Events Archive

Description: El Niño is a recurrent perturbation of world class. Although centered in the Pacific Basin, it influences much of global climate, even the northeast US where winters tend to be warmer during canonical events. In the Pacific, the Peruvian coast is one of the regions most negatively affected. Normally a desert, the torrential rains brought by El Niño destroy the irrigations systems on which normal agriculture depends, while warming ocean waters reduce the biomass of what is usually one of the world’s greatest fisheries. We now know that El Niño has multiple flavors, each with its own set of challenges for Peru and elsewhere. These events aren’t new: they have been around for much longer than people have been in the New World, but their frequency and intensity have changed over time. In this talk, I will summarize what we know about El Niño’s presence over the last 15 millennia during which humans have been in Peru. I will also discuss some of the possible effects of El Niño frequency change on cultural development in the region and review the latest studies on how pre-European inhabitants met the challenges of El Niño and prospered over the long run despite them.

Across the Roman Empire, bathing was a highlight of the day and an important social event. Indeed, baths were so prized that their patronage was a powerful public relations tool that could greatly enhance one's popular and political clout. It is hardly surprising, then, that as a spectacular gift to the people, the emperors commissioned eight magnificent baths in the city of Rome between 25 BCE and 337 CE. This lecture investigates the lived and visual experience of these Roman baths, the so-called imperial thermae, while also addressing the underlying ambitions of their imperial patrons.

This lecture focuses on the extensive decoration of the best preserved of these bath complexes, the Baths of Caracalla (inaugurated 216 C.E.). As I will demonstrate, this decoration was a carefully strategized ensemble intended to convey a particular message to a diverse Roman audience. I analyze the connotations of this sumptuous display, addressing the visual experience of the baths and revealing the decoration's critical role in articulating innuendo and advancing imperial agendas. By examining a variety of art media – architectural and freestanding sculpture, mosaic and other colored stone veneers – the case studies addressed in this lecture demonstrate that endowing monumental baths was a concern of dynastic legitimacy and imperial largess and elucidate the ways through which decorative programs successfully articulated these themes to their Roman viewers. Decorative choices, as we will see, were purposeful decisions by Caracalla and his architect to honor the emperor and to consolidate his power and reputation.

Maryl B. Gensheimer is a historian of Roman art and archaeology. Her research focuses on the art and architecture of the city of Rome, on the Bay of Naples, and in Asia Minor. She is particularly interested in ancient cities and urban life, and the social structures and interdependent systems of urban design and urban infrastructure that impacted the ancient experience of monuments and spaces. She holds a B.A. in art history from Williams College (2005) and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical art and archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2013). Dr. Gensheimer's work has been recognized by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), Center for Ancient Studies at NYU, Graduate School of Arts and Science at NYU, Lemmermann Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and US-Italy Fulbright Commission. Most recently, Dr. Gensheimer's first book, Decoration and Display in Rome's Imperial Thermae, was awarded the 2020 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities by the Council of Graduate Schools.

Jeremy Deller (b. 1966 in London; lives and works in London) studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute and at Sussex University. Deller won the Turner Prize in 2004 for his work ‘Memory Bucket’ and represented Britain in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. He has been producing projects over the past two decades which have influenced the conventional map of contemporary art. He began making artworks in the early 1990s, often showing them outside conventional galleries.

Deller has exhibited extensively worldwide with selected solo exhibitions including: Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); ‘The Infinitely Variable Ideal of the Popular’, CA2M, Madrid (2015), touring to MUAC, Mexico City, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires and Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao (2016); ‘English Magic’, British Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013), touring to William Morris Gallery, London, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol and Turner Contemporary, Margate (2014-2015); ‘Joy in People’, Hayward Gallery, London (2012).

Deller has curated numerous projects, recent exhibitions include: ‘Iggy Pop Life Class’, Brooklyn Museum (2016); ‘Love is Enough: William Morris and Andy Warhol’, Modern Art Oxford (2014).

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art History, NYU.

Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism examines the creative manifestations of black modernism, and explicates how tropicality functioned as a key unifying element in African Diasporic art. In this book, I argue that crucial artworks of the Caribbean modern art movement and of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as performance traditions ought not be viewed as being particular to their geopolitical parameters but rather as part of a larger African Diasporic mission. Given this reality, I contend that a discourse of internationalism existed in the realm of visual art and performance. By examining the art of Aaron Douglas and Wifredo Lam, as well as the performances of Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou and early twentieth-century Carnival masqueraders in Trinidad, I explicate how their representations of tropicalia are reflective of the unique yet complex relationship that black people of these respective regions have with the terrain they inhabit – land on which many of the enslaved ancestors labored. Despite this traumatic legacy, these creative works nonetheless show how this land is revered by their inhabitants who recognize them for their beauty, not with any intention to transform it but rather to accept it. This ideological heeding to nature should be viewed as an alternative modernity that counters the idea of transforming ‘undeveloped’ nature for the sake of capitalist expansion. In so doing, there is a particular political enterprise at stake, one that dissociates the land with the history of slavery and thereby reclaiming it. Artists such as Wifredo Lam and Maya Angelou are thus highlighting the internationalist ethos of Pan-Africanism through their visual explorations of landscapes -- terrains which are mostly tropical -- and are therefore geopolitically uniting areas such as the Southern United States and the Caribbean. Ultimately, this book seeks to illuminate the desire for early twentieth-century black Atlantic peoples to engender a sense of belonging to the citizenry, and a particular kind of claim to the land that they inhabit, which speaks to a desire for home.

Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History and the Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text, and Art Journal. Noël’s book, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Duke University Press, February 2021), offers a thorough investigation of how Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century were responding to colonial and hegemonic regimes through visual and performative tropicalist representation. It privileges the land and how a sense of place is critical in the identity formation of early twentieth-century artists as well as their creative processes. Noël is working on a new book tentatively titled Diasporic Art in the Age of Black Power. This book seeks to examine the impact of the Black Power Movement on visual art as it emerged in the political, historical, and social contexts of the United States of America and the Anglophone Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s. Noël is the 2021-2022 Smithsonian Terra Foundation Senior Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her research has also been supported by The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Moreau Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame. She has also received a number of grants and fellowship from Wayne State University.

We welcome the IFA community to join us for a virtual discussion to celebrate the opening of Kenneth Kemble and Silvia Torras: The Formative Years, 1956-63, the first dual presentation of the work of Argentine artists Kenneth Kemble (1923-1998) and Silvia Torras (1936-1970) in the United States. Join the curators for an engaging conversation, moderated by Dr. Edward J. Sullivan, on collaborative approaches to curating, working from and with archives, and the dynamics of staging a duo exhibition. Expanding on their aims and hopes for the exhibition and public programming, the curators will provide insight and context to the latest Duke House Exhibition Series show.

About the exhibition: The exhibition highlights a decisive period in the intertwined, yet individual, practices of the two Argentine Informalista artists against the backdrop of their personal, romantic relationship. Curated by MA students Clara Maria Apostolatos, Martina Lentino, Nicasia Solano, and Juul Van Haver, the exhibition is open February 23 - May 27, 2022 at the James B. Duke House of the Institute of Fine Arts.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) provided funding and extensive archival and research support with special assistance from Julieta Kemble. The paintings on view are on generous loan from the ISLAA collection.

