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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
- 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 Symposium Watch the George Rickey Symposium onlinePlease 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 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) - 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 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
Series: Ancient Seminar
Title: Baths, Beds, and Beyond: A New Form of Bathing in the Roman World
Speaker/s: Fikret Yegül, Distinguished Professor, UC Santa Barbara
learn more about 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 LethièreThe 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
Title: Concerning the Spiritual in Contemporary Arts in Latin America and The Caribbean
Speakers: Horacio Ramos, PhD Candidate, CUNY Graduate Center and Julián Sánchez, PhD Candidate, Columbia University
learn more about the ISLAA Forum on Latin American Art Watch Concerning the Spiritual in Contemporary Arts in Latin America and The CaribbeanonlineOver the past decade, scholars and art institutions across the Americas have observed a notable rise in the incorporation of spiritual beliefs into the practices of Latin American and Caribbean artists. Witchcraft, Shamanism, Paganism, Santería, Vodou, Obeah, Candomblé, and Divination have, not without controversy, become central themes in contemporary art discourse within communities of Indigenous artists, artists of color and beyond. These spiritually infused artistic explorations resonate with current decolonial and racial justice concerns, but their resurgence is far from coincidental.
In this program two advanced graduates with close ties to the IFA (Julián Sánchez from Columbia and Horacio Ramos from the Graduate Center at CUNY) will discuss their work in various Latin American venues in preparation for their PhD dissertations. Both speakers will address issues of race and aesthetic practices, subjects with which they also grappled during their recent activities as Curatorial Research Fellows at the Cisneros Institute at the Museum of Modern Art.
Horacio Ramos is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.He holds an MA in Art History and a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the Pontificia Universidad Universidad Católica del Perú. He has worked in the curatorial departments of the Museo de Arte de Lima, El Museo del Barrio, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Julián Sánchez González is a PhD candidate in Art History at Columbia University and a former Fulbright Scholar. He completed his MA in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts. He has held research fellowships at the Museum of Modern Art, Cisneros Institute, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University, and the Heyman Center for the Public Humanities at Columbia University.
The ISLAA Forum on Latin American Art is sustained in partnership with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). This event series brings artists, scholars, and critics of the arts of the Americas to the Institute of Fine Arts, providing a platform for discussions and debates about diverse issues pertaining to contemporary arts and visual cultures throughout the hemisphere. For more information on the ISLAA Forum on Latin American Art, please visit our webpage
- Wednesday, October 2, 6:00 pm
- November
- Saturday, November 2, 2024 2:00 pm
Title: NYU String Studies Chamber Music Concert Series
Description: Three masterpieces of chamber music literature will be performed on November 2nd. The program will last approximately one hour, including one five-minute pause. Both works will be performed by students from NYU Steinhardt’s String Studies program. - Thursday, November 7, 6:00 PM
Co-Sponsored with the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies (CEMS)
Title: Anti-colonial Barcelona and the Possibility of a Black Planet
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
learn more about the ISLAA Forum on Latin American ArtElvira 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
Dr. Elvira Dyangani Ose is currently the director of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). She has been the director and chief curator of The Showroom in London, as well as lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a member of the Thought Council, Fondazione Prada. Dr. Dyangani Ose has previously been curator of the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art; curator of international art at Tate Modern, London; artistic director of Rencontres Picha – Lubumbashi Biennial, Democratic Republic of the Congo; curator of contemporary art at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville; senior curator at Creative Time in New York; and curator of contemporary art at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Before academia she had a career as a registered nurse. Her first book is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021). She is writing a second monograph about the plantation and medicine called Empire States of Mind with Duke University Press and is co-editor of Beyond Boundaries: Seeing Art History from the Caribbean (Yale UP, 2025). She is a member of the American Antiquarian Society, was the 2022 Terra Foundation Rome Prize Fellow, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and co-curated the installation by Sonya Clark called The Descendants of Monticello, with Monument Lab in June 2024. She directs the research hub Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism www.artandcolonialmedicine.com.
