Events Archive

Abstract: Since their discovery in the mid 1970s, the Maya-style murals of Cacaxtla, Tlaxcala (AD 600–900) have challenged notions of Mesoamerican cultures as regionally bounded and immobile. Located some 700 kilometers from the nearest Maya site, the murals have been considered by some to be the result of migration or invasion by a poorly understood group from the southern Gulf Coast referred to as the Olmeca-Xicalanca, and by others to be a local attempt to claim ties to distant powers. This presentation considers the Maya-style traits that appear within Cacaxtla’s murals and elsewhere in the site’s monumental art programs and argues that Cacaxtla’s art reflects a deep and sustained engagement with specific Late Classic sites of the Maya Lowlands. Through analysis of style and iconography at Cacaxtla, it is possible to gain a better understanding of the nature of interaction between powerful cities of the Maya region and Central Mexico during the Late Classic period.

Image: Ricardo Alvarado Tapia

Abstract: Americas Society presents an academic symposium at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts to celebrate the upcoming exhibition José Leonilson: Empty Man and the international launch of the three volume Leonilson catalogue raisonné, recently completed by the artist’s estate, the São Paulo-based Projeto Leonilson.

Image: José Leonilson Bezerra Dias, Empty Man, 1991, Thread on embroidered linen, 20 7/8 x 14 9/16 in (53 x 37 cm). Família Bezerra Dias/Projeto Leonilson. © Projeto Leonilson

Abstract: In the 1920s, the scientist and inventor John Hays Hammond, Jr. built a medieval-style castle high on a bluff overlooking the sea in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His ‘castle’ housed his laboratory, but Hammond also used it as a stage setting for his sizeable collection of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance objects, in a fantastical setting meant to evoke a medieval past. Although Hammond lived, worked, and entertained his many famous friends in the castle, he also operated it as a museum, which one breathless newspaper account of the time deemed “the most extraordinary art museum in the world.” Despite these accolades, today Hammond’s collection and castle are almost completely unknown and unpublished.

Abstract: Esteban Lisa (1895-1983) was both an enigmatic figure as well as a major force within the development of art in Argentina in the mid-20th century. Born in a small town in the province of Toledo, Spain, he left for Buenos Aires at age 12. Like many other émigré artists to the Americas (Esteban Vicente, Maruja Mallo, the cinéaste Luis Buñuel or the musician Pau Casals) he formed a bridge between the artistic worlds of the New and the Old Worlds. Lisa developed a particular brand of abstraction that became widely acclaimed only after his death. (He refused to exhibit in his lifetime and, like his illustrious Buenos Aires contemporary Jorge Luis Borges, worked as a civil servant for many years). Lisa is the subject of a current exhibition at the art museum of Boston College. This lecture will place the artist within the context of his time in both Argentina and Iberia and will attempt to analyze the rise of interest in his work on both sides of the Atlantic beginning in the 1990s. Image: Fondation Audi, "Esteban Lisa: in the land of the Cedars" 2010, p. 66; PJT

The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of project presentations by current Conservation Center students from their summer experiences at IFA-sponsored and co-sponsored archaeological excavations.
Presentations will include:

Chantal Stein, Sardis Excavations in Turkey
Andrew Wolf, Samothrace Excavations

A question and answer session will follow the last presentation, and please join us for a light reception in the Loeb Room at the conclusion of the evening's program.

Abstract: In 1927, the radical-left magazine Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (or AIZ) published a two-page spread with the declarative titled “Die AIZ sagt die Wahrheit!” [The AIZ Tells the Truth!]. At issue was its cover photo from a few weeks earlier showing right-wing militiamen scandalously posing on the country estate of German Interior Minister Walter von Keudell, the first “völkisch” member of a Weimar-era cabinet. The picture had ignited furious public debate before enveloping the minister himself, who was forced to protest his innocence from the well of the Reichstag. As von Keudell declared, the picture was nothing more than a cut-and-paste falsification. In the subsequent two-page spread, the AIZ now confessed that its cover had indeed been a “Bildkombination,” but that the image nonetheless told the truth about the government’s codling of proto-fascists. Using this case of a highly public debate about photography’s veracity, my paper proposes that Weimar-era Germany’s politically polarized public sphere was significantly fomented by the camera. The experience of political combat was now being driven by a contest of photographic images. But as the paper also suggests, the rhetoric of truth propelling this encounter, particularly in the face of an open “Bildkombination,” shows that photography now functioned at an affective register that reinscribed the medium as a passionate rather than mechanically objective form of witness. This phenomenon resembles today’s photographic conditions in the era of “alternative facts.”