About the artists:

Kenneth Kemble (b. 1923, Buenos Aires, Argentina—d. 1998, Buenos Aires, Argentina) was an Argentine artist, writer, and teacher. He studied painting in Buenos Aires with Raúl Russo in 1950, and beginning in 1951, in Paris, at the Académie André Lhote. Kemble’s career in the fields of painting, collage, assemblage, and relief sculpture spanned several decades. He is most recognized, however, for his contributions to Argentine Informalist abstraction in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was one of the main participants of the exhibition Arte Destructivo (Destructive Art) that set the tone for Argentine Conceptualism. Throughout his career, Kemble exhibited in numerous individual and group presentations and received many awards. Recently, Kemble was accorded a posthumous retrospective at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano Buenos Aires (MALBA), titled Kemble por Kemble (2013).

Silvia Torras (b. 1936, Barcelona, Spain—d. 1970, Cuernavaca, Mexico) was a painter in Argentina's Informalismo movement from the late 1950s through the mid 1960s. Torras studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano and Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón prior to studying with Kenneth Kemble in 1956. The couple married later that year and worked closely together until they separated in 1963. Torras’ first major solo exhibition took place in 1960 at Galería Peuser in Buenos Aires. Along with Kemble, she participated in the 1961 Arte Destructivo exhibition. In 1962 Torras received an honorable mention for the Premio Ver y Estimar Prize at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and in 1963 was a finalist for the prestigious Di Tella Award at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella. Following her separation from Kemble, Torras relocated to Mexico and ended her artistic career. Since her death, Torras’s work has been exhibited in several exhibitions along with Kemble.

ISLAA

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) advances scholarship and public engagement with art from Latin America through its program of exhibitions, publications, lectures, and partnerships with universities and art institutions. Ariel Aisiks founded ISLAA in 2011 to raise the international visibility of art from Latin America. The pursuit of this goal has led to ISLAA’s involvement in more than 400 lectures and conferences, 30 books, and 20 large-scale exhibitions. In addition to these activities, ISLAA is home to the Jaime Davidovich Foundation, which honors the life, work, and inimitable spirit of artistic experimentation carried forth by the late artist.

The Institute of Fine Arts at NYU

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 DukeHouse 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 the 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.

Description: Few, if any, artworks from Hellenistic Iraq are as famous today as the alabaster goddess figurines, whose bright ruby eyes and golden crescent headdresses have advertised blockbuster exhibitions and graced book covers in recent years. In addition to their fine craftsmanship, economic value, and aesthetic appeal, these captivating statuettes – which almost certainly represent Ishtar-Aphrodite – have primarily been discussed as evidence for broader religious syncretism and multicultural negotiation between Greeks and Babylonians living in the post-Alexander period of southern Iraq. Yet, these alabaster goddesses were as anomalous as they are spectacular. Embedded within a diverse and flourishing Hellenistic Babylonian figurine tradition, they were nevertheless nearly unique not just in their visual splendor but also in their unambiguous presentation of a (partially) Mesopotamian deity in three-dimensional form and at hand-held scale.

In order to understand the significance of this exceptional group of miniature goddesses, this talk investigates them through the lens of miniaturization itself. Miniaturization was not incidental to these objects; rather, I will argue that it was a fundamental part of how the figurines expressed and embodied religious beliefs particular to Babylonia during the Seleucid and Parthian periods. The ambiguity inherent in scalar compression facilitated the elision of divine identity required for successful syncretism. The small-scale portability of figurines echoed the astral movements of the gods, while also imposing a burden of care upon the human user that served as a microcosm of temple-based religious practice. The erotic powers of the goddess Ishtar-Aphrodite were made particularly potent in miniaturized form, which could compel tactile manipulation and caresses. This reconstruction of the embodied practice of using the alabaster figurines will culminate with a discussion of their performative role in funerals, where I argue that the movement of the figurine’s body formed both a parallel to, and a hopeful contrast with, the seeming immobility of the corpse. Overall, by integrating this examination of miniaturized scale into the study of the materiality of Hellenistic Babylonian religion, I argue that we can better understand the complexity of practice and belief in which these figurines participated.

Stephanie Langin-Hooper is an Associate Professor and the Karl Kilinski II Endowed Chair in Hellenic Visual Culture, in the Department of Art History at Southern Methodist University. Her research focuses on the agency of miniature objects in identity construction and social negotiation in Hellenistic Babylonia. She is the author of Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia: Miniaturization and Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and the co-editor of The Tiny and the Fragmented: Miniature, Broken, or Otherwise Incomplete Objects in the Ancient World (Oxford University Press, 2018).

To celebrate Leo Steinberg’s essays on the works of Michelangelo, art historians Christian Kleinbub, Shawon Kinew, Maria Loh, and Sheila Schwartz join Rail Consulting Editor Alexander Nagel for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading.

More information on the event is on the Brooklyn Rail’s website.

View more details on the Essays by Leo Steinberg series edited by Sheila Schwartz and available through the University of Chicago Press, including Michelangelo’s Sculpture, Michelangelo’s Painting, Renaissance and Baroque Art, and the forthcoming volume Picasso.

Description: Guillaume Kientz, Director & CEO of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, will present an insightful lecture on the unique collection of the Hispanic Society, founded in 1904 as both a museum and library. The collection is unparalleled in its scope and quality, and includes paintings, sculpture, drawings, ceramics, glass, textiles, prints, photographs, furniture, as well as manuscripts, rare books, maps, and documents. The collection spans from the first millennium BC to the twentieth century, and documents the art, culture, and customs of the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, the Philippines, and Indian Goa. As all cultural organizations strive to reinvent themselves to face the needs facing our society and serve the public to its fullest ability, the Hispanic Society is on the cusp of both its physical and intellectual transformation. Through its master plan addressing the landmark facilities, the Hispanic Society’s collection serves as the foundation to offer invigorating programming as well as being the cultural hub uptown Manhattan. The future is now and engagement is core to making a difference.

Guillaume Kientz currently serves as CEO and Director of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (HSM&L) and is spearheading the museum’s restoration and renovation efforts to bring the historic institution into the present day.

An accomplished Art Historian and Curator, Kientz does not have the typical background of one in this profession. Rather than focusing his efforts singularly on university studies, Kientz dedicated much time to experiencing cultural institutions firsthand, traveling the world and discovering interesting objects and cultures. His unique background has given him the perspective of the visitor, using this viewpoint to approach the curation of exhibitions through the lens of the institution’s audience, making the visitor his top priority.

Kientz is a specialist in Spanish painting, and in particular the works of El Greco, Velazquez, Ribera and Goya, as well as in European Caravaggism.

At the Louvre, where he served as a curator in the Department of Paintings for eight years with a focus on Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American painting, Kientz developed the revered exhibition Le Mexique au Louvre. Chefs-d’œuvre de la Nouvelle Espagne, XVII–XVIIIe in 2013, bringing Mexican masterpieces to the spotlight for the first time in the institution’s history.

He is also recognized for the acclaimed exhibition Velázquez, shown at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, in 2015, and has co-curated significant exhibitions including Ribera à Rome, held in 2014 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes and then later Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg.

More recently, Kientz co-curated the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to the Spanish Renaissance master El Greco, shown at the Grand Palais, Paris, in October 2019 before it moved to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020.

