Events Archive

Description: This lecture presents an overview of recent work (2008–2014) at the Minoan settlement of Gournia on Crete with an aim of showing how the current vision of Gournia has changed from that of Harriet Boyd, who first excavated the site over a century ago. Recent work has added many new and specific details to our knowledge of Gournia, having to do with its development, size, commercial production, external relations, literacy, and cult ceremonies. But, if one stands back a step or two, its principal contribution is to confirm Harriet Boyd’s original assessment of the town.

A nationwide audit has shifted priorities at English Heritage towards preventive conservation, including passive and active control for showcases. Monitoring tarnish rate with silver coupons and colorimetry has been developed to provide a convenient, accessible method to assess environments. Storage of silver objects in heat sealed Marvelseal bags and Corrosion Intercept has been investigated. Rapid deterioration of cover glasses for Daguerreotypes has been observed, posing a significant risk to the images. If reintegration is not an option, their storage in heat sealed escal bags with Prosorb has been suggested. Considering the broader context of preventive conservation, the efficiency and carbon footprint of various environmental control strategies for display and storage in historic buildings will be presented.

The Institute of Fine Arts and Steinhardt invites you to join us for an evening of jazz at the Duke House featuring students from NYU's Steinhardt Jazz Program.The NYU Steinhardt Jazz Studies Program is located in the heart of Greenwich Village, the world's capital for jazz music. It develops young leaders in today's global jazz scene by offering Bachelor, Master, Artist Diploma, and Ph.D. degrees that combine artistic excellence with academic rigor. Its internationally renowned faculty helps students realize their full potential as performers and composers, and provides real-world knowledge that helps them succeed as 21st-century improvisers.

Program:

1st Set
Ethan Helm PhD. '20, alto saxophone
Timo Vollbrecht PhD. '20, tenor saxophone
Nicholas Panoutsous BM '20, bass
Lukas Akintaya MM '20, drums

2nd Set: NYU Wayne Shorter Ensemble
Alex Sipiagin, teacher, trumpet
Alex Ramirez MM '20, alto saxophone
Calvin Sexton MM '20, trombone
Talia Rubenstein BM '20, guitar
Dahye Kwon MM '20, piano
Sean Hannon MM '20, bass
Lucas Ebeling BM '20, drums

The Institute of Fine Arts at NYU Duke House Exhibition Series is pleased to present Fanny Sanín's New York: The Critical Decade, 1971-1981, a solo exhibition featuring works by artist Fanny Sanín (b. 1938, Bogotá, Colombia). The exhibition explores the artist's evolving practice of geometric abstraction during her first decade living and working in New York City after a successful career in Colombia, in London, and in Monterrey, Mexico. It also coincides with the publication of the major, multi-authored monograph of the artist Fanny Sanín: The Concrete Language of Color and Structure.

Please join us for an opening celebration on February 18th from 6:30 to 9:00 pm.

The exhibition is generously funded by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) www.islaa.org. Special thanks to the Fanny Sanín Legacy Project. The exhibition was curated by Edward Chang, Megan Kincaid, and Anastassia Perfilieva.

Since 1932 the Institute of Fine Arts has been dedicated to graduate teaching and advanced research in the history of art, archaeology, and conservation. The Duke House Exhibition Series brings contemporary art to the walls of the Institute's landmarked James B. Duke House. The work is displayed in the beaux-arts interior of the former residence of the Duke Family, juxtaposing the historic with the contemporary and inviting viewers to engage with both the past and future of the Institute. Since 2019, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is proud to support the Duke House Exhibition Series to showcase the work of Latin American artists.

Please join us in celebrating the Great Hall Exhibition series’ spring exhibition, Posture, featuring new work by New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons. This show continues the Institute of Fine Arts’ commitment to present the work of mid-career women artists. Encompassing video, photography, performance, installation, and sculpture, Simmons’ sweeping aesthetic practice is rooted in the interconnectedness of formal processes, rigorous archival research, and the concept of social and material reparations for the ramifications of colonialism with whiteness as its center.

Influenced in part by the Atelier Brancusi, the works in Posture create a studio-like atmosphere reminiscent of the twentieth-century artist’s attention to the relationship between sculpture and its placement within an environment. Rather than complementing the architecture of the Duke House, however, Simmons’ works comment on the building’s historical origins, an institutional building that was once the private home of the president of the American Tobacco Company, and navigate the complex relationship between art objects and the space in which they are exhibited.

Xaviera Simmons (b. 1974, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2004) and completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously participating in a two-year actor-training course at The Maggie Flanigan Studio, NY. She is a recipient of Socrates Sculpture Park's Artist Award (2019), Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Award (2018), as well as Denniston Hills’ Distinguished Performance Artist Award (2018). In addition to her numerous residencies, fellowships and lectures, Simmons has exhibited nationally and internationally. Simmons is a 2020 visiting lecturer and the inaugural Solomon Fellow at Harvard University. Featuring her work in the Great Hall follows a series of other acclaimed artists such as Lynda Benglis, Rachel Harrison, Martha Friedman, Judith Hopf, Jamie Eisenstein, Elaine Lustig Cohen, Amy Yao and most recently Sarah Peters among others.

The exhibition will be on view to the public from February 25 through May 22, 2020 from 1-4pm daily.

Posture was made possible through the generous support of Valeria Napoleone XX. Additional support provided by David Castillo Gallery. Special thanks to the artist for lending the works on view and to the Swiss Institute for providing exhibition materials. The exhibition is curated by Makenzi Fricker, Scout Hutchinson, Deborah Miller, and Juan Gabriel Ramirez Bolivar.

Beginning with vintage slides, Isca Greenfield-Sanders breaks down photographic images and rebuilds them as her own. Putting the image through various incarnations, she grids and paints small fragments, reconstituting the “details” to a whole in a manner similar to memory’s construction. The vague familiarity of her anonymous landscapes re-enforces her exploration of remembrance as manifested through a complex working method.

Greenfield-Sanders will speak about her more than twenty years working as a painter and what has led to her current body of work, showing how her creations are not only based on photography, but take photography as their primary subject.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders was born in New York City’s East Village, where she currently lives and works. She graduated from Brown University with honors, completing a double major in Fine Arts and Mathematics.

Selected public collections include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco.

Abstract: The so-called "Evangelist portraits” in Carolingian Gospels have been widely studied as masterpieces of Early Medieval illumination. However, the simplicity of the figures, the seemingly repetitive pattern of those representations, and the stylistic interest of such paintings, setting aside the purpose of images, differ from each other much more than expected. This lecture studies the illuminations of Godescalc’s Gospels and of the Gospel Book of Saint-Riquier in order to show how paintings and calligraphy fundamentally question the nature and function of visual representation (from mimesis to imago) and are shaped according to specific spatial dimensions and ratios so to reflect the human and divine natures of God’s Word.

