Public Programs

Over its more than fifty year-long history, AI art has evolved along with technological approaches, from the early symbolic phase to the current statistical one of artificial neural networks. The talk traces the historical trajectory of AI art, connecting the underlying technologies to concepts, aesthetics, and conservation challenges. Expert systems, generative adversarial networks (GANs), generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), and text-to-image models are tied to different creative practices and expressions, which in turn require specific methods of preservation. Recent AI technologies rely on classification, standardization, and optimization, using trillions of existing images harvested by corporations and operating within an echo chamber. Through the lens of artistic practice, the talk explores AI image production and its relationship to data models and materialities.

Christiane Paul is Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor Emerita at The New School. She is the recipient of 2023 MediaArtHistories International Award and the Thoma Foundation 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her books are Digital Art (4th ed., 2023); A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, 2016); Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Intellect, 2011; Chinese edition, 2012); and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Harold Cohen: AARON (2024), Refigured (2023), and Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 - 2018 (2018/19) and is responsible for artport , the museum’s portal to Internet art. Other curatorial work includes Chain Reaction (feralfile.com, 2023), DiMoDA 4.0 Dis/Location (traveling show, 2021-2023), and The Question of Intelligence (Kellen Gallery, The New School, NYC, 2020).

The Conservation Center’s Topics in Time-Based Media Art Conservation lecture series is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation. The series is organized by Christine Frohnert. A video of each lecture is archived and available after the event in the Institute's video archive.

Following the Korean War, the military government of South Korea supported industries to improve the dire post-war economic situation. Central to this strategy was to identify export goods that optimized local resources and knowledge, and that targeted international markets. Among those exports were wigs, and by the sixties, Seoul became the global center for wig manufacturing, relying on its own female population for hair supplies and cheap labor. These wigs were exported to the US and specifically targeted the growing consumer market of African American women. Moreover, wig stores were run by new Korean immigrants in urban neighborhoods that were in the process of becoming increasingly Black with white flight to the suburbs and red-lining practices. Parallel to the shifting racial and ethnic geographies in American cities, South Korea also faced socio-political change in which the women toiling in wig factories started to protest their working conditions. Their political actions would eventually mark the beginning of the Korean democracy movement. This lecture connects the migration stories of Koreans to those of African Americans, focusing on their shared spatial practices in wig stores during the Cold War period in the US.

Min Kyung Lee is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of the Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College. Her recent monograph, The Tyranny of the Straight Line: Mapping Modern Paris (Yale University Press, 2024) studied the relations between mapping and architecture in 19th-century Paris. Her research in this area brings together histories of orthography and quantification with theories of modern architectural and urban representations. Currently, her work, Mapping Wigs and Plywood centers on histories of post-war Korean migration as well as developing archival methods with and by diasporic communities. She is a co-founder of the Architecture and Migration group of the European Architectural History Network, supported by the New Directions Mellon Foundation Fellowship, and affiliated with research groups at the Courtauld in London and the Kunsthistorische Institut in Florence.

*This event will not be livestreamed or recorded.

The Mesoamerican world was always interconnected. For over three millennia, trade, pilgrimage, migration, and warfare have linked together different regions of this linguistically and ethnically diverse territory, corresponding to modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, as well as parts of Honduras and El Salvador. Gorgeously decorated objects brought as gifts or trade goods mediated diplomatic relationships between different places; immigrants made works that recalled their homelands using the materials of their new homes; public art proclaimed affinities with a broader world. Local artists adopted, adapted, and reshaped foreign styles, making works meaningful in new contexts through acts of creative reinterpretation. Yet our models for explaining the ancient Mesoamerican past often emphasize closed cultural units, casting instances of intercultural exchange as exceptional moments rather than a baseline expectation for human experience. How might Mesoamerican history look different if we assumed that interconnection was the norm, rather than the exception? What emerges, I will suggest, is a story in which even apparently simple objects reveal dazzlingly complex histories of exchange, allowing us to imagine a premodern past that has much in common with contemporary migration, diaspora, and creativity.

Claudia Brittenham is Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is also Director of the Center for Latin American Studies. Her research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, with interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, as well as The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico; The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (with Mary Miller); and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (with Stephen Houston and colleagues). Her next book focuses on the interconnectedness of the ancient Mesoamerican world.

This roundtable, featuring Antawan Byrd, Annissa Malvoisin, and Drew Thompson, will explore the critical stakes and future directions of Africanist art history in the twenty-first century. The Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, which played an important role in establishing the field in the United States, provides an ideal venue for this discussion. In 1937, Robert Goldwater completed his dissertation at the IFA, later published as Primitivism in Modern Painting, a seminal work that helped introduce African art to American audiences. His influence extended through his Africa-focused museum work in New York City and his teaching and mentorship of Africanist scholars at the IFA.

With Goldwater’s legacy in mind, our roundtable will explore the significance of “Other Africas,” encompassing geographies and worldmaking projects that move beyond established frameworks and methodologies. By doing so, we aim to unsettle the legacies of earlier scholarship and highlight contemporary, pathbreaking directions in Africanist art history.

Moderators

Kinaya Hassane is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts. Her dissertation project explores the intersecting histories of photography, migration, and labor on the western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius, Comoros, Zanzibar and Mombasa. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship-Social Science Research Council, NYU's Provost's Graduate Research Initiatives, and NYU's Migration Network. Prior to matriculating at the IFA, she was a curatorial fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, where she co-curated Imperfect History: Curating the Graphic Arts Collection at Benjamin Franklin's Public Library (2021-2022)

Prita Meier is Associate Professor of Africanist art history at the Institute of Fine Arts. She is the author of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (2016) and The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast (2024).

Roundtable Participants

Antawan I. Byrd is Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University and an Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a co-curator of Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, a major traveling exhibition, currently on view at the Art Institute, that surveys the influence of Pan-Africanist ideas on African and African diasporic art since the 1920s. He is now at work on a book manuscript that investigates the influence of sound technologies on the art and politics of the 1960s in Africa and its diaspora.

Annissa Malvoisin is Associate Curator of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum. A scholar of ancient African history, her research interests lie in a globalized ancient world through the study of material culture and trade and from the perspective of African regions. Her scholarship investigates inter- and transcultural interactions surrounding the Nile Valley by studying the intersectional biographies of objects. Malvoisin has co-curated Africa Fashion (2023) and Sakimatwemtwe: A Century of Reflection on the Arts of Africa (2023) and has an upcoming contribution to Ancient Pasts for Modern Audiences: Public Scholarship and the Mediterranean World (2025).

Drew Thompson is an art historian and curator. His recent exhibitions include Benjamin Wigfall and Communications at the Dorsey Museum of Art and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and SIGHTLINES at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. He is the author of the book Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times and is at work on a monograph provisionally titled Coloring Surveillance through Polaroids: The Poetics of Black Solidarity and Sociality. His writings on art and visual culture have appeared in edited volumes published by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Image Centre, and The Studio Museum. Thompson currently is Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center and Bard College.