and the UK, and co-directed the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, as well as to radio and television programmes. In January 2025 she takes up the Professorship of Ancient History at Cambridge University as the first woman to hold that post.
- Tuesday, September 10, 6:00 pm
Title: ISLAA Forum with Marisa Lerer: Commemorating Disasters Across Borders in Latine Public Memorials
Series: ISLAA Forum on Latin American Art
Speaker: Marisa Lerer, Director of Education, Creative Capital Foundation
learn more about Unbound from Rome watch the ISLAA forum online“It has to be from here, right this instance, my cry into the world” is a line by Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, which appears in both English and Spanish on artist Antonio Martorell and architect Segundo Cardona’s memorial dedicated to the thousands of victims of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. Focusing on the bilingualism and diasporic nature of Latine commemorative visual culture through three case studies, this talk examines how contemporary memorials that are part of a surge of twenty-first-century disaster monuments, respond to entwined Latin American and US tragedies. A close analysis of memorials by Martorell and Cardona, Freddy Rodríguez, and Scherezade Garcia illuminate innovations in material and aesthetic inquiries in commemorative works. The memorials under discussion embrace an aesthetics of post-disaster politics, which this study defines as an attempt to balance a representation of destructive forces such as societal and environmental instability while creating a nurturing, regenerative, and caring environment for visitors.
Marisa Lerer is Director of Education at Creative Capital Foundation. Prior to joining Creative Capital, she was Associate Professor of modern and contemporary art history and Chair of the Art History & Digital Media Art Department at Manhattan College. She specializes in monuments, memorials, and public art and her publications have focused on art under dictatorship in Latin America, memorials dedicated to victims of state-sponsored terrorism, and contested subjects and aesthetics in Latine public sculptures. She was the George Gurney Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, among others, for her current book project on Latine public memorials. She received her Ph.D. at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
The ISLAA Forum is a platform sustained in partnership with the Institute of Studies for Latin American Art (ISLAA).
- Thursday, September 12, 6:00 pm
Title: Jiří Vnouček, Changes in production of parchment over one millennium: 4th to 14th centuries
Speaker: Jiří Vnouček, Senior Researcher and Conservator at The Royal Danish Library
learn more about Jiří VnoučekParchment has been a support material for manuscript writing for centuries, yet its various types, preparation methods, and the identification of the animal species used have not been thoroughly studied. This oversight has often resulted in inaccuracies and misleading information in the physical descriptions of manuscripts. My research integrates visual analyses, practical parchment-making experiments, and biomolecular studies to provide more precise insights into parchment production techniques across different historical periods and geographical regions. This approach aims to enhance the accuracy of manuscript descriptions, particularly for those from the Late Antique to the Romanesque period, with special emphasis on select Insular and Carolingian codices.
Jiří Vnouček is a conservator with expertise in parchment, illuminated manuscripts, and bookbinding. Since March 2024, he has served as a Senior Researcher and Conservator at The Royal Danish Library. From 2018 to 2023, he was a researcher for the Beasts to Craft project. Jiří holds a Doctorate in Medieval Studies from the University of York, UK. His research is centered on biocodicology, a pioneering approach to the study of parchment manuscripts.
- Monday, September 16, 6:00 pm
Pre-Columbian Society of New York Lecture Series
Speaker: Rob Roy Smith, co-team leader of Kilpatrick’s Native American Practice Group
learn more about Rob Roy SmithThe Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is a ground-breaking human rights law passed by Congress in 1990 requiring museums and federally funded institutions to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian Organizations. In the 30 years since its enactment, however, numerous regulatory gaps hindered the Act’s implementation and prompted confusion among museums and federally funded institutions. New regulations took effect in January 2024, radically altering the repatriation process, and making other material changes to NAGPRA. This lecture will discuss the new regulations, and will provide crucial guidance and suggestions on best practices for implementation.