Description:
This talk goes behind the scenes at the Royal Palace in seventeenth-century Madrid to reconstruct the life and work of a long-forgotten tailor who dressed the court of Philip IV and whose creations—immortalized in Diego Velázquez’s greatest works—shaped the look and legacy of Golden-Age Spain.

From 1911 to 1954, Louise and Walter Arensberg formed one of the most important groupings of pre-Columbian art in the United States—a collection that is almost unknown today. Collecting at the same time as Robert Woods Bliss, the Arensbergs were also enthusiasts of modern art (and close friends of Marcel Duchamp), and the popularity of their modern collection has over time eclipsed the ancient American works they acquired. The couple began collecting pre-Columbian works in New York in the 1910s, dramatically accelerated their acquisitions in Hollywood from the late 1930s through the early 1950s, and donated their treasures to the Philadelphia Museum of Art at their deaths in 1953/54. While for decades, many of their works languished in the PMA’s storerooms, recently they have begun to be exhibited in the museums of Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania. This talk will outline the types of objects that the Arensbergs helped popularize, such as playful West Mexican ceramics, elegantly shaped ballgame paraphernalia, and especially rough stone Aztec pieces.

Program:
Selections from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) and Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
Zoe Dweck, BM '20 and Sienna Peck, BM '19/MM '21, violins
Charles Ives (1874-1954): Violin Sonata No. 2 (1914-1917, revised 1919)
I. Autumn: Adagio maestoso––Allegro moderato
II. In the Barn: Presto––Allegro moderato
III. The Revival: Largo––Allegretto
Zoe Dweck, BM '20, violin
Markus Kaitila, MM '20, piano


Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): Violin Sonata No. 2 (1927)
I. Allegretto
II. Blues: Moderato
III. Perpetuum Mobile: Allegro
Jess Bauer, MM '20, violin
Markus Kaitila, MM '20, piano

Description: Eugenie Tsai joined the Brooklyn Museum in fall 2007 as John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, and has presented a number of exhibitions there highlighting the contemporary collection. She has also organized several other exhibitions including Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk—An Introspective; Lee Mingwei: The Moving Garden; LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital; The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001–2013; Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories; Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond (organized with Ru Hockley); and Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic. Previously, Tsai was Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA PS1 and Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Among the exhibitions and installations, she has organized elsewhere are Threshold: Byron Kim, 1990–2004 at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Robert Smithson at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Shuffling the Deck: The Collection Reconsidered at Princeton University. Dr. Tsai received a B.A. from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Ancient Egyptian statues functioned as a vital point of contact to ancestors and gods. Since the 19th century, a recurring theme in Egyptological discussion has been how exactly we should understand this phenomenon. A dominant mode of explanation ascribes beliefs to the ancient Egyptians according to which either of the two main “souls” in Egyptian religion is thought to inhabit the statue, thereby allowing it to function as a site of encountering the depicted entity. The first part of this lecture examines the two most prevalent such hypotheses by looking at the key evidence that has been marshalled in their support and the conceptual frameworks in which they are rooted. It is argued that for the vast majority of Egyptian history, there is ultimately no evidence for such beliefs, and that the perceived need for a soul in the statue is thus likely more indicative of modern concerns than of ancient Egyptian ones. Prompted by this conclusion, the lecture seeks to outline an image ontology based on what ancient Egyptian did with, and said about, statues, as alternative to the representationalist search for a ghost in the machine. It is argued that reconfiguring central concepts like mimesis and material presence allows us to understand both why the Egyptians created works that have traditionally slotted quite easily into Western categories of fine art, and at the same time why the stakes in ancient Egyptian imaging practices were nonetheless considerably higher than a representationalist approach would expect.

While architecture was fundamental to Roman culture - a culture which was essentially urban in nature and which found expression in the built environment - the act of building was almost entirely the privilege of the political and economic elite. By the height of empire in the second to early third centuries CE, however, many cities in Italy and around the empire already had the standard complement of public buildings. The main choices left to ambitious benefactors were to build more bath buildings, to embellish the existing theatre with a new, elaborate scaenae frons, or to adorn the city with new display monuments such as nymphaea, which often used the same architectural language of the columnar façade as the scaenae frons. This paper aims to throw some light on the economics of such choices in a comparative sense across the empire.

Janet DeLaine is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and Director of its Ancient World Research Cluster, having previously been Associate Professor in Roman Archaeology at Oxford. Her research covers the built environment of the Roman world, particularly in the Mediterranean, with a focus on the Roman building industry, Roman baths, and the urban development of Ostia. Her major study on the Baths of Caracalla in Rome (1997), won the Archaeological Institute of America’s James R. Wiseman Award, and has been fundamental in establishing the archaeology of construction as a new discipline within the field of classical archaeology. She is the author of many articles and edited volumes, and has just completed a short book on Roman architecture for OUP. Dr DeLaine is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a Corresponding Member of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Robert Dudley’s Arcano del mare (Secrets of the Seas) (1646-1647) is thought to be the first printed sea atlas. Comprised of large-scale engraved maps and numerous charts with volvelles, the multi-volume book seeks to comprehensively document the world and demonstrate mastery over the seas. Created at the court of the Medici in Florence by the son of the more renowned Robert Dudley (1st Earl of Leicester), Dudley sought to legitimize himself through his navigational studies and knowledge of ship building. Though he made few voyages himself, he gained credibility via the Arcano. This paper will introduce Dudley’s obscure career and the complex atlas itself, exploring several diverse editions. Through close analysis of text and image in the Arcano, the study demonstrates the significance of the section devoted to Brazil, which contains maps that are the only ones in the atlas to include human figures and a cartouche with the Medici coat-of-arms. Fraught with contradiction, the text and images on the maps both preserve and celebrate these lands and people while also denigrating them. Ultimately, the study questions Dudley’s sources and motivations for depicting South America and argues that these images were recycled years after Medici incursions in the Americas were possible.

Lia Markey is the Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at Chicago’s Newberry Library. Dr. Markey’s research examines cross-cultural exchange between Italy and the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, collecting history, and early modern prints and drawings. She has published Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (2016) and a co-edited volume The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750 (2017). Her new edited volume, Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s “Nova Reperta” (2020), complements the Newberry Library’s fall 2020 exhibition by the same title. She currently participates in the Getty Connecting Art Histories Research Group, “Spanish Italy and the Iberian New World.