- November 8, 2024, 6:00-8:00pm
Currents in Art and Beyond
Title: Erasing History: A Conversation Between Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy, Yale University and Milton S.F. Curry, Professor of Architecture and Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Engagement at Cornell University
Speakers: Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy, Yale University; Milton S.F. Curry, Professor of Architecture and Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Engagement at Cornell University
learn more about Currents in Art and BeyondJoin us for a compelling evening featuring bestselling author and philosopher Jason Stanley and esteemed architect and professor Milton S.F. Curry as they delve into the intricate themes of historical and architectural erasure. This event, centered around Stanley’s new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (Simon & Schuster) and Curry's pioneering journal, CriticalProductive: A Journal of Architectural Urbanism and Cultural Theory (MIT Press), promises to provoke thought and inspire dialogue. Stanley and Curry will explore how erasures manifest in both history and architecture, examining the implications of these processes on our collective future. Stanley’s work dissects the mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes manipulate historical narratives, while Curry provides critical insights into the built environment and its role in shaping cultural memory.
Central to the discussion is the distinction between acceptable architectural erasures—those that contribute to progress—and problematic ones that reinforce oppressive ideologies. This conversation will also touch upon the relationship between architectural erasures and educational erasures, highlighting the ways in which both shape our understanding of the world. In addition, Stanley and Curry address the pervasive concept of "decadence" within contemporary right-wing politics, unpacking how this term is leveraged to undermine progressive narratives. This event offers a unique opportunity to engage with two thinkers as they explore the core values of democracy, and the fascist forces eroding free expression and open intellectual inquiry today.
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of six books, including How Fascism Works and How Propaganda Works. Stanley is a member of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School and serves on the advisory board of the Prison Policy Initiative. He writes frequently about authoritarianism, democracy, propaganda, free speech, and mass incarceration for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, and many other publications.
Milton S. F. Curry is a Professor of Architecture and Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Engagement at Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP); founding editor of CriticalProductive and principal of Milton Curry ProjectStudio design consultancy. In addition to publications on architecture race theory, and diversity in the practice and profession of architecture, Curry is leading the curatorial team at work on three exhibitions on the life and work of the award-winning LA-based Black architect Paul R. Williams, slated to open simultaneously at LACMA, the USC Fisher Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute in 2026.
- Tuesday, November 12, 6:00 pm
Series: Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture
Title: Reimagining How and Why and Who and What in Photographic Exhibition-Making
Speaker: Roxana Marcoci, Acting Chief Curator and the David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art
learn more about Roxana MarcociHow did Deana Lawson reclaim the idea of a citizenry of photography, providing a revisionist twist on Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man” thematic? Who are the creative interlocutors blurring the line between theory and activism in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments to Solidarity? What does it mean “to look without fear” in Wolfgang Tillmans’s worldview? How did Christopher Williams visualize The Production Line of Happiness? Why did Louise Lawler espouse a process of continuous re-presentation, reframing, and restaging of her images in the present? This lecture focuses on an intergenerational group of artists whose engagement with photography’s multiple lives, exhibition-making contexts, and viewers’ receptions has not only changed museological conventions but forged perceptive links between progressive politics and institutional transformation. These artists’ intersectional strategies—ranging from anti-authorial models of authorship to the preservation of forgotten stories of labor, gender, and race in contemplating the construction of a world built on solidarity and creativity—offer a meditation on history as a projective process of consciousness-raising.
Roxana Marcoci is Acting Chief Curator and the David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art. Major exhibitions she curated include LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity (2024); An-My Lê, Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières (2023); Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear (2022); Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum (2022); Carrie Mae Weems: From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (2020); Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW (2017); Zoe Leonard: Analogue (2015); From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (2015); Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness (2014); The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook (2012); The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (2010). A contributor to Aperture, Art in America, Art Journal, Document, and Mousse, she has co-authored and edited the three-volume Photography at MoMA (2015/17). The recipient of the 2011 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellowship, Marcoci is co-founder of MoMA’s Forums on Contemporary Photography and of C-MAP’s Eastern and Central
- 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
learn more about Edges of AileyThis evening celebrates the Whitney Museum's current landmark exhibition Edges of Ailey, the first major museum show devoted to choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). The exhibition’s Curator Dr. Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney, will be in conversation with Claire Bishop, art critic and Presidential Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Edwards and Bishop will together consider the art and legacy of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the place of dance and performance in contemporary museums and art history.