Kientz has pursued research and earned degrees in political science from l'Institut d’Études Politiques (IEP) de Strasbourg and a Masters in Art History from Université Marc Bloc in Strasbourg. Following his graduation from the Institut National du Patrimoine, Paris, in 2008, he joined the Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Auvergne, France, where he oversaw the preservation of historic monuments and buildings, before his appointment to the Louvre in 2010.

His current research focuses on early 17th-century European painting, with an emphasis on artists in the circle of Caravaggio. Most recently, Kientz served as curator of European Art at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas before joining his current position as CEO and Director of the HSM&L in March 2021.

Kientz is the recipient of top industry honors and awards, including the Daniel Arasse Fellowship from Villa Medici, and regularly contributes articles and sections to the most important industry catalogues, publications and reviews. He is proficient in many languages including French, English, Spanish, Italian, German (speaking, reading, and writing), Dutch and Portuguese (reading).

Description: The key issues for all communities caring for changeable objects are how to preserve the intangible sensory, cultural, and immersive experiences created by change over time. While traditional conservation tenets seek to arrest change by preserving the tangible components of an object with minimal physical change, Time-based Media conservation theories advocate for long-term activation of changeable objects that preserve the intangible, embodied experience. This presentation is based on a collaborative research project with Utilitarian heritage conservator Alison Wain and explores how best practice in the conservation of changeable objects must acknowledge and manage the tension between these conflicting ideas to ensure that object authenticity can evolve as time and contexts change. By viewing objects through the lens of change, we can open the door to the development of a new field of conservation expertise.

Asti Sherring is a paper, photographs and time-based media conservator. She has completed a Bachelor of Media Arts (honours) from Sydney University and a Masters of Materials Conservation at Melbourne University. Asti held the position of senior time-based art conservator at The Art Gallery of New South Wales between 2015-2020. She has also worked at institutions such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Asti is currently working in private practice and undertaking doctorate research at Canberra University, which explores contemporary conservation theories and practices of works that are digital, ephemeral, immersive, participatory and technological in nature.

Nicole Eisenman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. They are a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Their work was included in both the 2019 Venice Biennale and the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Having established themselves as a painter, Nicole Eisenman has expanded their practice into the third dimension.

Nicole has a show at Hauser & Wirth opening in Spring of 2022 in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Heads, Kisses, Battles: Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns,’ at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, traveling to Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, France, and Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Nederland; ‘Nicole Eisenman. Maquette and Paper Pulp Works’ at Anton Kern Gallery, New York; ‘Nicole Eisenman. Giant Without a Body’ at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; and ‘NICOLE EISENMAN. STURM UND DRANG’ at The Contemporary Austin, Austin, TX.

Description: The political organization of the Classic Maya has been a topic of debate for almost a century, and over that time scholarly interpretations have differed wildly. This talk sets out the evidence for a resolution to this debate, one that seeks to move beyond basic questions of political structure to open up the richer and deeper ones that lie beyond. That case relies on particular lines of evidence but also on particular theoretical understandings, since we must attempt not simply to describe, but to analyze and explain, how and why the Classic Maya created their highly decentralized political world.

Description: The recent restoration of Rubens’ Het Steen landscape brought about a significant change in the appearance of the work, done in advance of its pairing with the Wallace Collection’s Rainbow Landscape. It also occasioned a program of interdisciplinary research by the Gallery’s conservation, scientific, and curatorial staff, work which has brought new understanding of its technique and evolution. The panel is yet another example of an unusual additive working method, perhaps unique to Rubens, a context which has been provided by the important research undertaken in recent years in New York, Vienna, Madrid, and elsewhere.

Larry Keith studied painting conservation at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge. He joined the National Gallery Conservation Department in 1991, and has headed the Conservation department since 2010. He has published extensively on painting conservation and technique in the Gallery’s Technical Bulletin and elsewhere, and has made major contributions to the catalogues of the Gallery’s exhibitions on Velazquez, Leonardo, and Artemisia.

A curator and historian who writes, lectures and broadcasts widely on culture, Dr. Gus Casely-Hayford, OBE, Prof by Practice, SOAS, University of London (the leading Higher Education institution in Europe specializing in the study of Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East), is the founding Director of V&A East, a museum and collection center presently under construction. He was previously the Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

Over the course of his career, Casely-Hayford has been a constant champion for the arts. He has presented two television series of The Lost Kingdoms of Africa for the BBC (and wrote the companion book), two television series of Tate Britain: Great Art Walks for Sky, and has worked for every major British TV channel. His TED talk on Islamic culture has been viewed more than a million times. Former Executive Director of Arts Strategy, Arts Council England, (Britain’s major arts funder) and ex-Director of the Institute of International Contemporary Art, he has offered leadership to both large and medium scale organizations. Dr. Casely-Hayford has lectured widely on art and culture, including periods at Sotheby’s Institute, Goldsmiths, Birkbeck, City University, University of Westminster and SOAS. He has advised national and international bodies on heritage and culture including the United Nations and the Canadian, Dutch and Norwegian Arts Councils. In 2005 he deployed these leadership, curatorial, fundraising and communications skills to organize the biggest celebration of Africa Britain has ever hosted with Africa 2005 when more than 150 organizations put on over 1000 exhibitions and events to showcase African culture.

Amongst a range of honors, he has been awarded a Kings College cultural fellowship for service to the arts and a SOAS Honorary Fellowship for service to Africa. He speaks widely, gave a SOAS Centenary lecture, judged the Art Fund’s British Museum of the Year award, advised the Royal Shakespeare Company on their production of Hamlet, and is a member of English Heritage’s ‘Blue Plaques Group’.

This program is made possible with generous funding from the Paul LottLectureship.

While the pandemic saw continued disruptions to archaeological fieldwork in summer 2021, a small on-site team, supported by a robust virtual team, still made significant strides in our understanding of the main urban sanctuary of the ancient Sicilian Greek colony of Selinunte. At Selinunte, a trench excavated to the northeast of Temple R, the city’s oldest monumental stone temple, discovered new evidence for the sacred structure’s earliest phases. A complex ritual deposit was found in close association that has important implications for understanding ancient Greek construction ritual. Chance discoveries included a fragment of a marble kouros, deepening our knowledge of Archaic Greek sculpture in Sicily.

Thanks to the remote participation of students from the Institute of Fine Arts, the season also saw new analyses of the excavation’s past discoveries, with new implications for how we understand the feasting and other ritual activity that enlivened this urban sanctuary.

The Symposium will be held entirely online. Following submission of your RSVP, a Zoom link will be provided via email in advance of each day of the conference.

The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, Columbia University in the City of New York, and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (islaa.org) are pleased to announce the Sixth Annual Symposium of Latin American Art. “Movement & Presence: The Visual Culture of the Americas” will be held on March 30, 31, and April 1, 2022. The Symposium will include keynote presentations by Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva and Dr. Diana Taylor.

Read more on ifalatinamerica.org

This event brings together Dr. Pepe Karmel (New York University), Dr. Megan Sullivan (University of Chicago), and Dr. Ana Maria Franco (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá) for three presentations and a lively panel discussion facilitated by the curators of Kenneth Kemble and Silvia Torras: The Formative Years 1956-63.

Expanding on the Duke House Exhibition’s major themes, the presentations will discuss the formal and political dimensions of Informalista practices in Argentina and the greater region of Latin America, highlighting hemispheric connections in gestural abstraction at the time.