Museum conservators are increasingly involved in multiple holistic aspects of the museum culture as it affects the preservation and use of collections. As conservators interface with other professionals, the area in which there is perhaps the greatest need for collaboration is in the planning and execution of exhibitions.

Since at least the 1980s, many museums have invited artists or other cultural figures to forage through their storerooms and assemble an exhibition using personal criteria to determine both the content and how it will be displayed. This museological approach places the emphasis on reinterpreting and revitalizing permanent collections through independent thinking from an external vantage point. It also brings into view rarely seen collection pieces, exposing the richness of collections otherwise lingering in storage.

Join Lucy Commoner as she explores through a series of exhibitions at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the creative and sometimes controversial outcomes of collaborations and compromises between conservators and guest curators from outside the museum field.

Lucy Commoner is Conservator Emeritus at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where she served since 1977 as Senior Textile Conservator, and as Head of Conservation from 2004 until her retirement in 2016. Previously, she was an Assistant Restorer for the Textile Conservation and Egyptian Departments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history and studio art from Brown University. Her areas of expertise include early Dynastic Egyptian textiles, folding fans, museum storage systems, fiber identification and microscopy, exhibition and mounting techniques for textiles, and the construction and maintenance of a conservation environment. She has lectured and published widely and has been an adjunct professor at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center since 1987. She was the recipient of the Textile Specialty Group Award for contributions to the field of Textile Conservation from the American Institute for Conservation in 2016.

Pixy Liao deals with photography, installation, and performance. Her work features a bright palette and careful staging, inviting an intimate way of beholding. The project Experimental Relationship (2007-ongoing) captures the artist with her 5-year-younger boyfriend, Moro, in a range of scenes and poses, playfully and mindfully reversing gender roles to question heteronormative relationships. Inspired by the contemporary political climate, her most recent project, Evil Woman Cult, dedicates itself to powerful female figures in history, paying homage to those who 'tend to have bad names because they were ruthless women.'

Liao is a recipient of an NYFA Fellowship in Photography; Santo Foundation Individual Artist Awards; Jimei x Arles Madame Figaro China Women Photographers Award; En Foco's New Work Fellowship; and LensCulture Exposure Awards. Her work has been exhibited at the Rencontres d'Arles, France (2019), Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, Xiamen, China (2018), and the Chinese American Art Council, New York (2011), among others. Born in Shanghai, China, she currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Description: Medieval pilgrims often carried away tokens of the sanctuaries and shrines they visited. In the Islamic world, pilgrims to the holy places of Arabia seem to have been presented with an array of possible souvenirs. These included metal bowls, paper scrolls and tablets of dust and earth engraved or stamped with potent words and images. Among them are printed amulets that offer the earliest evidence for block-printing outside of China. These materials conveyed the blessings of place, but were also believed to offer protection from misfortune, or even to cure ailments ranging from stomach pain to snake bite. Straddling the boundaries between memento and medicine, some were worn close to the body, while the texts and images that others bore were washed or dissolved in liquids to be consumed by drinking. Professor Flood will explore this intimate relationship to the body, which highlights a paradoxical relationship between technology, protection and mass production in the medieval Islamic world.

Finbarr Barry Flood is founder-director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. He has held fellowships from the University of Oxford, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Institution, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Getty Research Institute, the Carnegie Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In spring 2019 he was the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, while in autumn 2019 he delivered the Chaire du Louvre lectures at the Musée du Louvre on the theme Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’islam: pèlerins, reliques, copies, accompanied by a book of the same title. Previous publications include The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (2000), Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, (2009), and the 2-volume Blackwell Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture (2017), co-edited with Gülru Necipoğlu. He has recently edited and introduced the volume There Where You Are Not: Selected Writings of Kamal Boullata (2019).

Join Edward J. Sullivan, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History, for an illustrated conversation exploring the concept of “landscape” and representations of nature from a preservationist point of view. It starts with comments on the pivotal role of Prussian naturalist and essayist Alexander von Humboldt who spent the years 1799 to 1804 traveling throughout South and North America. His scientific and artistic concerns regarding disappearing nature inspired future artists and naturalists to formulate their own strategies of representing “wild” and “tamed” landscapes (to use archaic terms popular in the 19th century) as reflective of shifts in society’s priorities regarding open spaces and the “progress of “civilization.”

Major figures of the Hudson River School such as Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade will be discussed. Latin American artists such as Mexico’s José María Velasco also played key roles in depicting the newly transformed landscapes of their nations as they approached modernity. The lecture then shifts to the mid-20th century and considers the contribution of Roberto Burle Marx, the extraordinary Brazilian garden architect, painter, environmental activist and political agitator for stricter regulations to combat incipient climate change and the destruction of the country’s forests in the Amazon region and the State of Minas Gerais. Parallels will be drawn with today’s calamitous situation in a trans-continental context.

Edward J. Sullivan is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts and the (CAS) Department of Art History. He has been awarded the “Great Teacher” citation from CAS and in 2019 was honored with the “Outstanding Teacher of Art History” award from the College Art Association. Professor Sullivan is currently Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts and Provostial Fellow. He has had a decades-long career at NYU and in addition he has taught at such institutions as Trinity College, Dublin, Williams College and the University of Miami. He is author of some thirty books and exhibition catalogues. His most recent publications include The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas (Yale University Press, 2007); From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism (Yale, 2014) and, Making the Americas Modern: Hemispheric Art 1910-1960 (Lawrence King Ltd. London, 2018).

Please join IFA Professor Thomas Crow for a virtual return to the closed galleries of 19th-century French painting at the Metropolitan Museum as he discusses how landscape works so often viewed as pleasant idylls find another story of precarious existence in unforgiving rural terrain. Professor Crow will explore how present-day fears of plague, hunger, and displacement find a mirror in these paintings.

Thomas Crow is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art. He has authored two influential studies of eighteenth-century French painting: Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1985), which received the Morey Prize from the College Art Association, and Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (1995). Subsequent publications, including The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent and the essay collection Modern Art in the Common Culture (both 1996), examine the later twentieth century, while The Intelligence of Art (1999) analyses specific moments in the history of art. Crow’s most recent books are The Long March of Pop: Art, Design, and Music, 1930–1995 (2015); No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (2017); Restoration: the Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art (2018); and the forthcoming The Hidden Mod in Modern Art, London 1957-1969.

Crow has received numerous honors throughout his career. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary degrees from Pomona College and the University of London. He was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 2014 and delivered the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in 2015.

Before his appointment at the Institute of Fine Arts, Crow was director of the Getty Research Institute, professor of art history at the University of Southern California, professor and chair in the history of art at the University of Sussex, and the Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale.