Rob Roy Smith is a partner with the international law firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP resident in the firm’s Seattle, Washington office. He is co-team leader of the firm’s Native American Practice Group. Mr. Smith exclusively practices federal Indian law. He advises Indian tribal clients on all aspects of federal, state, and tribal law, including tribal sovereignty, economic development, natural and cultural resource protection, taxation, and gaming. Mr. Smith is dedicated to helping Indian tribal governments achieve their goals. Whether as general counsel or special litigation counsel, Mr. Smith consistently finds the best legal and business solutions to benefit tribal communities.
Mr. Smith has successfully represented Indian tribal governments, individual Indians, and tribal businesses in high-stakes litigation before tribal, state, and federal courts, including numerous appellate courts, and the Washington and Idaho Supreme Courts, on issues ranging from protecting tribal sovereign immunity to securing treaty rights. Mr. Smith has extensive experience litigating and advising clients with respect to cultural resource and sacred sites protection, including repatriations under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. He has also handled over one billion dollars in financing transactions for tribal governments and tribal businesses.
Mr. Smith was born in New York City. He is a 1997 graduate of the College of the Holy Cross, and he received his juris doctor cum laude from the Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College in 2000, with a Certificate in Natural Resources and Environment Law.
- Thursday, September 19, 6:30 pm
Title: Ancient Seminar Program with Elizabeth Marlowe, 'Ancient Art as an Investment': A Strange, Cautionary, and Ongoing Tale
Series: Ancient Seminar
Speaker: Elizabeth Marlowe, Professor of Art History, Chair of the Art Department, and Director of the Program in Museum Studies at Colgate University
learn more about Elizabeth Marlowe Watch Elizabeth Marlowe's talk onlineThis talk will tell the story of a decades-long antiquities investment scheme orchestrated by a very well-known Manhattan dealer and an insurance salesman based in Detroit. By the end, it involved nearly a hundred investors, three hundred ancient artworks, and seven university museums. The story did not end well for most of the participants. The talk will examine the risks and ethics of the financialization of antiquities, and also raise questions about the relationship of museums to the art market.
Elizabeth Marlowe is Professor of Art History, Chair of the Art Department, and Director of the Program in Museum Studies at Colgate University. She earned her Ph.D in Roman art history at Columbia University, and has published widely in both scholarly and popular venues on Roman imperial art, museum ethics, and cultural property. Recent publications have focused on the Benin Bronzes, the Elgin Marbles/Parthenon Sculptures, museum labels, and an ongoing case concerning a group of Roman bronze statues looted from Turkey.
- Wednesday, September 25, 2024, 6:00 pm
Title: ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing: Curating the Whitney Biennial’
Speaker: Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art
learn more about Chrissie Iles‘Even Better Than the Real Thing: Curating the Whitney Biennial’ will unpack the curatorial process and thematic structures of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, co-curated by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli. The exhibition, the 81st edition of the museum’s landmark series, is the longest-running survey of contemporary American art. Iles and Onli sought to organize an exhibition that would feel like being inside a ‘dissonant chorus’, as participating artist Ligia Lewis described it; a provocative yet intimate experience of disparate voices that collectively probe the cracks and fissures of the current moment. The show’s subtitle, ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’, addresses questions around our understanding of what is real, from AI to rhetoric around gender and authenticity, transphobia, and long histories in America of deeming people of marginalized race, gender and ability as subhuman – less than real. The exhibition amplifies the voices of artists confronting those legacies, and provides a space where difficult ideas can be engaged and considered. It is a gathering of artists who are exploring the relationship between the body and subjectivity, the psychological implications of architectural space, material agency, sonic space, trans-national Indigenous discussions, and the growing precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds around us. The lecture will unpack these loose themes, exploring how the affective relational structures of the exhibition can function critically at a moment of high nostalgia in the American psyche, as a framework for considering what new forms of relationality might look like.
Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her curatorial focus is contemporary art and moving image art of the 1960s and 1970s, from a global perspective. She is part of the senior curatorial team at the Whitney, and builds the film and video part of the museum’s permanent collection.