About the exhibition: The exhibition highlights a decisive period in the intertwined, yet individual, practices of the two Argentine Informalista artists against the backdrop of their personal, romantic relationship. Curated by MA students Clara Maria Apostolatos, Martina Lentino, Nicasia Solano, and Juul Van Haver, the exhibition is open February 23 - May 27, 2022 at the James B. Duke House of the Institute of Fine Arts.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) provided funding and extensive archival and research support with special assistance from Julieta Kemble. The paintings on view are on generous loan from the ISLAA collection.

About the artists:

Finding Form: Informalismo and Mid-Century Trends in Global Abstraction (b. 1923, Buenos Aires, Argentina—d. 1998, Buenos Aires, Argentina) was an Argentine artist, writer, and teacher. He studied painting in Buenos Aires with Raúl Russo in 1950, and beginning in 1951, in Paris, at the Académie André Lhote. Kemble’s career in the fields of painting, collage, assemblage, and relief sculpture spanned several decades. He is most recognized, however, for his contributions to Argentine Informalist abstraction in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was one of the main participants of the exhibition Arte Destructivo (Destructive Art) that set the tone for Argentine Conceptualism. Throughout his career, Kemble exhibited in numerous individual and group presentations and received many awards. Recently, Kemble was accorded a posthumous retrospective at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano Buenos Aires (MALBA), titled Kemble por Kemble (2013).

Silvia Torras (b. 1936, Barcelona, Spain—d. 1970, Cuernavaca, Mexico) was a painter in Argentina's Informalismo movement from the late 1950s through the mid 1960s. Torras studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano and Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón prior to studying with Kenneth Kemble in 1956. The couple married later that year and worked closely together until they separated in 1963. Torras’ first major solo exhibition took place in 1960 at Galería Peuser in Buenos Aires. Along with Kemble, she participated in the 1961 Arte Destructivo exhibition. In 1962 Torras received an honorable mention for the Premio Ver y Estimar Prize at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and in 1963 was a finalist for the prestigious Di Tella Award at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella. Following her separation from Kemble, Torras relocated to Mexico and ended her artistic career. Since her death, Torras’s work has been exhibited in several exhibitions along with Kemble.

Description: Clues to the creation of flower-laden spaces in ancient Maya temples, tombs, and palaces lie on the floors of the best-preserved of these structures. The Copan Acropolis has proved to be a particularly good site for the recovery of well-preserved pollen grains from flowers that adorned ritual spaces. Scholars have described temple spaces as thick with the odor of burned copal, pine, and offerings, but added to this was the fresh and heady fragrance of greenery and blooming buds, imparting a fecund perfume to the areas of ritual supplication. These botanical offerings and adornments were undoubtedly tied to mythical associations, as they are today in modern Maya ritual houses. Analysis of pollen from sediment cores, and macroremains from middens, aided in the interpretation of ritual botanical materials, emphasizing the importance of understanding the complete ecological context of a community in the interpretation of species commonly found in ritual spaces. Few archaeological projects in the Maya area take floor samples for pollen analysis from buried temples and tombs. As this paper will demonstrate, this is a tremendous loss regarding our understanding of ancient Maya ritual practice.

This talk, arising from the forthcoming volume The Land Between Two Seas, looks at Eastern Europe—from the Adriatic all the way to Poland and Lithuania—and its interaction with the larger Mediterranean artistic and cultural melting pot in the early modern period. Connected by strong riverine ties to the seas of the Mediterranean system (from the mare nostrum itself through the Sea of Marmara, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov), this hinterland raises questions about center and periphery, hybridity, and the sites of artistic innovation. Focusing on a cathedral in Wallachia (c. 1512-1517) I explore this liminal zone mediating between Western Europe and Central Asian cultures that is now essentially lost in a twilight space of “Byzantium after Byzantium”. Yet, as I will argue, this territory “between two worlds” had an identity of its own, fluid and unstable and therefore more flexible and elastic in art, manners, tastes and even faiths.

Alina Payne is Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and Director of Villa I Tatti (Florence). Most recently she published L’architecture parmi les arts. Matérialité, transferts et travail artistique dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (Hazan/Louvre 2016). She is the editor of a number of volumes among which The Renaissance in the 19th Century (with Lina Bolzoni; I Tatti/Harvard, 2018); The Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Architecture (Wiley/Blackwell, 2017); and Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (with Gulru Necipoglu; Princeton, 2016). In 2006 she received the Max Planck and Alexander von Humboldt Prize in the Humanities and is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held visiting appointments at the GSD (Harvard University), Villa I Tatti, Kunsthistorisches/ Max Planck Institut Florence, École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, Hertziana/ Max Planck Institute, Rome and Max Planck Institute, Berlin.

This panel celebrates the launch of Linda Nochlin's last essay collection, Making it Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now, which focuses on Nochlin's writings on modernism in art and politics, a central focus of her work throughout her career. From her first public lecture—a talk on art and French revolutionary politics that started with a quote from Karl Marx, given in 1956 at the height of McCarthyism in the US—and including both widely read and previously unpublished essays on topics ranging from French academic art to Andy Warhol's nudes, the book takes seriously Nochlin's insistence that to be modern was to be of one's time. What lessons do Nochlin's decades of passionate writing have for us today—what does it have to say about how to be in our time?

Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic whose work appears in publications including The New York Times, Frieze, and 4Columns, Her book Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited) was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. She is editor of Making it Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now, Linda Nochlin's final essay collection.

Christine Poggi is the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director, and Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Much of her research has focused on early twentieth-century European avant-gardes, the invention of collage and constructed sculpture, the rise of abstraction, and the relationship of art to emerging forms of labor, technology, and new media. She is also interested in the interplay of text and image, the representation of the crowd, and the engagement with theater and performance in modern art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Rachel Silveri is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art + Art History at the University of Florida, where she specializes in the history of early twentieth-century European art. She is currently at work on her manuscript, The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris, which reexamines the avant-garde ambition to unify art and everyday life.

Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were black. Simultaneously, photography culture blossomed—marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, Deborah Willis explores the crucial role of photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has largely gone unacknowledged.

With over seventy images, The Black Civil War Soldier contains a huge breadth of primary and archival materials, many of which are rarely reproduced. The photographs are supplemented with handwritten captions, letters, and other personal materials; Willis not only dives into the lives of black Union soldiers, but also includes stories of other African Americans involved with the struggle—from left-behind family members to female spies. Willis thus compiles a captivating memoir of photographs and words and examines them together to address themes of love and longing; responsibility and fear; commitment and patriotism; and—most predominantly—African American resilience.

The Black Civil War Soldier offers a kaleidoscopic yet intimate portrait of the African American experience, from the beginning of the Civil War to 1900. Through her multimedia analysis, Willis acutely pinpoints the importance of African American communities in the development and prosecution of the war. The book shows how photography helped construct a national vision of blackness, war, and bondage, while unearthing the hidden histories of these black Civil War soldiers. In combating the erasure of this often overlooked history, Willis asks how these images might offer a more nuanced memory of African-American participation in the Civil War, and in doing so, points to individual and collective struggles for citizenship and remembrance.

Deborah Willis, PhD, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: "Framing Moments in the KIA," "Migrations and Meanings in Art", "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography; Out of Fashion Photography; Framing Beauty at the Henry Art Gallery and "Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments" at Indiana University.