Description: In connection with the current Great Hall Exhibition Xaviera Simmons: Posture, artist Xaviera Simmons will engage in conversation with Sally Tallant, President & Executive Director of the Queens Museum, and John Hatfield, Executive Director of Socrates Sculpture Park, to discuss racial disparities in museum practice and how museums and artistic spaces acknowledge and confront racial inequality in their public spaces, exhibitions, and collections. The panelists will also address the benefits and challenges of stewarding art institutions located in Queens, one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the United States.

About the panelists

Xaviera Simmons (b. 1974, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2004) and completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005). She is a recipient of Socrates Sculpture Park's Artist Award (2019), Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Award (2018), as well as Denniston Hills’ Distinguished Performance Artist Award (2018). Recent solo and group exhibitions include SculptureCenter, Long Island City, Harvard University, Cambridge, and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, among others. She is a visiting lecturer and the inaugural 2019 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University and was awarded The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College in Spring 2020.

Sally Tallant is the President & Executive Director of the Queens Museum. An internationally recognized curator and educator, Tallant was previously appointed Artistic Director and CEO of Liverpool Biennial in 2011. She is recognized as a leader in the field of public and socially engaged art and education and speaks regularly at conferences worldwide.

John Hatfield is the Executive Director of Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City. Hatfield previously served as Deputy Director of the New Museum, as well as the Assistant Vice President for Memorial, Cultural and Civic Programs at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, where he managed the design competition for the 9/11 Memorial.

Description: Madeline Hollander (b. 1986 in Los Angeles) is an artist who works with performance, film and installation to explore how human movement and body-language negotiate their limits within everyday systems of technology, intellectual property law, and daily ritual. Her performances and installations present continuously looping events that intervene within spatial, psychological and temporal landscapes, and engage with alternate modes of viewership, replication and archive. Hollander has had solo exhibitions at Bortolami, NY (2020), The Artist's Institute, NY (2018); Bosse & Baum, UK, and SIGNAL, Brooklyn, NY (2016). Her work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2019); The Aldrich Museum, CT (2020); Helsinki Contemporary, Finland (2019); Serpentine Galleries, UK (2018); and the Centre Pompidou Metz, France (2019). Hollander was the choreographer for Jordan Peele’s feature film “Us” (2019) and Urs Fisher’s exhibition “PLAY” presented at Gagosian, NY (2019) and at Jeffrey Deitch, LA (2019). Upcoming projects include solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Shed, NY; and ARCH Athens, Greece.

Description: This conversation celebrates the recent release of Hans Ulrich Obrist & César Paternosto Interview, published by Manuella Editions with the support of the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). In this interview directed by Hans Ulrich Obrist with an introduction by Lucy R. Lippard, César Paternosto revisits his career as a painter with passion and sincerity. From his beginnings with Art Informel, to his development of a radical geometric abstraction up to his most recent works of public art and experiments with the pictorial support, Paternosto narrates his lifelong commitment with abstraction. An abstraction also crucially influenced by his involvement with the ancient arts of the Americas, on which he also has written extensively.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this, he was Curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, “World Soup (The Kitchen Show)” in 1991, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is a contributing editor to Artforum, AnOther Magazine, Cahiers D’Art, and 032C; he is a regular contributor to Mousse and System Magazine, and he writes columns for Das Magazin and Weltkunst. In 2011 he received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, and in 2015 he was awarded the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to the arts. His recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018), and The Athens Dialogues (2018).

César Paternosto (b. 1931, La Plata, Argentina) is a painter, sculptor, and theorist. Paternosto lived in New York between 1967 and 2004, when he moved to Segovia, Spain. At the beginning of the 1960s he embraced abstraction at a time in which painting was still the cutting-edge art. It was in New York in 1969, however, that he conceived a radical “lateral vision” of painting that brought the pictorial notations to the side edges of the picture. Toward the end of the 1970s an encounter with the ancient arts of the Americas led him to pursue systematic research on the eccentric origins of abstraction in non-European cultures, about which he later wrote, published (The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, 1996), and organized exhibitions (most notably, Abstraction: The Amerindian Paradigm, 2001). All along he has continued developing pictorially, as well as intermittently in sculpture, these foundational principles of his work.

Description: The conservation of time-based media artworks often implies the involvement and expertise of external specialists. Conservators embrace and rely on their knowledge and experience. How can this external expert knowledge become institutional knowledge? Collecting and bundling information is one of the central tasks of conservators at institutions. What kind of documentation is required beyond the description of guidelines and processes? This talk reflects on the building of institutional knowledge and discusses how common tools and finding a common language support the museum's aims for collection care.

Agathe Jarczyk is the Associate Time-based Media Conservator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Between 2011 and 2019 she was an adjunct professor at the Department of Conservation and Restoration at the University of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland. In 2008 she founded the Studio for Video Conservation and has been working for numerous Swiss and international museums and collections as conservator and consultant.

Topics in Time-based Media Art Conservation is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Description: Scholarship on a global Middle Ages has centered on comparisons or connections across regions and time. This academic and museological turn has contended with problematic terminology, outdated chronologies, and insufficient evidence, and still has a long way to go in working toward equity for traditionally marginalized peoples and places. In 2020, the combined global pandemics of Covid-19 and systemic racism require that all who research, teach, and curate within these fields confront disciplinary biases and actively engage in public or social media discourse. In this lecture, Dr. Bryan C. Keene reflects upon endeavors to expand the remit of global medieval studies and also looks at how queer contemporary artists have drawn inspiration from the Middle Ages in order to disrupt oppressive hierarchical systems in the present.

Speaker Bio: Bryan C. Keene is an educator and curator dedicated to promoting equity in the study and display of the visual arts. He teaches art history at Riverside City College, where he is an advocate for LGBTQIA2+ communities. Prior to that, he organized over a dozen exhibitions as curator of manuscripts at the Getty Museum. His 2019 edited volume "Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts" (Getty Publications) features contributions by twenty-six specialists on book arts from Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, and Austronesia. He holds a PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art with a dissertation on Italian choir book illumination, and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Center of Medieval Art.

The Institute of Fine Arts-The Frick Collection Symposium on the History of Art was first held in 1940 in order for art history graduate students from six institutions to meet one another and compare their research and methods, and was the first symposium of its kind to be held in the United States. Since then, the symposium has expanded to include fifteen schools.

Due to restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the original program scheduled in April 2020 was postponed and moved online to be hosted over Zoom Webinar during the fall. We are proud to present this new format to be held on October 16, 23, 30, and November 6, which will represent a group of emerging scholars, selected by their institutions for their contributions to the field.