Iles’ exhibitions include surveys of the work of Louise Bourgeois, Dan Graham, Donald Judd, Paul McCarthy and Sharon Hayes, exhibitions of Cauleen Smith, Kevin Everson and Lorna Simpson, and four major thematic exhibitions of moving image art: ‘Signs of the Times: British Film, Video and Slide Installation in Britain in the 1980s’, ‘Scream and Scream Again: Film in Art’, Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977’, and ‘Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 19180-2016. She co-curated the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials, and the 2024 Whitney Biennial ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’ with Meg Onli. Iles publishes widely, and is a member of the Graduate Committee of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, a Faculty member of the School of Visual Arts Curating program, and a Visiting Critic in Columbia University’s Fine Art department. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in the History of Art by Bristol University, England, in 2015.
- Thursday, September 26, 6:30 pm
Title: Ancient Seminar Program with Johannes Lipps, The Basilica Aemilia at the Forum Romanum: Designed movement and atmospheres in Augustan Rome
Ancient Seminar
Speaker: Johannes Lipps, Fulbright Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania
learn more about Johannes LippsThe Basilica Aemilia at the Forum Romanum is one of the most important buildings of ancient Rome due to its location, size and splendor. Compared to most other buildings, it is particularly well preserved. However, it is only in recent years that the surviving parts of the imperial building have been documented and examined. On this basis, a very detailed reconstruction of the building and its history has been achieved.
The lecture 1) justifies a new method for dealing with dislocated finds at the Forum Romanum, 2) provides an insight into the work behind the reconstruction in case studies on individual components and 3) discusses the limits of stylistic dating in Augustan Rome. Building on this, the lecture 4) will deal with the qualities of the architecture itself.
While research in recent years has mainly described Augustan architecture in Rome diachronically as a power-political argument to justify the Principate, relying heavily on literary and numismatic sources, the exceptionally good state of preservation of the Basilica Aemilia offers a unique opportunity to examine in detail the visual strategies with which an architectural complex of superlatives in Augustan Rome generated aesthetic pleasure and appropriate atmospheres.
Johannes Lipps is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar joining the Departments of Classical Studies and Art History at the University of Pennsylvania from April to October 2024. He studied Classical Archaeology (main subject), Ancient History, Papyrology, Epigraphy and Numismatics of the Ancient World at the Universities of Marburg (2000–2002), Rome (2002–2003), Bonn and Cologne (2003–2006). After completing his dissertation “The Basilica Aemilia on the Forum Romanum. The Imperial structure and its architectural decoration” at Cologne in 2008, he received the “Reisestipendium” from the German Archaeological Institute and traveled to large parts of North Africa and the Near East. This was followed by postdoctoral positions in Rome and Munich. He was Junior Professor in Tübingen and is University Professor of Classical Archaeology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since 2019, where he was Head of the Department of Classical Studies from 2021 to 2023.
His research focuses on ancient architecture, sculpture and urbanism in Rome and the Roman provinces. He has conducted excavations and surveys in Pompeii and Tunisia, as well as research projects at the Roman Forum, the Palatine Hill, the Vatican and in various German cities such as Augsburg and Mainz. Since 2023 he is leading the 24-year academy project "disiecta membra. Stone Architecture and Urbanism in Roman Germany". His last books dealt with Roman monumental architecture in Augsburg (2016), the so-called House of Augustus on the Palatine in Rome (2018) and the sensational discovery of a Salus statue in Roman Mainz (2023).