Dr. Adrienne Edwards is Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She curated “Edges of Ailey,” an exhibition, performances, and catalogue on the choreographer Alvin Ailey that opened at the Whitney in September 2024; cocurated “Quiet as it’s Kept: 2022 Whitney Biennial;” and was president of the International Jury of the 59th Venice Biennale. Previously, she served as curator of Performa in New York and as curator at large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In addition to over fifty interdisciplinary performance and moving image commissions, Edwards’s curatorial projects have also included the exhibition and catalogue “Blackness in Abstraction” presented at Pace Gallery (2016), the traveling exhibition and catalogue “Jason Moran” at Walker Art Center, ICA Boston, and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018–19); “Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise,” a series of performances based on a text cowritten by Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten at the Whitney (2020); Dave McKenzie’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, “The Story I Tell Myself,” and its pendant performance commission, “Disturbing the View,” at the Whitney (2021); the performance collective My Barbarian’s twentieth anniversary exhibition and catalogue at the Whitney (2021–22); and Every Ocean Hughes's “Alive Side,” a four-part project including two performance commissions, video installation, exhibition, and a catalogue, co-published with Moderna Museet in Stockholm, at the Whitney (2023). She was part of the Whitney’s core team for David Hammons’s public art monument Day’s End. Edwards has taught art history, visual studies, and dance studies at New York University, the New School, and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Claire Bishop is an art critic and Presidential Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Walther Koenig, 2013), and a book of conversations with the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. She has two new publications, both 2024: Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso) and Merce Cunningham’s Events: Key Concepts (Koenig). She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, a Contributing Editor of Artforum, and her essays and books have been translated into twenty languages.
- Wednesday, November 20, 6:00 pm
Conservation Center, Summer Projects Day III -
Thursday, November 21, 2024, 6:30-8:00pm
Title: Annual Selinunte Lecture
Speaker: Prof. Clemente Marconi (The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU), Director, IFA–NYU and UniMi project in Selinunte
Dr. Rosalia Pumo (The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU), Deputy Director, IFA–NYU and UniMi project in Selinunte
Prof. Andrew Ward (Fairfield University), Field Director, IFA–NYU and UniMi project in Selinunte
learn more about Selinunte Join us in-personfor the Selinunte lecture Join us onlinefor the Selinunte lectureThis past summer saw a major step forward in the work of the archaeological project on the Acropolis of Selinunte of the Institute of Fine Arts–NYU and the University of Milan. The new permit, issued by the director of the Archaeological Park, Dr. Felice Crescente, has extended the area of operation of our project to the entire main urban sanctuary. Covering two hectares, this was one of the largest sacred areas in the Greek Mediterranean during the Archaic and Classical periods, well known for its abundant monumental architecture but still largely unexcavated underneath the levels of the Punic phase (ca. 300–250 BCE). This extension has led to remarkable new finds related to the original articulation of the area during the past excavation season, including the peribolos wall to the south, a previously undocumented monumental entrance at the northwest corner, and a new Archaic cult building and banqueting halls north of Temple D. The work this past summer has also produced remarkable new finds in Temple R, particularly as regards the earliest phase of Greek settlement between ca. 628 and 570 BCE.
- Saturday, November 2, 2024 2:00 pm
- December
- Monday, December 2, 2024, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Aphrodisias Lecture
Title: New Research and Discoveries at Aphrodisias in 2024
Speaker: Roland Smith
learn more about the Aphrodisias lecture Join us in-personfor Aphrodisias lecture Join us onlinefor the Aphrodisias lectureJoin us to hear Roland R. R. Smith speak about the most recent work carried out by NYU-IFA at Aphrodisias in southwest Turkey, in collaboration with Oxford University. Aphrodisias is one of the most important sites of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean, with superbly preserved public buildings and monuments. Marble-carving was a noted Aphrodisian speciality in antiquity, and the excavated remains of the city’s statues, sarcophagi, and architectural reliefs are abundant and of spectacular quality.
The 2024 season at Aphrodisias was rich in interesting and unexpected results. The discoveries of a powerful marble ‘portrait’ of Zeus and of an underground cult chamber in the House of Kybele were both major surprises. The Kybele House complex was equipped with ritual apparatus and small high-quality marble cult figures of Aphrodite, Apollo, Athena, and Kybele – for private pagan worship that continued much longer than anyone could have expected, into the early seventh century. This discovery is of substantial historical significance.