Participants (in order of appearance):

October 16
Robin Owen Joyce, The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
Josie Johnson, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, (PhD, Brown University)
Z. Serena Qiu, University of Pennsylvania
Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Cornell University

October 23
Jordan Karney Chaim, Boston University
Xiao (Amanda) Ju, University of Rochester
Hadley Newton, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Zohreh Soltani, Ithaca College (PhD, Binghamton University)

October 30
Shirlynn Sham, Yale University
Shannon Steiner, Binghamton University (PhD, Bryn Mawr College)
Rahul Kulka, Harvard University

November 6
Diana Mellon, Columbia University
Aleksander Musiał, Princeton University
Caitlin Play, Rutgers University
Christine Griffiths, Bard Graduate Center

Organized by Tianyuan Deng and Shannah Rose, The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; and Caitlin Henningsen, The Frick Collection.

Description: In 1908, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the first American institution to begin collecting small-scale Italian bronzes. Today the Museum has almost three hundred works reflecting changing taste and the desire to build a comprehensive holding. The collection, among the largest in the United States, comprises a fascinatingly diverse, often mysterious assemblage of largely understudied works ranging in date from around 1450 to 1800.

Cataloguing The Met’s collection began in the early 2000s when an international team of authors was challenged to expand the traditional focus on attribution, dating, and quality by giving equal emphasis to scientific examination, the process of making, issues of patronage, the object’s social context, the art market, and the history of collecting. Nearing completion, the catalogue of Italian bronzes at the Met promises to narrate the story of small-scale bronze sculpture as a frequent locus for monumental ideas and intimate meanings that spoke to elite and middle-class audiences across Renaissance and Baroque Europe.

This lecture will present some of the highlights of our investigations – the discoveries made, the attributions changed, and the surprising knowledge gained by cataloguing even the most humble bronzes. It will consider how vital international collaboration among curators, academics, conservators, scientists, dealers, and collectors has become to the advancement of this specialized field. And most of all, it will offer some suggestions on how in 2020 Italian Renaissance and Baroque bronzes might speak to diverse audiences and open new doors that connect these works with contemporary social issues.

Denise Allen, Curator, joined the staff of the department of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014. She currently is leading the project dedicated to cataloguing The Met’s collection of Italian Renaissance and Baroque bronzes. In 2017 she co-curated the installation “Rodin at The Met,” celebrating the centenary of the sculptor's death. Her area of specialty is Italian Renaissance sculpture, with a focus on the work of Benvenuto Cellini. As a curator at The Frick Collection (2003–2014), she curated six exhibitions devoted to the art of the bronze statuette, including: Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Hill Collection (2014), Antico (2012), Andrea Riccio (2008), and European Bronzes from the Quentin Collection (2004). She was the associate curator of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (1995–2002). She received her MA from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts in 1984 and B.A from Wellesley College in 1979.

In connection with the current Great Hall Exhibition Xaviera Simmons: Posture, artist Xaviera Simmons will engage in a conversation with William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, co-authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020). Focusing their conversation around this critical new publication and Simmons’ art practice, the panelists will examine how the United States’ economy has historically upheld and continues to uphold white supremacy at every level of our society while also discussing methods of enacting federal-level social and material reparations for black American descendants of US slavery.

About the panelists

Xaviera Simmons lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2004) and completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005). She is a recipient of Socrates Sculpture Park's Artist Award (2019), Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Award (2018), as well as Denniston Hills’ Distinguished Performance Artist Award (2018). Recent solo and group exhibitions include SculptureCenter, Long Island City, Harvard University, Cambridge, and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, among others. She is a visiting lecturer and the inaugural 2019 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University and was awarded The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College in Spring 2020.

William A. Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke. His research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, and stratification economics, and he has published several books and articles on these topics. Darity is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, most recently serving as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (2015-2016) and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011-2012) at Stanford.

A. Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. As a faculty member with the Community Folklife Documentation Institute, she trained students to research and document the state’s African American music heritage. Mullen was a consultant on the North Carolina Museum of History’s “North Carolina Legends” and “Civil Rights” exhibition projects. Her writing can be found in museum catalogs, journals, and commercial media.

Description: A widely published author and one of the museum field’s most distinguished and preeminent leaders, Lonnie Bunch is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian, a vast institution comprising 19 museums, 21 libraries, numerous research centers, several education units, and the National Zoo. He was formerly the Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the nation’s largest and most comprehensive cultural destination devoted exclusively to exploring, documenting, and showcasing the African American story and its impact on American and world history.

Under his leadership, the NMAAHC was transformed from an inspired vision with no building, no collection, no funding, and one staff member, into a glorious and critically acclaimed, nearly 400,000-square-foot building on the National Mall in Washington, DC. With a collection now numbering some 40,000 objects, the museum has welcomed more than 6 million visitors since it opened in September 2016. In this informal conversation with Visiting Professor Linda Wolk-Simon, Secretary Bunch will share some reflections on that heroic achievement, on institutional racism in museum culture and practice, and on the fundamental imperative of the curator and the museum to tell a good story.

Description: Agnaldo dos Santos, Rafael Borjes de Oliveira, Manoel do Bonfim, and José de Dome are some of the Black artists who frequented cultural spaces in Salvador (Bahia), Brazil that principally catered to a local, mostly white elite. There they developed strategies to position themselves within the flourishing modernist art market established in that city between 1947 and 1964. Salvador, as a site of extensive colonial memory, was fast becoming a major industrial and touristic center following the end of World War II. The new job opportunities in the city prompted large waves of migration, mostly by a Black populace from rural areas and smaller cities. This talk will analyze the experiences of those Black painters and sculptors who were living this new cultural reality from the perspective of a new working class. I will highlight how they were creating life plans, citizenship projects, and affirming their cultural sensibilities in the local art spaces.

Description: Artworks with a substantial software component, whether the expressive blinking lights of an AI supercomputer or the algorithmic growth patterns of virtual "plastic garbage coral reefs," require upgrades and eventually migration to other platforms over the course of time periods that can range from several months to several decades (and hopefully longer). But what is important, what is the core of the artwork to be preserved, and what is an irrelevant technical artifact of a past time? Tamiko will talk about conserving and archiving her 35 year old supercomputer, her 20 year old virtual reality installation and 10 year of augmented reality artwork.