- Friday, September 27, 1:30 pm – 5:30 pm
George Rickey Symposium
Speakers include: Susanneh Bieber, associate professor, Texas A&M University; John J. Curley, professor, Wake Forest University; Marina Isgro, associate curator, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden; Caroline A. Jones, professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Marin R. Sullivan, independent art historian and curator; Alex J. Taylor, associate professor, University of Pittsburgh; Organized by: Robert Slifkin, Deputy Director and Director of Graduate Studies; Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts, The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and Richard Benefield, Executive Director, George Rickey Foundation, Inc.
learn more about the George Rickey SymposiumPlease join us for an afternoon symposium on George Rickey held at the Institute of Fine Arts' Duke House. One of the pioneers of kinetic art, George Rickey (1907-2002) left an indelible mark on the history of modern sculpture. This one-day symposium will bring together six leading scholars to consider Rickey’s work and legacy, situating his practice alongside other figures such as Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, and Jean Tinguely and addressing his art’s engagement with modern architecture and landscape design, commercial manufacturing, cybernetics, and the cultural history of postwar Germany where he lived and worked for many years.
- Friday, September 6, 6:00 pm
- October
- Wednesday, October 2, 6:00 pm
Conservation Center, Summer Projects Day I
learn more about Summer ProjectsThe Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of presentations from current conservation students on their summer 2024 work projects.
Alayna Bone
"The Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, Turkey"Elizabeth Torres
"Archaeological Excavations in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace, Greece"Minyoung Kim
"The American Antiquarian Society"Adrian Hernandez
"Smithsonian National Museum of American Art & The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston" - Thursday, October 3, 6:00 pm
Series: Roundtables
Title: Unicorns Stomping in a Graveyard: The Paradox of Asian American Art (History)
Speakers: Joshua Chambers-Letson, Professor, Performance Studies and Asian American Studies, Northwestern University; Susette Min, Associate Professor and Department Chair, Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis
Please note that due to the sensitive nature of this roundtable, it will be livestreamed and not recorded
Limited Seating Available
learn more about Roundtables Join us in-person for Roundtables Join us virtually for RoundtablesFeaturing Susette Min and Joshua Chambers-Letson, this roundtable will explore the complexities of Asian American art through a candid and critical lens, moving beyond traditional acts of recuperation, insistences on ontological framings rooted in inclusion or critique while also resisting romanticized views of Third World activism. Central to our discussion are recent provocations such as the artist Simon Leung who asks whether Asian American art can be considered a theory of democracy? This query prompts us to examine whether this perspective inadvertently transforms Asian American art into a census or population project, where the pressures of inclusion overshadow the necessity of disagreement and friction. Art historian Marci Kwon highlights the ethical dilemma when engaging with Asian American artists—the challenge of respecting, rather than attempting to resolve, the inherent paradoxes in their work. This notion aligns with Susette Min’s exploration in her book Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art, which scrutinizes the limitations and possibilities within the field.
As Asian American art garners increasing attention from institutional and market sectors, there is an urgent need to develop new languages and terminologies that capture its multifaceted nature. At the same time, to what degree is Asian American art an unreal, or perhaps, an undead fiction along the lines Ocean Vuong observes of drag queens in his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: as "unicorns stomping in a graveyard." How do we reconcile with the dead who lie in the open even as new histories attempt to unmoor artists and artworks from the purgatory of being perpetually adjacent to suspect ideations of modernism, "America," or the "global?"
Joshua Chambers-Letson is the Chair of Performance Studies and Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Completing a book on queer love and loss for NYU Press (forthcoming 2025), JCL is also the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America; co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o and of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok.
Susette Min is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis where she teaches Asian American studies, art history, and cultural studies. She is the author of Unnamable Encounters: the Ends of Asian American Art (NYU, 2018). She is also an independent curator. Formerly, she was the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at The Drawing Center and has curated exhibitions at The Asia Society, Whitney Museum of American Art, apexart, Berkeley Art Museum, Blaffer Art Museum, and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. She has published articles in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, American Quarterly, Panorama, Trans-Asia Photography Review, Social Text, Art Journal, Amerasia Journal and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is currently curating an exhibition on Asian American art and writing a book on art, immigration and terrorism.
- Friday, October 4, 2024, 6:00 pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Jin Xu (Columbia University) will present on the topic "The Huihuiying Mosque (1764) in Beijing."