About the Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture

This lecture series honors the legacy of Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. (November 4, 1921 – January 14, 1987). Wagstaff attended the Institute of Fine Arts in the 1950s, studying Italian Renaissance Art under Richard Offner, and went on to become a notable American art curator, collector, and patron of the arts. Through his influential collecting, teaching, and curatorial work, Wagstaff promoted photography as a fine art medium. His groundbreaking collection was purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984, constituting the cornerstone of its newly formed Department of Photographs. Sam Wagstaff’s devotion to the medium contributed to its rising status over the years. We are delighted to celebrate his achievements by naming our annual photography lecture in his honor.

The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to attend a thought-provoking conversation between theater director, performance theorist, and author Dr. Richard Schechner, editor of TDR: The Drama Review, a well-known theater director, and former professor of Performance Studies at NYU, and Avital Meshi, the New Media and performance artist featured in this year’s Great Hall Exhibition.

Expanding on the Great House Exhibition’s major theme, this conversation will discuss the performative aspect of Meshi’s works and her interactions with artificial intelligence, highlighting how “conversations with algorithms” impact Meshi’s playful interaction with the algorithmic gaze.

The Institute has sponsored excavations at Abydos, one of Egypt’s most important sites, since 1997. The site was the ancestral home and burial place of Egypt’s first kings. Later, as the primary cult place of the god Osiris, ruler of the land of the dead, it became a religious center of singular significance and a place of pilgrimage for many centuries. Investigating the nature of early royal activity at Abydosand how it shaped the site’s subsequent history are central questions of the Abydos project’s fieldwork program.

A current research initiative is focused on the remains of a brewery of unparalleled proportions for both ancient Egypt and the ancient world more broadly. Abydos project director Matthew Adams will share with the Institute community the results from excavations at the brewery, including from the just-concluded 2022 field season.

Matthew Adams, Senior Research Scholar at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, first worked at Abydos as an undergraduate student in 1981 and has directed excavations at the site for more than 30 years.

Textile production methods changed little between the Late Bronze Age and the nineteenth century. Fiber sourcing and processing may have become more streamlined, looms more mechanically capable, but textiles were still produced using natural fibers woven into much the same technical structures until the beginning of the twentieth century.

This presentation will explore how the concept of “making” fibers, rather than shearing or harvesting them, began a swift progression of revolutionary products that have changed our relationship to textiles and clothing. Twentieth-century advances in polymer chemistry supported the invention of new generations of technically complicated fibers -- from synthetics to bicomponent, micro- and nano-fibers. These innovations, now (and soon to be) appearing in fabrics, have created challenges for the use, collecting and conservation of textiles.

Denyse Montegut is a textile conservator and a leading authority on fiber analysis and identification. Until her retirement in 2021 she was Professor of Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she taught conservation science courses and served as department Chair for 23 years. She has been the consulting textile conservator for the Guggenheim Museum since 1998 and in 2020 she was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Textile Specialty Group of the American Institute for Conservation. Denyse holds a dual B.A. in Mathematics and Art History from Brooklyn College, an M.A. in Art History and a Certificate in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is A.B.D. in Art Conservation Research from the University of Delaware.

IFA Contemporary Asia is pleased to present The Future of Asian American Art History: A Conversation with Marci Kwon and Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Moderated by Alexandra Chang. The equivocal history of Asian American art presents a challenge for scholars envisioning its future directions. The field and its subjects oscillate between obscurity and hypervisibility, the latter often emerging from moments of crisis facing Asiancommunities in America. For AsianAmerican art history to stake a larger claim on the future, it must shatter the many disciplinary, political, and economic boundaries that both prescribe its categorization and relegate it to a minor position. How can scholars of Asian American art move beyond identity-based interpretations to resist the limits of established categorizations, and open up new fields of inquiry? In attending to Asian American art’s global and diasporic dimensions, its interdisciplinary resonances across literature and cultural studies, and confrontations with legacies of racialization and colonization, how does the field of Asian American art challenge normative narratives of art history and modernity itself?

The Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI), established in 2021 at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, marks a significant new effort dedicated to the research, collection, and exhibition of works by Asian American and Asian diaspora artists. In this event, we will hear from founding co-directors of the AAAI, Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Assistant Curator of American art at the Cantor, and Marci Kwon, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, on their significant effort to preserve artworks and archives in the face of institutional racism, and the development of Asian American art history. The conversation will be moderated by Alexandra Chang, director of the Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange and Virtual Asian American Art Museum with the A/P/A Institute at NYU and Associate Professor at Rutgers University-Newark.

Mexico City (CDMX), one of the cultural capitals of Latin America and the world, is a site of contested social relations and a dynamic agent of visual production. At the turn of this century, artists mobilized aspects of this conflicted megalopolis, such as the conditions of occupying space within it under an ongoing coloniality, racial capitalism, and neoliberalism, just as their work began to circulate internationally. This talk focuses on Damián Ortega’s Cosmic Thing (2002), a disassembled Volkswagen beetle—a vehicle indelibly associated with the urban fabric of Mexico City—that the artist methodically reconstructed piece by piece as a suspended sculpture. It considers the various ways that Ortega marshals a plethora of diagrammatic modes (including repair manuals) and forms of non-hegemonic knowledge rooted in the streets of Mexico City to submit modernist sculptural practices to the classed, racialized, and mutable geographies of the megalopolis. A visual pun on what I consider urban cosmogonies, the work crystallizes a DIY ethos redolent in contemporary artistic practices, which I argue is rooted in the lived realities of Mexico City and speaks to modes of making, knowing, and seeing in the Global South. As a work both of the city and sited in it, Cosmic Thing raises questions about the tensions embedded in precarity aesthetics and the reinscription of the extractive practices of colonialism.

Anna Indych-López is Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center and The City College at CUNY where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art among Latin American, U.S., transatlantic, Afro-diasporic, and Latinx networks. She is the author of Judith F. Baca (2018) and Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (2009) and co-author of Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011). A frequent contributor to exhibition catalogues, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art (2020) and The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism: 1910-1950 (2016), she is the recipient of a Stuart Z. Katz Professorship of the Humanities and an Alcaly-Bodian CUNY Distinguished Scholar Fellowship at the Advanced Research Collaborate at The Graduate Center. She is an alumna of The Institute of Fine Arts and worked with Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel on the Jackson Pollock retrospective (1998-99) at The Museum of Modern Art.

The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to attend an important discussion between Simone Browne, Kade Crockford, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and Avital Meshi, on Privacy, Security, and Race in AI. This exemplary group of artists and scholars will discuss one of the most pressing and pervasive issues of our day: the proliferation of modes of surveillance and how they disproportionately harm marginalized communities.

Simone Browne is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Simone is currently writing her second book manuscript, Like the Mixture of Charcoal and Darkness, which examines the interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life, from policing, privacy, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO to encryption, electronic waste and artificial intelligence. Together, these essays explore the productive possibilities of creative innovation when it comes to troubling surveillance and its various tactics, and imagining Black life beyond the surveillance state.

Kade Crockford is the Director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts. In that role, Kade leads the affiliate’s work on issues at the intersection of technology and civil rights. Most recently Kade has been leading the affiliate’s campaign to bring democratic control over government use of face surveillance technologies, an effort that has resulted in the passage of eight bans on face surveillance in municipalities across the state including Massachusetts’ four largest cities, initial statewide regulations on police use of the technology, and the creation of a legislative commission to study further reforms. Kade also founded and runs the ACLU of Massachusetts’ Data for Justice project, which uses data science to advance core civil rights and civil liberties law reform.

Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, Transmediale, the Walker Center for Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and PS1 MOMA. Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Wellcome Collection, the Exploratorium, and the New York Historical Society, among others, and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Art Forum and Wired. Heather has a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at NYU Abu Dhabi, a Sundance Institute Interdisciplinary Program Art of Practice Fellow, an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium, and is an affiliate of Data & Society. She is a founding board member of Digital DNA, a European Research Council funded project investigating the changing relationships between digital technologies, DNA and evidence. She is also a co-founder and co-curator of REFRESH, an inclusive and politically engaged collaborative platform at the intersection of Art, Science, and Technology, and she co-leads the Decolonising Interactive Media research group at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Avital Meshi is a New-Media and a Performance artist. In her work, she examines the influence of AI technology on our behavior and our social environment. She invites viewers to intermingle with the technology, see how they are being seen through its lens and reveal their agency when confronted with it. Meshi is a Performance Studies Ph.D. student at UC Davis. She holds a BSc and an MSc in behavioral biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from the Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz.

Description: In 1571, a full-length bronze statue of Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, Third Duke of Alba and governor of the Netherlands, disparagingly nicknamed “the Butcher of Flanders”, was erected in Antwerp. It was met with criticism, both on the part of the Spanish and the local population. Cast by Jacques Jonghelinck with molten bronze from the cannons of Louis of Nassau’s troops during the battle of Jemmingen (1568), the statue was taken down by Alba’s successor as governor, Luis de Requesens, in 1574. The subject of many prints, poems, and essays spanning from the eulogistic to the satirical, the monument was long said to have been torn to pieces by the populace after the fall of the citadel in 1577. In fact, the statue was likely hidden and later re-cast into new cannons by the Spanish themselves. Often called a “memoria” of the Duke, the now-lost monument survives in our memory only through proxies – chief among them, the bronze bust of the Duke now at the Frick Collection in New York. Outlining the history of the monument, its destruction, and its afterlives, this paper seeks to investigate the peculiarities of bronze as a fabric of memory. Now part of a museum display, Jonghelinck’s bust is a complex work: a familial keepsake, an object of unparallel artistic virtuosity, and (a reminder of) a public monument, it encourages nuanced thinking, asking questions as to the role of sculpture within and without the museum context.

Giulio Dalvit is Assistant Curator for Sculpture at the Frick Collection. In 2020-21, he worked as Guest Curator on the Frick Madison Project, focusing on the display of the Frick’s sculpture and medals collection in the Breuer building. Previously, he was Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art, where he also received his Ph.D. on the life and work of Lorenzo di Pietro, known as Vecchietta (Siena, 1410-80). His research has been published in catalogues, books and academic journals, including The Burlington Magazine, Art History, the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, among others. The receiver of a number of scholarships, Giulio has formerly worked and held fellowships both in curatorial and academic capacities at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the University College London (UCL) in London, and the University of Amsterdam.

Time-based Media (TBM) artworks are characterized by having a durational element, such as sound, performance, light, or movement, which unfolds to the viewer over time via slide, film, video, software, or the internet. Preserving them presents particular challenges, given their conceptual nature and use of components that extend well beyond traditional categories of art materials.

For further information, please visit www.tbmatnyu2022.com

In order to meet the ever-increasing complexities of TBM art conservation, the next generation of media conservators must cross over the disciplinary boundaries of computer science, material science, media technology, engineering, art history, and conservation.

Thanks to generous funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University has designed and implemented the Time-based Media (TBM) Art Conservation Education and Training Program, the first of its kind in the US.

This webinar will present teaching concepts developed by instructors, as well as student perspectives over four years of curriculum implementation. Educators and professionals from other programs are invited to discuss their teaching approaches in the classroom and beyond. Resources developed at the Conservation Center will be shared to promote TBM art conservation education and training and to inspire others embarking on similar initiatives.

Organizers and moderators: Dr. Hannelore Roemich, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Conservation, and Christine Frohnert, Research Scholar and TBM Program Coordinator, at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Contact for further information: hr34@nyu.edu.

Description: New media are fragile. Their Achilles heel is technological obsolescence and the technical fragility production process itself. This theoretical approach to permanence through change offers an alternative to other conservation-restoration theories based on two fundamental paradigms: antifragility and evolvability. While traditional conservation theories consider new media art as art ("more of the same"), this approach starts from a logical typification free of paradoxes. This presentation explores the philosophical underpinnings of this theory, a methodology of production-recreation of new media artworks that ensures the preservation of the work's identity over time.

Lino García Morales is a musician, writer, teacher and conservator of new media. He completed an engineering degree in automatic control at the ISPJAE, a master's degree in Systems, Signals and Communications at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), a Ph.D. in Telecommunications at the UPM and a Ph.D. in Conservation and Restoration of New Media at the Universidad Europea de Madrid (UEM). He has designed and coordinated Masters in Conservation-Restoration of Contemporary Art for the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), Cultural Heritage Management (UCM-UPM), Forensic Acoustics (UPM), Degree in Digital Art (UEM), Degree in Digital Design (Universidad Internacional de La Rioja). He has produced new media works for artists such as Hans Haacke and coordinated the development of a program for the conservation study of Guernica at MNCARS.

The lecture will be presented in Spanish with English subtitles. The event will be moderated in both Spanish and English by Caroline Gil, Director of Media Collection and Preservation at Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.

Description: How did the Fora—the great piazzas of the Roman world—come into existence? We still know relatively little about this central element of Italian urbanism, which slowly developed over the course of the entire first millennium BCE. Greek colonial agorai, by comparison, evolved much faster and became monumentalized much sooner than their central Italian counterparts. New discoveries at various urban centers in Latium and Etruria are casting a new light on this complex issue. The lecture reports on recent work at Gabii and in Rome, to retrace the siting of these piazzas, as well as the emergence of distinctive elements of later fora. Pavements, colonnades, basilicas and shops all appeared slowly and tentatively, often much later than generally assumed. These new developments have broader implications for the history of Roman architecture.

Nicola Terrenato is the Esther B. Van Deman Collegiate Professor of Roman Studies at the University of Michigan. Since 2020, he also directs the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. He studied at Rome and Pisa. He specializes in first millennium BCE Italy, in particular early Rome, northern Etruria and the Roman conquest. He directs the Gabii Project and the Sant’Omobono Project. Other interests include theories of state and empire formation, field survey and history of archaeology. He recently published The Early Roman Expansion into Italy, Cambridge 2019, which was awarded the 2021 Wiseman Book Award by the Archaeological Institute of America.

Description: In 1704-05, after one of the most ambitious campaigns against “idolatry” in the colonial Americas, Northern Zapotec communities in Villa Alta (Oaxaca) surrendered 102 calendrical manuals and four ritual song compilations. This presentation, based on the first comprehensive survey of these songs and manuals, presents new insights regarding Mesoamerican cosmology and the 260-day divinatory count. It also examines multiple connections between cosmological beliefs and ritual protocols in this corpus, and sections from two pre-Columbian codices in the Borgia group: Fejérváry-Mayer 1, and Borgia 29-32. This talk surveys a Zapotec cosmological theory that linked the 260-day count with a three-tiered cosmos, analyzes parallels between Borgia images and Zapotec cosmogonic events, notes similarly structured ritual protocols in the Zapotec corpus and the Borgia, and concludes with a colonial ancestor summoning protocol that references imagery found in Classic-Period Zapotec monuments.