Roland Smith is an expert in Greek and Roman art, with a special interest in the visual and urban culture of the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. He taught at the IFA from 1986 to 1995 and has been director of the NYU Aphrodisias project since 1991. He retired from his position as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford University in 2022, and now devotes more time to Aphrodisias and the publication of the project’s results. He is currently also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Bilkent University in Ankara.
- Tuesday, December 3, 2024, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Huber Colloquium
Title: The side effect this system created: Art, Race and Labor in Mid-Twentieth Century Brazil
Speaker: Bruno Pinheiro, Post-doctoral fellow, Leonard A. Lauder Research Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
learn more about the Huber Colloquium Join us in-personfor the Huber Colloquium Join us onlinefor the Huber ColloquiumDuring the 1º Congresso Nacional do Negro (August 1950), playwright and activist Abdias Nascimento proposed the creation of the Museu de Arte Negra. Although Nascimento lacked the resources to establish the museum as a physical institution, it became a lifelong project of Black collectionism. The Museu de Arte Negra was conceived to address the underrepresentation of Black artists in the growing post-World War II debates about the creation of modern art museums in Brazil. By examining the careers of painters contemporary to Nascimento such as Wilson Tibério and Tomás Santa Rosa, I will explore the conditions that led to the activist’s proposal. Through these experiences, I will analyze the responses to racial inequalities in art institutions as part of an intellectual tradition that the Hip Hop group Racionais MCs described in 1997 as “the side effect this system created.”
Bruno Pinheiro an Art Historian specializing in the Arts and Visual Culture of the African Diaspora in the Americas. He holds a Ph.D. from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), where he analyzed the trajectories of artists of African descent who were active during the mid-twentieth century in Salvador (Brazil) and their circulation in local and international art institutions. Currently, he is a Leonard A. Lauder Postdoctoral Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2024-2026), where he is working on his book project ‘Black Modernism in the Americas: the transit of ideas on art and race’. The results of his research were presented in papers published in Afterall Journal, and Oboe Journal, as well as in other peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and digital editorial projects.
- Wednesday, December 4, 2024, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Close Reading: Authors at the IFA
Title: 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
Speaker: Prita Meier and Cajetan Iheka
learn more about Close Reading: Authors at the IFA Join us in-personfor Close Reading: Authors at the IFA Join us onlinefor Close Reading: Authors at the IFAPlease join us for our next Close Reading: Authors at the Institute of Fine Arts-NYU event, featuring Prita Meier, who teaches African and Indian Ocean art history at the IFA. She will be in conversation with Cajetan Iheka, Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University and a renowned scholar of African arts and literature.
Professor Meier recently published The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast (Princeton University Press, October 2024), the first history of photography from coastal East Africa. The book showcases over 200 previously unpublished photographs from public and private collections across Africa, Asia, the United States, and Europe. Immersing readers in African networks of trade and travel, the book shows how photographs are not static images but mobile objects with remarkable shape-shifting qualities. Beginning with the earliest photographs introduced through seaborne commerce, the medium’s integration into the cultural landscape was swift. Photographs functioned as objects of decoration, good taste, and cosmopolitanism, but were also used by local elites and foreigners to coerce and objectify enslaved people. Through more than a decade of archival and ethnographic research in Zanzibar, Mombasa, and Lamu, Professor Meier repositions Africa’s islands and port cities at the center of global discussions on vernacular photography.
Prita Meier is Associate Professor of African art history at the Institute of Fine Arts and in the Department of Art History at New York University. In addition to The Surface of Things, Professor Meier is the author of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (2016) and co-editor of World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean (2017), which accompanied an exhibition she co-curated, which received two National Endowment for the Humanities grants. She also has served as a co-PI with Nancy Um, Associate Director for Research and Knowledge Creation at the Getty Research Institute, for Indian Ocean Exchanges, an international collaborative research project funded by the Getty.
Cajetan Nwabueze Iheka is Professor of English, director of the Whitney Humanities Center, chair of the Council on African Studies, and head of the Africa Initiative at Yale University. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (2018) and African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (2021). Both books have won multiple awards, including the African Studies Association Best Book Prize, the Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association. He has also coedited African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (2018) and Environmental Transformations, a special issue of African Literature Today.