The discussion will be moderated by Michele Matteini (New York University)
RSVP for the China Project Workshop - Thursday, October 17, 6:00 pm
Pre-Columbian Society of New York Lecture Series
Title: Scrolls of Smoke and Sky: Picturing the Invisible
Speaker: Alanna S. Radlo-Dzur, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
learn more about Scrolls of Smoke and Sky Join us in-person for Scrolls of Smoke and Sky Join us virtually for Scrolls of Smoke and SkyCentral Mexican artist-scribes, known as tlahcuilohqueh in Nahuatl, adopted striking visual strategies to depict the unseeable. This analysis establishes a visual grammar for understanding how invisibles are rendered in the Borgia Group of manuscripts, a set of five stylistically linked divinatory manuscripts that survived the purges of Mesoamerican books in the colonial period. Comparison with images providing the third, visual narrative in the Florentine Codex shows how those strategies started to shift in the first fifty years of Spanish domination in Mexico. Where textual evidence for the agency of invisibles contrasts starkly with an absence of those forces in their visual depiction, a message of resilience emerges instead. Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of art historical, linguistic, and ethnographic methodologies, the study highlights themes of interrelation and metonymy across Nahua modes of representation, discourse, and knowledge generation. Finally, this historical research is related to revitalization efforts in contemporary Nahuatl-speaking communities where unseen forces continue to affect order, health, and wellbeing in the present day.
Alanna S. Radlo-Dzur is an art historian of Indigenous arts in the Americas. With a background as a filmmaker and lens-based artist, she is Postdoctoral Research Associate in Indigenous and Native North American Studies in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Her dissertation considers the graphic depiction of invisible concepts— from the sensorium to the divine—in postclassic and early colonial Nahua artistic traditions of central Mexico. A second project explores the fluid roles of diplomats, huaqueros, museum staff, and art dealers in the history of collecting Precolumbian objects of Gran Nicoya on the Pacific coast of Central America. Her work with the Florentine Codex Initiative at the Getty Research Institute and the K’acha Willaykuna Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Art and Humanities community at Ohio State University demonstrate her advocacy for language revitalization and the creation of open-access projects that open archives to empower Indigenous communities.
Dr. Radlo-Dzur joins the faculty of the University of Rochester as an assistant professor of Art History in Jan 2025.
- Tuesday, October 22, 6:00 pm
Walter W.S. Cook Lecture
Speaker: Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum - Thursday, October 24, 2024, 6:30pm
Title: Baths, Beds, and Beyond: A New Form of Bathing in the Roman World
Speaker/s: Fikret Yegül, Distinguished Professor, UC Santa Barbara Series: Ancient Seminar
learn more about Fikret Yegül's talk Join us in-person for Fikret Yegül's talk Join us virtually for Fikret Yegül's talkA group of baths in northern Syrian and southern Anatolia feature large halls or lounges which are generally referred to as “social halls,” offering facilities for resting, socializing, but also, overnight stays—an uncommon function among the plethora of functions of a Roman bath. In Serdjilla, a small agricultural town near Aleppo, separated from the main bath across a courtyard is a two-storied pavilion which has been interpreted as an inn. I have described these baths as the “hall-type” baths. Often located on trade routes, they offered their customers not only the comforts of a hot bath after arduous journeys, but also safe lodgings, much like the network of caravansarays of medieval Anatolia. As the most commodious public space available in small towns and extra-urban settings, these baths might have been the ideal place for human contact, assembly and interchange, their new function bridging classical, late antique and medieval worlds.