Presentations will include:

Kayla Metelenis
Acton Collection Research Project: Examination of a trecento panel painting of Saint Michael

Laura Richter
Innate Degradation or Direct Intervention? Uncovering Changes to both a Lippo di Benivieni and Lee Krasner Painting

Ruth Waddington
Repairing Canvas Tears and Tracing a Florentine Panel’s Life

Laura Bergemann
Conservation of a miniature gilded gondola at Villa la Pietra

Maria Olivia Davalos Stanton
From historic house to memorial museum: evaluating how we engage with objects

Clare Misko
Ethical Considerations for Objects left in Memorial at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum

There will be a brief question and answer session following the final presentation.

Description: Feminist and queer activists, artists, and writers have long harnessed the forces of the erotic to energize and power their interventions. Presented by the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and organized in conjunction with the exhibition Eros Rising: Visions of the Erotic in Latin American Art at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), this panel will examine the political applications and subversive potential of eroticism in contemporary Latin America through three case studies.

Reflecting on recent feminist activism in Latin America, the scholar, writer, and activist Cecilia Palmeiro will discuss the prospect of politicizing pleasure and eroticizing politics. In his presentation, the artist and writer Duen Sacchi will interrogate our erotic connections to the past, insinuating the possibility of an “ero-historiography” vis-a-vis colonial trauma and the pleasure of resistance. For his talk, the artist, writer, and lawyer Jorge Sánchez will address the intersection between Latinx and queer/cuir perspectives in the Americas. The panelists’ presentations will be followed by a discussion moderated by Mariano López Seoane and Bernardo Mosqueira, the curators of Eros Rising.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Mariano López Seoane is a writer, researcher, and curator based in Buenos Aires and New York. He is currently the director of the Graduate Program on Gender and Sexuality at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Argentina. He also teaches Latin American literature, cultural studies, and queer studies in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. López Seoane has curated and coordinated public programs for the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, and Art Basel Cities. He has written extensively on contemporary Latin American literature and arts, focusing on the cultures of sexual and gender dissidents in the Americas, Latin American instances of queer studies and queer activism, and figurations of drug culture and drug-related violence in Latin American narrative, film, and visual arts. His publications include the volume of essays Donde está el peligro. Estéticas de la disidencia sexual (2022) and the novel El regalo de Virgo (2017).

Bernardo Mosqueira is a curator and writer based in New York and Rio de Janeiro. He is the ISLAA Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum. He is also the founder and artistic director of Solar dos Abacaxis, an institution for experimentation in art, education, and social transformation in Rio de Janeiro, and since 2011 he has directed Premio FOCO ArtRio, a national award for emerging artists. Mosqueira previously organized the performance festival Venus Terra and worked as a curator at Galeria de Arte Ibeu. Mosqueira has been curating exhibitions, editing books, teaching, and contributing texts to art publications since 2010; was awarded the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi in 2017; and cofounded Fundo Colaborativo, the first emergency fund for artists in Brazil, in 2020. His recent exhibitions include Miriam Inez da Silva at the Museu da República, Brasília (2021); Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro: Eclipse at the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2021); and Daniel Lie: Unnamed Entities at the New Museum, New York (2022).

Cecilia Palmeiro is a scholar, writer, and activist. She holds a doctoral degree in Latin American literature and teaches at New York University in Buenos Aires and at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) in Argentina. She holds a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures from Princeton University and specializes in contemporary Latin American cultural studies, with special attention to Argentine and Brazilian literature and gender studies. Palmeiro’s main interests are critical theory, intellectual history, and the relationship between art and politics. She has written a range of articles on contemporary Argentine and Brazilian literature and gender issues; has translated contemporary Brazilian literature into Spanish; and has published the books Desbunde y felicidad. De la Cartonera a Perlongher (2011), Correspondencia (2016), and Cat Power. La toma de la Tierra (2017). Palmeiro is also a founding member of the Ni Una Menos collective and an organizer of the International Feminist Strike.

Duen Sacchi is a Guaxu (trans) artist and writer who grew up in Aguaray, Gran Chaco, where he learned the arts of fire, words, and dyes. He sold beer, cleaned houses, traced roads, danced, and migrated. Sacchi completed the Independent Studies Program at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art in 2015. He is part of the artistic team Río Paraná. He published Ficciones Patógenas (Brumaria, 2018/Rara Avis, 2020) and is currently guest editor at Terremoto. Sacchi actively participates in the transvestite and trans feminist, anti-racist, and Indigenous movements. He lives between the bush and the banks of the Río de la Plata.

Jorge Sánchez is an artist, writer, and lawyer from Puerto Rico, living in New York City, and serves as the curator in the Arts and Culture Team at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies of Hunter College. He is also the curator and arts coordinator of the University of Pennsylvania and The Mellon Foundation multidisciplinary initiative “Dispossessions in the Americas: the extraction of bodies, land, and heritage from la conquista to the present.” Sánchez has a double BA from Tufts University, a JD from Rutgers School of Law, and an MFA from New York University, and is admitted to the NY and NJ bars. His writings, photographs, and curatorial projects address Latinx, HIV/AIDS, queer/cuir perspectives, and sexual dissidence.

ABOUT THE LATIN AMERICAN FORUM

The Latin American Forum is a platform sustained in partnership with ISLAA that 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.

This series of public programs and events is coordinated by Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and organized by graduate students. Since partnering with ISLAA in 2011, NYU’s Latin American Forum has hosted more than thirty events.

Description: The reception of El Greco as a proto-modernist in early twentieth-century Northern Europe invites questions concerning transnationalism, genealogy construction, and strategies of mediation. In 1888, the Danish artist Johan Rohde published the first article on El Greco to appear in Scandinavian art journals. Building on El Greco’s growing reputation in France and Spain, Rohde offered the artist as a proxy to criticize local tastes and institutional provincialism. The Nordic interest in El Greco grew in the years after 1900, especially after the publication of German critic Julius Meier-Graefe’s influential Spanische Reise (The Spanish Journey; 1910). Meier-Graefe’s Greco – the radical colorist, the cosmopolitan – was celebrated by Franz Marc in the Blue Rider Almanac and cited by critics throughout the Nordic countries. Perhaps paradoxically, given that Meier-Graefe aligned El Greco with Impressionism and that one of his principal concerns was color, his book contained no illustrations. Without direct access to original works, or to few of them, artists and critics nonetheless responded to the “effect” that characterizations of El Greco had on local art politics. Using El Greco’s reception history as a springboard, this talk considers how such art-historical mediation legitimized a burgeoning avant-garde in the North.

