Events Archive

Ana María Reyes will discuss her book The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Duke 2019) in relation to the Colombian artist’s furniture assemblages. González repurposed domestic furniture to frame her enamel-on-metal paintings, drawing inspiration from Catholic altar-making traditions and engaging with global artistic practices like assemblages and ready-mades. Critics labeled González's furniture pieces as "cursi," reflecting societal anxieties about changing class structures and social practices during the Cold War, particularly in response to the artist's humorous and satirical approach to cultural and artistic norms. González's art practice, marked by a baroque sensibility, stands apart from the ephemeral and dematerialized gestures of her contemporaries in Latin America, challenging notions of taste, authenticity, and the porous boundary between public and private in the construction of subjectivities.

Ana María Reyes (PhD, University of Chicago) Associate Professor of Latin American Art History, Boston University and the Symbolic Reparations Research Project. Her books include The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Duke, 2019) Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon, co-edited with Maureen Shanahan (UPF, 2016) and To Weave and Repair: Aesthetics in Colombia’s Peace Process (in progress). She has worked with the Inter-American Court and Commission of Human Rights, Center for Justice and International Law, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Transitional Justice organizations in Colombia.

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: Among the Nahuas of Late Postclassic and early colonial central Mexico, precious materials played an integral role in manifestations of the divine. When layered and worn, devices of highly valued stones, feathers, shells, and gold gave rise to multisensory experiences that reconstituted the identity of their wearers as embodiments of sacred beings and phenomena. Surviving devices and Nahuatl textual descriptions of the experience of insignia worn on the body together provide insight into the maneuvers through which precious insignia underwent a type of dematerialization, becoming sensory experiences that simultaneously reconstituted the wearer's own body and self. In this talk, I focus on a set of Nahuatl-language texts that narrate the act of assembling precious insignia onto the body and the subsequent transformations through which precious material and dressed body alike became aesthetic experiences that were at once kinetic, visual, sonorous, and spatialized. Through this discussion, I trace the question of the material, thinking through the ways in which juxtaposition, motion, and sensoriality enabled bodies and precious materials alike to take on new forms as fully aesthetic experiences. Through this process, insignia helped produce bodies that manifested an experiential sense of self and new, expansive forms of identity and sociality.

Allison Caplan is an assistant professor in the History of Art at Yale. She is a scholar of the art of Late Postclassic and early colonial Mesoamerica, with a focus on the Nahuas of central Mexico. Her research centers on Nahua art theory and aesthetics, issues of materiality and value, and the relationship between visual expression and the Nahuatl language. Caplan received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Art History and Latin American Studies from Tulane University and her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University. Previously, Caplan was an assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the inaugural Austen Stokes Ancient Americas Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Caplan is currently completing her first book, Our Flickering Creations: Concepts of Nahua Precious Art, which reconstructs Nahua theorizations of color, light, surface, and assemblage for art combining precious stones, feathers, and metals. Her work has also appeared in Ethnohistory, West 86'h, MAVCOR Journal, Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas, The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance, and Mexico Tenochtitlan: Dynamism at the Center of the World. Caplan's research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Getty Research Institute, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Description: Dr. Andrea Achi holds a BA from Barnard College and a PhD from New York University. Trained as a Byzantinist, Dr. Achi’s scholarship and curatorial practice focus on late antique and Byzantine art of the Mediterranean Basin and Northeast Africa. She has a particular interest in manuscripts and archaeological objects from Christian Egypt and Nubia, and she has brought this expertise to bear on exhibitions like Art and Peoples of the Kharga Oasis (2017), Crossroads: Power and Piety (2020), The Good Life (2021), Africa & Byzantium (2023) and Afterlives (2024) at The Met and in presentations and publications.

Dr. Andrea Achi, curator of Africa & Byzantium at the Metropolitan Museum, will discuss creating this exhibition, which was highly praised by many including Peter Brown of the New York Review of Books and Holland Cotter of The New York Times. Starting at the museum almost a decade ago as an intern in The Medieval Department at The Met, Dr. Achi has expanded on her earlier exhibitions related to archaeology in Africa and the global medieval ages to explore connections between northern Africa and Byzantium over the centuries. Dr. Achi will end with a preview of her upcoming projects and her aspirations overall for Byzantium at The Met.