Andrés Mario Zervigón is Associate Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Photography and Germany (Reaktion Book, 2017). In addition, Zervigón coedited three anthologies: Photography and Its Origins with Tanya Sheehan(Routledge, 2014), Photography and Doubt with Sabine Kriebel(Routledge, 2016), and Subjective/Objective: A Century of Social Photography with Donna Gustafson (Zimmerli/Hirmer, 2017). For his current book project, titled Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung -- The Worker's Illustrated Magazine, 1921-1938: A History of Germany's Other Avant-Garde, he received the Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA, 2013-14). His articles and reviews have appeared in New German Critique, Visual Resources, History of Photography, Rundbrief Fotografie, Photo/Researcher, Études Photographiques, October, Art Journal, and CAAReviews. Zervigón leads The Developing Room, an academic working group at Rutgers that promotes interdisciplinary dialogue on photography’s history, theory and practice. Its last event was the two-day symposium Reinventing Documentary Photography in the 1970s, co-convened by Sarah Miller and Drew Sawyer.

Abstract: Artist, poet, activist and philosopher, Cecilia Vicuña (born in Chile, a long-time resident of New York) has been noted for many decades for her work in a wide variety of media and venues. Her political activism, her artistic innovation and her stimulating and original approach to problems of visuality and the expression of collective emotion are at the heart of her art.

We are immensely pleased to have Cecilia as the first Artist in this Fall's series of Latin American Forum events. She will discuss her work in the context of a conversation with Edward J. Sullivan, Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Art History and Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts

This exhibition proudly continues a commitment to presenting work by mid-career female artists at the Institute’s James B. Duke House. Set within the building’s beaux-arts interior, Hopf’s films and sculptures of brick create a rich aesthetic contrast and promote conceptual interaction with the historic venue.

Since 1932 the Institute of Fine Arts has been dedicated to graduate teaching and advanced research in history of art, archaeology, and conservation. This tradition was enhanced in 2013 when the Institute, revealing the potential of the Duke House’s interior as venue for contemporary art, inaugurated its student-led Great Hall Exhibition program. Acclaimed artists Lynda Benglis, Rachel Harrison, Marta Chilindrón, Martha Friedman and most recently Lucy Kim, are among the artists featured to date.

The exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Valeria Napoleone XX and Kaufmann Repetto. It was curated by Scott R. Davis, Kendall Follert, Mattos Paschal, and Haley S. Pierce.

The exhibition will be on view to the public from October 19th through January 2018 from 1-4pm daily.

Abstract: The collaboration between curators, conservators and conservation scientists has become an increasingly important dynamic in recent years. The result of their research, sometimes called technical art history, is often incorporated into museum websites and exhibition catalogs and design. Three exhibitions held in recent years at The Museum of Modern Art will be presented as case studies.

Karl Buchberg has a B.A. from Columbia University and holds a master’s degree in art history and an advanced certificate in conservation from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He was the Conservator of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Firestone Library of Princeton University from 1980-1986. He was a part time lecturer at the Conservation Program at the School of Library Service at Columbia University from 1984-1990. He has recently retired after a tenure of thirty years from The Museum of Modern Art where he was Senior Conservator specializing in paper conservation. During this time, he was co-curator for the landmark exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs; the first time a conservator curated a show at the museum. In addition, he contributed technical essays to both the Georges Seurat, The Drawings and Degas: A Strange New Beauty catalogues.

Abstract: Anicka Yi lives and works in New York City. Recent institutional solo exhibitions of her work include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunsthalle Basel; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and The Cleveland Museum of Art. In October 2016, she was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize and presented a solo exhibition at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, from April to July 2017. Yi has screened her film, The Flavor Genome, at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2017. She is represented by 47 Canal, New York.

Abstract: Many discussions of Inka rule focus on the domination of millions of people, by imposing military control, establishing sustainable governance, and building a vast support infrastructure. Equally important, however, were the efforts the Inkas made to impose their own notions of cosmic and social order on the world at large. This talk explores how the Inkas thought the world worked and how to be successful within it, as they tried to make themselves the indispensable intermediary between humanity and all other powers. Among the key ideas that contributed to practical rule were their notions of life and death (e.g., living ancestral mummies), flexible relations with time and the past, and a landscape in which they shared social space with living mountains and rocks. Those ideas help us to understand how the Inkas managed to rule in a land without writing or a multi-year calendar. Among the sites explored are the major temples, carved stones, and the world’s highest archaeological sites, the mountain peak shrines containing sacrificed children.

Program Description: In conjunction with the fall 2017 Great Hall Exhibition featuring Berlin-based artist Judith Hopf, please join us for a conversation between Pepe Karmel, Associate Professor of Art History at NYU with interests in contemporary art and critical theory, and Ben Kafka, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, and practicing psychoanalyst from NYU Steinhardt.