Bio: Tamiko Thiel has been exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity in political and socially critical artworks for over 35 years. Her works in museum collections include: the Connection Machine CM2 (1987) A.I. supercomputer in MoMA NY; her virtual reality installation Beyond Manzanar (2000) in the San Jose Museum of Art in Silicon Valley; and her augmented reality installation Unexpected Growth (2018) in the collection of the Whitney Museum.In order to be able to conserve and archive not just Unexpected Growth, but also all the AR artworks she had made since 2010, she teamed up with her software developer husband Peter Graf to create the open source AR platform ARpoise, which they aim to keep alive irregardless of the commercial AR companies that come and go over the decades.

Description: At the height of his international fame, Guido Reni surprised his public with a series of stunning altarpieces and gallery pictures in his second Manner. By drastically lightening his palette, Reni ignored his former teacher Ludovico Carracci’s warning that a painter ought to reflect a whole year before applying a single brushstroke of lead white to a painting. Examining select paintings by Reni in his new style, this paper explores the visual evidence against early critics’ assessments and theoretical texts about the use of white pigment and proposes various triggers for his artistic choice. “Bianchezza” resounds today with timely social issues, and the final part of the lecture opens discussion of the cultural context and implications of Reni’s whitened aesthetic in representing skin color.

Bio: An alumna of the Institute of Fine Arts, Catherine Puglisi is Professor of Art History at Rutgers University and a specialist in Italian Baroque art. She is author of Caravaggio (Phaidon Press, 1998), Francesco Albani (Yale University Press, 1999), and most recently co-author of Art and Faith in the Venetian World: Venerating Christ as Man of Sorrows (Brepols, 2019). She co-curated the exhibition, “Passion in Venice” (New York, Museum of Biblical Art, 2011) and co-edited the volume New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows (Medieval Institute Publications, 2013). Her current research addresses radical style change in the Baroque.

Description: Join us to hear about the IFA’s work this season at the Amun temple of King Taharqo at Sanam, Sudan. At this monumental stone complex of the first millennium BCE, the local Nubian population interacted in close quarters with Egyptian architecture and religion, adapting it in innovative ways for their own cultural requirements.

This year we continued our investigations into the mysterious monumental building discovered last year outside the temple walls, a discovery which sheds light on the shadowy period that precedes the famed Black Pharaohs. While our research brought as many new questions as it did answers, the scale of the building appears unprecedented, and offers evidence for the development of one of ancient Africa’s most important dynasties in a period that until now has been very poorly known to archaeologists. As always, work inside the temple delivered a rich and varied collection of small finds and architectural remains that tell us not only about ancient activity, but the life history of the temple as it was destroyed, occupied by the British army in the 19th century, and excavated by Oxford archaeologists in the 1910s. The fragmented remains of the richly decorated wall blocks provide us a bridge to think through how one building remains meaningful across more than two-and-a-half millennia and three continents.

Description: Join NYU professors Pepe Karmel, author of the just-released Abstract Art: A Global History, and Edward J. Sullivan as they discuss new histories of abstraction.

Abstraction was long seen as the pinnacle of modern art. And the path to this pinnacle seemed to be blazed by a handful of white men working in Europe and North America. In recent years, however, historians of Latin American art have uncovered an alternative route to abstraction, running through Buenos Aires, Caracas, Rio de Janeiro and Havana, in which women artists played a key role. Today, women, artists of color and non-Western artists are leading protagonists in contemporary abstraction.

A pioneer in the rediscovery of abstract art from Latin America, Edward Sullivan has dramatically changed the narrative of twentieth-century art. Focusing on the subject matter expressed by abstract forms, Pepe Karmel’s new book divides abstraction into five categories – Bodies, Landscapes, Cosmologies, Architectures, and Signs and Patterns – and uses them to explore the work of a more inclusive mix of artists from Vasily Kandinsky to Ibrahim El-Salahi, Carlos Cruz-Diez to Bridget Riley, Anni Albers to Sean Scully, and Julie Mehretu to Wu Guanzhong.

Pepe Karmel teaches in the Department of Art History, New York University. His book, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, was published by Yale University Press in 2003. He organized the 1989 exhibition, Robert Morris: Felt Works, at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and was co-curator, with Kirk Varnedoe, of the 1998 retrospective, Jackson Pollock, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2004, he organized The Age of Picasso: Gifts to American Museums, which was seen in Rome and in Santander, Spain. His installation, “Dialogues with Picasso” is currently on view at the Museo Picasso Málaga. Karmel was the curator of New York Cool: Painting and Sculpture from the NYU Collection, in 2008, and the co-curator, with Joachim Pissarro, of Conceptual Abstraction, seen at the Hunter College / Times Square Gallery in 2012. He has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and written widely on modern and contemporary art for publications including Art in America and The New York Times. His new book, Abstract Art: A Global History, is being published by Thames & Hudson on November 17.

Edward J. Sullivan is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts and the (CAS) Department of Art History. He has been awarded the “Great Teacher” citation from CAS and in 2019 was honored with the “Outstanding Teacher of Art History” award from the College Art Association. Professor Sullivan is currently Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts and Provostial Fellow. He has had a decades-long career at NYU and in addition he has taught at such institutions as Trinity College, Dublin, Williams College and the University of Miami. He is author of some thirty books and exhibition catalogues. His most recent publications include The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas (Yale University Press, 2007); From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of impressionism (Yale, 2014) and, Making the Americas Modern: Hemispheric Art 1910-1960 (Lawrence King Ltd. London, 2018).

Description: Discovered in the desert cemeteries west of Cairo around 1860, an ancient Egyptian statue known as the ‘Sheikh el-Beled’ was a sensation at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867 and merited more photographs than any other object in the landmark 1872 Album du Musée de Boulaq. By the end of the 19th century, reproductions of it were circulating globally in the form of plaster casts, postcards, stereographs, and book illustrations. The ‘Sheikh’ owed its name, and fame, to the legend of its discovery. According to this poorly documented tale, when workmen digging on behalf of Auguste Mariette first uncovered the 112cm-high statue, they cried out with immediate recognition. There was their village chief – their sheikh el-beled – carved in wood around the time the pyramids were built. Mixing the bewitching lifelikeness of the statue with the trope of credulous ‘Orientals’, the legend has featured in histories of Egyptian art ever since.

This lecture takes the Sheikh as an entry point for a historiographic re-evaluation of ancient Egyptian art. How did the translation of ancient objects into other media shape methods, priorities, and disciplinary praxis in the field of Egyptology – and why do colonial inscriptions (such as the gullible ‘Oriental’) still speak?