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Thursday, December 5, 2024, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor in Conservation and Technical Studies Lecture
Title: Art Versus the Great Outdoors: Wrestling with the Meaning of Repair
Speaker: Rosa Lowinger
learn more about the Praska lecture Join us in-personfor the Praska lecture Join us onlinefor the Praska lectureConservators are taught that caring for artworks relies on managing environments, retaining original material, and avoiding radical interventions that are difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. Such tenets, ingrained into our practice during our training, don’t quite apply to works subject to rain, wind, birds, vandals, skateboarders, untested new materials, and, in the case of integral architectural works, outliving their support buildings. Good care of these works constantly challenges time-honored conservation ethics and approaches. But practitioners of outdoor public art conservation also frequently grapple with fundamental truths about the nature of repair and the conservator’s place within the world of artmaking and stewardship. This lecture will explore how this type of thinking works and how it has led the author to consider its potential to reverberate outside the field of conservation to engender personal and societal repair.
Rosa Lowinger is an art conservator specializing in sculpture, monuments, integral architectural artworks and contemporary art. A 1982 conservation graduate of the Conservation Center at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, she is the founder of RLA Conservation, LLC, a practice with offices in Los Angeles and Miami. Rosa is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and the 2009 Booth Rome Prize Fellow in Conservation at the American Academy in Rome, where she conducted a study of the history of vandalism. In addition to her practice, Rosa writes about conservation for general audiences. She has curated the exhibits Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure, American Seduction (Wolfsonian, 2016) and Concrete Paradise: Miami Marine Stadium (Coral Gables Museum, 2013). Her books include Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt: 2006) and Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House: 2023).
- Monday, December 9, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Roundtables
Title: Africa’s Past, Black Futures: The Afterlives of Pharaonic Egypt in Art and Politics
Speaker: Kathryn Howley, Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, Erich Kessel, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Associate Professor at New York University, and Prita Meier, Associate Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU
learn more about Roundtables Join us in-personfor Roundtables Join us onlinefor RoundtablesFeaturing Kathryn Howley, Erich Kessel, and Nadia Yala Kisukidi, this roundtable will consider the many afterlives of “ancient” Africa, focusing particularly on Pharaonic Egypt. Using the Met’s current exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now as a springboard, we will examine how Africa’s pre-modern history is constantly being reimagined in relationship to modern and contemporary art and politics. We will consider the implications of presenting African kingdoms and kings as a source of Black civilizational greatness, exploring how Black artists and intellectuals engage with the African past to advance alternative visions of freedom and identity. Additionally, we will discuss the role of civilizational discourse in global liberation movements, diasporic racial formations, and nationalism. Join us for lively debate and informal discussion as we explore the implications of remaking and consuming the past.
The moderator for the roundtable will be Prita Meier, Associate Professor of African Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.
Kathryn Howley is the Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. An archaeologist and art historian, she investigates the role of material culture in intercultural exchanges, focusing on Egypt and Nubia during the first millennium BCE. Her research combines Egyptological, anthropological, and art historical approaches to explore how objects shaped social systems and cultural interactions. She directs fieldwork at Sanam, Sudan, examining Nubian use of Egyptian material culture under the Kushite dynasty. She is currently completing her first book, The Royal Tombs of Nuri: Interaction and Material Culture Exchange between Kush and Egypt c. 650-580 BC.
Erich Kessel is Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora and African-American Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. His research examines how racial violence shapes the conceptual and historical frameworks of visuality, aesthetics, and embodiment. Integrating interdisciplinary approaches from Black Studies, Marxist critique, psychoanalysis, and media theory, his work interrogates art, images, and exhibitions as reflections of racial hierarchies and capitalism. His current book project investigates the racial, aesthetic and political-economic work of the idea of the image across a variety of artistic practices, media, and forms of sociality since the 1970s. He is co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979–1989.
Nadia Yala Kisukidi is Associate Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is a philosopher specializing in French and Africana thought. She has taught at the University of Geneva and Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis and served as Vice-President of the Collège International de Philosophie (2014–2016). A fellow at Columbia University's Institute for Ideas and Imagination (2022–2023), she co-curated the Yango II Biennale in Kinshasa. Her works include Bergson ou l’humanité créatrice (2013), Dialogue transatlantique with Djamila Ribeiro (2021), and the novel La Dissociation (2022). Kisukidi also contributed to Colonisations. Notre histoire (2023) and Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relations (2023).
- Monday, December 2, 2024, 6:00-8:00pm