The discussion will be moderated by Institute student and co-coordinator of the Great Hall Exhibition Series, Kendall Follert.

Topics of conversation will include the impact of technology on perception and human experience and its role in contemporary art, using Hopf’s work as a touchstone.

Description: In collaboration with The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, The Walther Collection will present an international symposium on Friday, November 3, 2017. The symposium brings together leading international scholars, curators, writers, and artists to address a wide range of topics pertinent to the production and reception of photography, video, and new media art practices in China from the 1990s to present. This half-day event, co-organized with The Institute of Fine Arts and hosted on its campus, coincides with East of Que Village: The Ends of Nature, a site-specific video installation by Yang Fudong, currently on view at The Walther Collection Project Space through November 25, and is curated by Christopher Phillips.

The first Surrealist poems by a young generation of Arab artists and critics in Syria and Iraq appeared in 1946, in short-lived journals like al-Qithara and al-Fikr al-Hadith. Next, there followed a tide of visual experiments with automatic drawing in a heavily psychologized register: ink-blot sketches, talismans, and doodles of bloated hands and blinded eyes. The most inventive and critical of these practitioners is Aleppo-based artist Fateh al-Moudarres (1922-1999), a figure who went on to forge a brilliant career as a painter of the repressed material of Syrian historical memory and its looped cycles of martyrdom and rebirth, and prophets and false gods. In this talk, Lenssen examines al-Moudarres’s early engagements with theories of the fleetingness of the image’s manifestation—and in particular the vulnerability of its outward formation, such that the presence of a figure always entails a kind of subcutaneous bleeding—and highlights their significance to the later arts of decolonization struggle in the Arab East.

Abstract: History of archaeology is commonly written centering on Western men of knowledge in far-away lands and among primitive people unable to understand the values and meanings of past civilizations. Focusing on everyday life on an archaeological site in Nippur, this lecture will offer another perspective by highlighting a complex social dynamic with multiple voices: local laborers, Ottoman civil servants, and American archaeologists.

Description: The talk between Miguel Luciano and Elizabeth Ferrer will introduce recently commissioned projects that question the complicated relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, at the centennial mark of U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans (1917-2017). Luciano's work acts as a powerful commentary on the current economic and political crisis in Puerto Rico and examines its impact on the diaspora.

The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of presentations by current conservation students about their projects at Villa La Pietra, NYU's campus in Florence, Italy.

Bryanna Knotts & Chantal Stein
Treatment of two upholstered stools

Kim Frost & Andy Wolf
Stabilization of polychrome sculpture and examination of the "Cartapesta Madonna da Vestire" in the Sala di Ballo

Lia Kramer & Soon Kai Poh
Treatment of an 18th Century painted fan

A question and answer session will follow each presentation. Please join us for a light reception in the Loeb Room at the conclusion of the evening's program.

Abstract: Considered one of the pioneers of interactive cinema, New York-based artist Toni Dove creates hybrid performance, installation and screen-based art that fuses film, game or instrument based interaction, and experimental theater. In her work, performers interact with an unfolding narrative, using interface technologies such as motion sensing, iPad and laser harp to inhabit and animate on-screen avatars.

Toni Dove's work has been presented in the United States, Europe and Canada as well as in print and on radio and television. Projects include interactive installations: Archeology of a Mother Tongue, (virtual reality) Banff Centre for the Arts; Artificial Changelings, premiere: Rotterdam Film Festival, USA; Body Mécanique at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio; Spectropia: feature length live-mix movie performance: Lincoln Center, Scanners, the New York Video Festival 2006; Cleveland at the Ingenuity festival 2007; premiered: Wexner Center for the Arts; REDCAT, LA Nov 2007;the Zero1 Festival of Art on the Edge, San Jose, 2008, EMPAC, Troy NY, 2008, the Kitchen, NYC, 2010, Roulette, NY, 2012. Lucid Possession, a live mix music cinema performance, a co-production with Issue Project Room, Roulette and HERE, premiered in NYC in 2013 after a preview show at Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech.

Her current work in progress, an interactive cinema and robotics installation ‘The Dress That Eats Souls’, will be presented in a retrospective of Dove’s interactive work “Embodied Machines” at The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, 2018.

Dove was the Hirshon Artist/Director in residence at the New School for Social Research in Media Studies 2014/15. She has received numerous grants and awards including support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Langlois Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The LEF Foundation, MediaThe Foundation, and the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T.

Dove was appointed to the 2000/2003 Government Advisory Committee on Information Technology and Creativity, National Research Council, USA. She is the granddaughter of American abstract painter Arthur Dove.