Christina Riggs is Professor of the History of Visual Culture in the Department of History at Durham University. She is a historian of photography and archaeology with a particular interest in North Africa and the Middle East, and has written extensively on the reception of the culture we know as “ancient Egypt”. Archives and museum collections form a primary source for much of her work, which interrogates how the fields of archaeology, art history, and Egyptology developed in tandem with colonial and imperial expansion. Her most recent books include Photographing Tutankhamun (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Description: My discussion focuses on Korean experimental avant-garde art in the 1960s and 1970s and its global context. I will be examining Korea's reception and response to international trends such as earth art and time-based art forms. In particular, I explore the identity of Korean avant-garde art, which includes both early installations and performance art. This talk examines in detail the collective groups such as A.G. (Avant-Garde), S.T. (Study & Time), The Fourth Group in the late 1960s and 1970s, groups that stimulated the identity of Korean avant-gardism and initiated the conflicting issues of “body and gender,” “art and language,” and “art and environments.” By looking at early pieces in the history of Korean performance art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we will understand the perception of female performers such as Jung Kangja. The talk also discusses Lee Seung-Taek’s immaterial “non-sculpture”, Kim Kulim’s experimental film work, and Lee Kun-Yong’s “Logical-Event,” the latter based on the mediation of “languages” and his own body. My talk ends with Lee Kang-so’s experimental work of 1973 called The Bar in the Gallery in which he installed a bar in the Myungdong Gallery during the socially oppressed military regime of the 1970s. Although Korean experimental art and early performance art were short-lived, diverse experiments marked the vernacular identity of Korean Avant-Garde art during this period.

Yeon Shim Chung is a professor of the department of Art Studies (Art History and Theory) at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea. She received her Ph.D. in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Dr Chung’s research interests encompass both modern and contemporary Western and East Asian art. Before teaching at Hongik, Dr Chung was an assistant professor at the art history department at FIT/SUNY in New York City and a researcher for the exhibition The Worlds of Nam June Paik at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1999. She also co-curated Faultlines (2018 Gwangju Biennnale Edition). In 2013, Chung compiled the critical anthology of Lee Yil, a major proponent of Dansaekhwa in post-war Korean art (Mijinsa, 2013; English translation published at Les Presses du réel, 2018). She authored several articles on Dansaekhwa at M+ Matters (Hong Kong), and monographs on Lee Bul, Nam June Paik, Park Hyun-Ki, and Korean experimental avant-garde artists. She published a book chapter in Visualizing Beauty: Gender and Ideology in Modern East Asia (2012); and has several monographs entitled Installation Art in Contemporary Space (2014), Korean Contemporary Art Now (2015), and Korean Installation Art (2018). Chung co-edited Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, Interaction (London: Phaidon, 2020).

Description: In the early years of this century, Chinese artist Zhang Dali carried out an extended archival project entitled A Second History (2003-6). In this work, Zhang curated a series of paired images, one original, the other manipulated, to show how the Chinese Communist Party repeatedly doctored the photographic record of the Revolution in its secret photo labs. The photographs range from official portraits of Mao Zedong to snapshots of ordinary citizens as they experienced the revolution. The targets for the airbrush also vary: sometimes people are wiped entirely from the frame, on other occasions a portrait of Mao is added to a bare wall, a slogan is re-written, or trees in the backdrop switch miraculously from barren to blossoming. The motives for manipulation, meanwhile, oscillate from the strategic to the faintly absurd. All the images, though, are instructive on matters of the clandestine. In one sense, the installation takes some of the most iconic photographs of China’s revolution and exposes their hidden secrets. Yet in another sense, the series also explores secrecy as something out in the open – the notion that viewers of these images sometimes understood all too well that they were faked. In this talk, I discuss what Zhang’s work tells us about regimes of secrecy and misinformation in China, and about how the pressures of “knowing what not to know” have structured the processing of the nation’s troubled twentieth-century past.

Bio: Margaret Hillenbrand is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research and publications to date have focused on literary and visual culture in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, and her latest book, Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China, appeared with Duke University Press in 2020. She is now working on a new project about the impact of endemic precarity on cultural practices in post-millennial China.

Description: At a symposium on Authenticity in Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994, the art historian Charles Rhyne stated that since “everything is an authentic something, our question should be not ‘Is it authentic?’ but ‘What is it?’” This question implies an approach toward questions of authenticity and attribution that is open and objective. However, the ambiguities inherent in questioned paintings and other artworks often result in certain patterns in research borne from our unconscious biases. We desire resolving the unknown to arrive at a state of cognitive ease and, in doing so, often unknowingly take short-cuts in our reasoning to come to decisions based on information that in hindsight may be inaccurate, incomplete, or irrelevant.

The talk will focus on three paintings, once attributed to Canaletto, John Constable, and Amedeo Modigliani, which although dissimilar in their visual attributes, share many common threads in their stories. In each case, ambiguities in provenance and idiosyncracies in artistic technique raised questions about authenticity. The technical study of each painting to answer the question “What is it?” will be discussed and the impact our cognitive biases have on our perception will be considered.

Elise Effmann Clifford is the Head of Paintings Conservation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco where she has been since 2007. Prior to working at the Museums, she was the Assistant Conservator of Paintings at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Paintings Conservation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She received her M.A. in Art History and Diploma in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2000, after completing her final year internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Elise has published on such diverse topics as the historical views of Jan van Eyck’s painting medium, the rediscovery of a painting by Thomas Cole, the materials and techniques of the 17th century French artists the Le Nain Brothers, and misconceptions about the painting medium of the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Roddam Spencer Stanhope.

Professor Arlene Dávila (NYU Department of Anthropology) recently published a provocative and highly informative book entitled Latinx Art: Artists, Markets and Politics (Duke University Press). This landmark publication treats the phenomenon of contemporary art by U.S. artists of Latin American descent ("Latinx" is a term that denotes gender neutrality). Dávila's deft analyses are essential for an understanding of a sector of the U.S. art world that has sometimes been less recognized by the museum and gallery establishment. In this conversation, Dávila will join Dr. Miriam Basilio (PhD, IFA) of NYU's Museum Studies Program and the Department of Art History to delve into the numerous compelling artistic and social issues of her subject.

This talk focuses on abstract art’s political Arlene Dávila is a recognized public intellectual focusing on questions of cultural equity and a leader in the field of Latinx and critical race studies. She is the author of six books focusing on Latinx cultural politics spanning the media, urban politics, museums, and contemporary art markets, all characterized by a rigorous global and political economic perspective. A Professor of Anthropology and American Studies, she is also the founding director of The Latinx Project.