Fikret Yegül is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara; he also holds a MArch from University of Pennsylvania. A member of Sardis Archaeological Expedition since 1964, Yegül has published some ten books and over 100 articles and essays on Roman art, archaeology, architecture and urbanism of which 27 are on Roman baths, bathing, and water culture. His Baths and Bathing in the Classical World received the Alice D. Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians (MIT Press, 1994). Recent publications include Roman Architecture and Urbanism (co-authored, CUP; PROSE Award, 2020); The Temple of Artemis at Sardis (2 volumes, Harvard University Press, 2020); Hamid’in Öyküsü-Leyleklerin Dönüšü (a novel, 2023); Temple of Artemis at Sardis and Hellenistic Temple Tradition in Asia Minor (CUP, in print)
- Friday, October 25, 5:30 pm
Alumni and Families Weekend Lecture:
Guillaume Lethière and his Worlds
Speaker: Esther Bell, Deputy Director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator of the Clark Art Institute
learn more about Guillaume Lethière Join us in-person for Guillaume Lethière and his Worlds Join us virtually for Guillaume Lethière and his WorldsThe Institute of Fine Arts Alumni Association Board invites you to attend the eighth annual Alumni Weekend lecture. The lecture will be followed by the IFA's Alumni Reunion.
Distinguished Alumni Speaker: Esther Bell, PhD '11
Guillaume Lethière and his Worlds
Born in Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832) was a leading figure in French painting during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The son of a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman of mixed race, Lethière moved to France with his father at age fourteen. He trained as an artist and successfully navigated the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath to achieve the highest levels of recognition in his time. A favorite artist of Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte, Lethière served as director of the Académie de France in Rome, as a member of the Institut de France, and as a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. A well-respected teacher, he operated a robust studio that rivaled those of his most successful contemporaries. Despite his remarkable accomplishments and considerable body of work, Lethière is not well known today. This talk will shed light on Lethière’s extraordinary career, while situating the artist within a vast colonial network in which he firmly participated.
After its presentation at the Clark, the exhibition will travel to the Musée du Louvre in Paris and will be on view there from November 13, 2024–February 17, 2025.
Esther Bell is the deputy director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator at the Clark Art Institute. Prior to joining the Clark, Bell was the curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Previously, she served as the curator of paintings, drawings, and sculpture at the Cincinnati Art Museum. A specialist in French art, Bell has organized and co-organized a number of exhibitions, including Guillaume Lethière (2024-2025); Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (2022–23); Renoir: The Body, the Senses (2019–20); Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade (2017); and The Brothers Le Nain: Painters of Seventeenth-Century France (2016–17).
- Tuesday, October 29, 6:00 pm
Series: ISLAA Forum on Latin American Art
Speakers: Horacio Ramos, PhD Candidate, CUNY Graduate Center and Julián Sánchez, PhD Candidate, Columbia University - Wednesday, October 30, 6:00 pm
Conservation Center, Summer Projects Day II - Thursday, October 31, 6:00 pm
Currents in Art and Beyond
Erasing History: A Conversation Between Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy, Yale University and Milton Curry, Professor of Architecture and Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Engagement at Cornell University
- Wednesday, October 2, 6:00 pm
- November
- Thursday, November 7, 6:00 PM
Co-Sponsored with the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies (CEMS)
Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and 2024 Visiting Professor in Catalan Studies, NYU in conversation with Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Associate Professor, Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, Princeton University - Tuesday, November 12, 6:00 pm
Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture
Speaker: Roxana Marcoci, David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art - Tuesday, November 19, 6:00 pm
Title: Edges of Ailey
Speaker: Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs, Whitney Museum of American Art - Wednesday, November 20, 6:00 pm
Conservation Center, Summer Projects Day III
- Thursday, November 7, 6:00 PM
- December
- Monday, December 2, 6:00 pm
Aphrodisias Lecture - Tuesday, December 3, 6:00 pm
Huber Colloquium
Speaker: Bruno Pinheiro, Post-doctoral fellow, Leonard A. Lauder Research Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Ar - Wednesday, December 4, 6:00 pm
Close Reading: Authors at the IFA
Speakers: Prita Meier and Cajetan Iheka
The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast: A Conversation Between Prita Meier and Cajetan Iheka, Professor of English, Yale University
- Monday, December 2, 6:00 pm