Presentations will include:

Celia Cooper
Washing a Water-Damaged Book at The New York Public Library: A Novel Approach

Alexa Machnik
Training in Japanese Paintings Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Emma Hartman
Conserving the Consuelo Kanaga Archive at the Brooklyn Museum: Documentation, Analysis, and Treatment of her Gelatin Silver Prints

Abigail Slawik
A Survey of the Garden Club of America’s Rare Book Collection at The New York Botanical Garden

Amalia Donastorg
Media Mysteries: Examination and Treatment of a Beauford Delaney Painting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Isabelle Lobley
Conservation of Arms and Armor at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Devon Lee
Where the Wild Things Are: Conservation of Natural Science Collections at the American Museum of Natural History

The Isthmo-Colombian Area, comprising territory occupied predominantly by Chibchan speakers in southern Central America and northern Colombia, was home to Pre-Columbianpeoples whose societies, technologies, cosmologies, and iconographies were distinct from those of their neighbors in Mesoamerica, the Andes, Amazonia, and the Antilles. Their traditions included techniques of crafting jadeite, gold, and gold-copper alloys into elaborate ornaments representing social status, wealth, and power. Fine jewelry manufactured from exotic materials communicated esoteric knowledge about the natural and supernatural worlds. Indigenous conceptions of social order in Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia were reflected in jade and gold and can be understood through artwork in media such as stone sculpture and pottery as well as careful consideration of archaeological data. This presentation, emphasizing objects in the recently published Robert Wood Bliss collection at Dumbarton Oaks, will explain how elite craft items were made and used in this unique part of the Americas.

Presentations will include:

Erin Fitterer
Two Summer Projects: Documenting Bruce Nauman’s "Slant Step" and Excavating at Selinunte

Caroline Carlsmith
Something Old, Something New: Conservation of Archaeological Materials at Selinunte and Digital Design Files at Cooper Hewitt

Ameya Grant
In the Field: The Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, Turkey

James Hughes
Keeping Track of "Timekeeper"

Felice Robles
"Anima Terra": Condition & Risk Assessment of a Software- and Light-based Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago

Josephine Jenks
A Survey of Motion Picture Films at Bobst Library

There will be a brief question and answer session following the final presentation.

Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1943) is one of the most beloved paintings in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, often seen as the Dutch artist’s dazzling effort to capture the dynamism of his new home. Building on writing by Yve-Alain Bois, Harry Cooper and Fred Moten, how can we understand this picture as one that emerges from the confluence of two streams of migration? That could only have been made in America? And what are its distinctive political stakes?

As Director of Research Programs, Leah Dickerman leads one of MoMA’s newest departments in building an infrastructure to support and strengthen the Museum’s many research activities. These programs explore new narratives of modern and contemporary art, connect people across disciplines around the study of artworks, and mentor the next generation of art historians, curators, and other museum professionals. Dickerman is also the founding Director of the Museum Research Consortium, a partnership between MoMA and graduate art history programs at the Institute of Fine Arts, the Graduate Center at The City University of New York, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. From 2018 to 2021, Ms. Dickerman was co-head of the Creative Team at the Museum, developing digital platforms and programs to carry content about art and ideas beyond the gallery walls, including the online publication Magazine. As Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art and previously at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, she organized or co-organized a series of exhibitions offering new perspectives on the modern including Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends (2017); One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North (2015); Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 (2012-2013); Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011-2012); and Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity (2009-2010). She has published on many topics in modern art, and has served on the editorial board of the journal October since 2000. In 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Description: Game engines are software tools for building virtual environments and experiences. They simulate properties of the real world, like materials and physics, while supporting the creation of different realities with their own geographies and rules. Having emerged in the context of video game development, game engines are also finding use in the creation of software-based art. When displayed, these artworks consist of moving image sequences that play out in real-time, allowing them to respond dynamically to input or unfold in unpredictable ways. This talk will consider the theoretical and technical considerations involved in the conservation of artworks made in game engines, and reflect on the role of the conservator when working with an emerging medium.

Tom Ensom (he/him) is a freelance digital conservator specialising in the conservation of software-based art. In 2018 he completed his PhD, which explored approaches to the documentation of software-based art through a collaborative doctoral partnership between King’s College London and Tate. He continues to work closely with Tate’s Time-based Media Conservation team, where he has helped develop their conservation strategy for software-based art and works on the acquisition of a wide range of time-based media artworks. His current research focus is the conservation of artworks which employ real-time 3D rendering and immersive media technologies.

Introduction by President Andrew Hamilton and Christine Poggi, Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director, the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

Join us to hear Roland R. R. Smithspeak 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 team carried out a rewarding nine-week research season at Aphrodisias last summer, back to near-full pre-COVID strength. Current projects all saw exciting results—the Civil Basilica with its inscribed text of Diocletian’s Prices Edict; the Place of Palms and its 170m-long pool; the Tetrapylon Street and its extraordinary seventh-century Dark Age Complex; and a new project at the late antique House of Kybele and its lively neighborhood. Excavation recovered several important new statuary finds. Most striking is an Antonine portrait of a young priestess wearing a fashionable hairstyle of long plaited braids wound elegantly six times around her head.

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 recently from his position as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford University and is currently teaching for the academic year 2022–23 at Princeton University as the Stanley Kelley Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching.

*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed to those that join by Zoom. Zoom details will be available upon registration for virtual attendees. All in-person attendees must be in compliance with NYU's COVID-19 vaccination requirements (fully vaccinated and boosted, once eligible and by NYU's deadline) and be prepared to present proof of compliance. Please review the University's COVID guidelines in advance of your visit.

Written originally for a Franciscan nun in Tuscany in the early fourteenth century, the Meditationes Vitae Christi or Meditations on the Life of Christ is arguably the most somatic devotional text of the late Middle Ages. Invoking the bodily senses, the author urges the reader to imagine herself physically present at the events of Christ’s life. In this presentation, I will explore the role of sense perception in the best-known illustrated manuscript of the Meditationes: Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Ms. ital. 115, made ca. 1350 for nuns in Pisa. I will argue that the text and image program of Ms. ital. 115 trained the nuns to activate their senses as a way of participating in church liturgy and rituals while observing rules of enclosure and separation required of female members of the Franciscan order. Despite the inherent tensions between the celebration of the senses and the renunciation of the body in traditional monastic practices, in Ms. ital. 115, sensory perception serves to cultivate collective memory for the nuns, reinforcing their Franciscan identity.

Holly Flora is Professor of Art History and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Her research explores issues of gender and narrative in the devotional art of late medieval and early modern Italy. Her publications include two monographs, The Devout Belief of the Imagination: the Paris Meditationes Vitae Christi and Female Franciscan Spirituality in Trecento Italy (2009) and Cimabue and the Franciscans (2018), two co-edited volumes, and a number of articles and museum catalogue contributions. A past recipient of the Rome Prize (2010-11) and fellowship at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti (2015-16), her current projects include a forthcoming monograph on the senses and the Meditationes Vitae Christi and a study of manuscripts of Bonaventure’s Legenda maior.

Photographic images are, more than ever, part of our daily environment. We are constantly surrounded by numerous images but rarely look at them closely. They contain as much information as they pose questions to the historian, conservator, sociologist, scientist, and each of us personally. Through a selection of photographs that have punctuated his professional life, Bertrand Lavédrine will attempt to reveal aspects of their public or private history by placing them in context with their creation and will share with us what material science, documentary evidence, or collective memory reveals about each of them without fully disclosing all their mystery.

Bertrand Lavédrine is a professor at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle and a scientist at the Centre de recherche sur la conservation in Paris. From 1998 to 2019, he was the director of this center and was appointed head of the Conservation training program at the Sorbonne University from 2002 to 2007. He has written papers and books on the preservation of photographic collections, now available in several languages (French, English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Vietnamese). Dr. Lavédrine has participated in various international training programs funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Conservation Institute or Iccrom, and research projects funded by the European commission.