Miriam Margarita Basilio Gaztambide is Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at New York University. Between 2001-2005, she was a Curatorial Assistant in the Departments of Painting and Sculpture and Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art. There she co-curated Tempo (MoMAQNS 2002) and Caribbean and Latin American Art: MoMA at El Museo (organized with El Museo del Barrio, 2004). Her book Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions and the Spanish Civil War was published by Routledge in 2013. Retratos Hablados/Spoken Portraits, an artist’s book with an essay, was published by Mudito & Co. in 2020. Currently, she is writing a book on the history of MoMA’s modernist canon and the definition of “Latin American” art.

The Colloquium is the product of the generosity and continuing support of Roberta and Richard Huber, and we thank them heartily for making the current year’s activities possible.

Description: Through video and audio examples, composer/performer and interdisciplinary artist Pamela Z will share her work and process, and discuss the increasingly blurred lines between disciplines in her practice. Highlighting her use of voice, found objects, and sampled speech sounds, she will illustrate the various directions her work has taken over the years and address the effects of both rapid and gradual changes in technology have had on making, preserving, and documenting her work.

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist making works for voice, electronic processing, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles (including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird). Her awards include the Rome Prize, United States Artists, the Guggenheim, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Herb Alpert Award.

This lecture series is generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Description: In the Roman period the tendency to individualize or ‘personalize’ the Egyptian mummy, which had to some extent always existed in Pharaonic culture, became much more pronounced. The process culminated in the creation of the ‘portrait mummy’, or ‘portrait shroud’ which carried a vividly painted representation of the deceased and showed him or her in contemporary clothing. Such portraits included considerable personal detail—right down to the rendering of individual hairstyles (and styled beard for mature men), and to flamboyant fashion jewelry, and extravagantly colored garments for women.

What were the aims or goals of this ‘personalization’ of the mummy? Specialists have repeatedly asked whether these Roman portrait mummies may have been intended to be displayed and viewed differently from earlier mummies. For it has been suspected that Roman mummies were starting to acquire a more distinctly commemorative function—something close to the kind of personal commemoration we find in the funerary monuments of other areas of the Roman empire.

In this paper a number of different interpretations of the Roman portrait mummy will be considered, with the aim of arriving at a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the evidence.

Chris Hallett is Professor of Roman art at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his education at the University of Bristol in England, at Lincoln College Oxford, and at UC Berkeley. He is primarily known as a specialist in Roman sculpture, being the author of The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 BC–AD 300 (Oxford 2005), and editor of the recent volume Flesheaters: an international symposium on Roman sarcophagi (Wiesbaden 2019). He is also a practicing field archaeologist, and since 1991 he has worked at New York University’s excavations in Aphrodisias in South-Western Turkey. He is co-author—with Bert Smith, Sheila Dillon, Julia Lenaghan, and Julie Van Voorhis—of Roman Portrait Sculpture of Aphrodisias (Mainz am Rhein 2006).

Please join the Institute in conversation with Dipti Khera, Associate Professor at NYU's Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts about her new book, The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur's Painted Lands and India's Eighteenth Century. Her book looks at the painting traditions of northwestern India in the eighteenth century, and what they reveal about the political and artistic changes of the era. It uncovers an influential creative legacy of evocative beauty that raises broader questions about how emotions and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place.

Responding to the book will be Vittoria Di Palma, Associate Professor of Architectural History and Art History at the School of Architecture at University of Southern California, and Kavita Singh, Professor of Art History at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Dipti Khera earned her Ph.D. in South Asian art history from Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology in 2013. In 2012–13, she was a postgraduate research associate and lecturer at the South Asian Studies Council, MacMillan Center, Yale University. Her book, The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020), received the 2019 Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize for the best book manuscript in Indian Humanities, awarded annually by the American Institute of Indian Studies (http://theplaceofmanymoods.org). She is currently writing essays and entries for the catalogue that will accompany her co-curated exhibition, provisionally titled, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, India, slated to open at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in November 2022.

Vittoria Di Palma is Associate Professor of Architecture and Art History at the University of Southern California. She specializes in modern European architectural history and theory, with particular concentrations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture, early modern land use and landscape, and contemporary landscape theory and design. Her research interests include intersections between early modern science, medicine, and aesthetics; questions of perception and representation, and broader issues in the environmental humanities. Di Palma is the author of Wasteland, A History (Yale University Press, 2014), which was awarded five prizes, including the 2016 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association, the 2016 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.

Kavita Singh is Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University where she teaches courses in the history of Indian painting, particularly the Mughal and Rajput schools, and the history and politics of museums. Singh has published on secularism and religiosity, fraught national identities, and the memorialization of difficult histories as they relate to museums in South Asia and beyond. She has also published essays and monographs on aspects of Mughal and Rajput painting, particularly on style as a signifying system. In 2018, she was awarded the Infosys Prize in Humanities and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

We are delighted to offer a discount for Dipti Khera's new publication - please use code TPOMM-FG for 30% off and free shipping for The Place of Many Moods through 1/15/21.

Aphrodisias: Recent Research and Discoveries The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to a lecture on the archaeological research at Aphrodisias 2019. Presented by Roland R.R. Smith, Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art, University of Oxford; Director of NYU Excavations at Aphrodisias.

Join us to hear 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 both abundant and of spectacular quality.

NYU has conducted extensive research at the site every year since 1961. The lecture will show the results of our main recent projects, notably in the Civil Basilica, the Tetrapylon Street, and in the urban park formerly called the ‘South Agora’ – as well as the work carried out this year under restricted conditions due to the pandemic. Excavation in the Civil Basilica has revealed large expanses of remarkable ‘carpet’ mosaics from the interior of the grandest roofed public building in the city. The Street continues to illuminate the urban life of late antiquity and then the different but active life of the ‘dark’ centuries that followed a violent destruction in 616/17. The Mica and Ahmet Ertegun South Agora pool project has brought an extraordinary wealth of new finds and new results, and the complex is now undergoing intensive conservation, study, and publication. Although summer 2020 was essentially a study season, important discoveries continued – for example, new marble sarcophagi from the modern fields that lie over the area of the city’s eastern necropolis.

Aphrodisias continues to offer exciting new insights into the art, life, and history of the first millennium of our era.

Responding to the current social and intellectual climate, this panel seeks to address uncertainties about the changing field of Asian art history in the collaborative realms of academia and the museum. The speakers address the demographics of future practitioners, novel modes for community building, and specific initiatives and priorities currently underway that aim to reimagine the field of Asian art history for a more equitable future, making it accessible and compelling to those outside the field. Preserving the spirit of showcasing unfinished projects at the China Project Workshop, we understand Asian art history to be an evolving and imperfect discipline; this session has therefore been conceived as a public space to reimagine the field with those who stand to shape its future. Organized by the current cohort of Asian art history doctoral students at the IFA, with a moderated, public Q&A session to follow.