The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University is pleased to announce the opening of its spring exhibition, Magali Lara: Interior Landscapes, on view in The James B. Duke House. Curated by Angelina Medina, Giovanni Falcone, Katie Svensson, and Vivian Wu, the exhibition presents four major paintings by Magali Lara, one of Mexico's most important living artists, highlighting her interior landscapes as acts of reclamation and healing. We hope you will join the curators at 6:30 PM for a tour and discussion of the Spring 2024 Duke House Exhibition.

Created between 1983 to 1995, the paintings on display in The James B. Duke House reflect the changing ways Lara articulated her own corporeal experiences and subjectivity. Her early domestic spaces grapple with memories of her childhood and the misogyny that surrounded her, while her later abstract works confront her personal experiences with grief and, simultaneously, consider the relationship between humans and the natural environment. Through her work, Lara contests the traditional expectations of women in Mexican society and proposes new avenues for expressing desire and recuperation.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) provided funding and extensive archival and research support. The works on view are on generous loan from the ISLAA collection.

Special thanks to Professor Edward J. Sullivan, Dr. Madeline Murphy Turner, and Magali Lara for their support of this exhibition.

About ISLAA

Founded in 2011, ISLAA supports the study and visibility of Latin American art. ISLAA recognizes Latin American artists and cultural movements as integral to the trajectory of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. ISLAA seeks to expand these narratives by creating opportunities for researchers, curators, and the public through grants, exhibitions, publications, and our art and archival collections. ISLAA’s partnerships with educational and art institutions include New York University, Columbia University, CCS Bard, the New Museum, and Dia Art Foundation.

About 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 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 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.

Please join the Institute in conversation with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Prita Meier on Siddiqi's new book, Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, Theory in Forms, 2024), on the spatial politics, visual rhetoric, ecologies, and long colonial traditions of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. Siddiqi is the co-editor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence. Her book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva analyzes the politics of heritage environments through the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier.

Prita Meier is associate professor of African art and architectural history at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History. Her scholarship focuses on Africa’s port cities and histories of maritime exchange and conflict. She is the author of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Indiana University Press, 2016), The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast (Princeton University Press, forthcoming October 2024) and co-editor of World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean (University of Washington Press, 2017).

The book may be purchased from dukeupress.edu using discount code E23SIDDQ.

The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to announce the opening of the 2024 Great Hall Exhibition, Once we leave a place is it there, featuring a new work by artist Maia Ruth Lee (b.1983, Busan, South Korea). The Spring 2024 iteration marks the return to in-person exhibitions since the start of the pandemic and proudly continues the Institute’s Great Hall Exhibition series’ commitment to celebrating the practices of exemplary women artists.

Shaped by her lived experiences of migration, Lee’s practice explores the friction and fragmentation that arises from assimilation through dislocation, alongside larger themes of community, borders, and language. At the center of the exhibition is Bondage Baggage Banner (2024), a new commission that brings to life marginalized histories within the historic architecture of the Institute’s Marica Vilcek Great Hall. Featuring banners, sculptures and a jesa-sang, a Korean offering table, the work blends traditions from Korean jesa, a ritual to commemorate ancestors, with public offerings quintessential to Buddhist monasteries in Nepal. The jesa-sang will hold Lee’s sculptures, alongside visitors’ personal contributions. Visitors are invited to partake in this communal offering and the installation’s gradual metamorphosis by placing an object of their choice on the table.

Note: The offering object may be any palm-sized item, excluding active flames, fresh food, or other items susceptible to rot.

Maia Ruth Lee (b.1983, Busan, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, photography, and video. She attended Hongik University in Seoul, Korea, and Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. Lee has had solo exhibitions at the Tina Kim Gallery (NY), Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (CO), and François Ghebaly Gallery (LA). She has participated in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and an array of group exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum (CO), Fotografiska New York, Gio Marconi Gallery (Milan), and Mai 36 Galerie (Zurich). Lee was awarded the Gold Art Prize in 2021 and the Rema Hort Mann Grant in 2017. Her work is held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Valeria Napoleone XX.

Clarice Lee, Malaika Newsome, Ruiqi Wang, and Fiona Yu curated the exhibition. We extend special thanks to the artist, Maia Ruth Lee, and to the Tina Kim Gallery and Diana Lee. Catherine Quan Damman, Christine Poggi, Sarah Higby, and Sofia Palumbo-Dawson provided faculty and administrative support; Jason Varone designed the website.

Two masterpieces of chamber music literature will be performed on February 24th, Brahms Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor and Brahms Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major. The program will last approximately one hour, including one five-minute pause. Both works will be performed by students from NYU Steinhardt’s String Studies program.

Program

Brahms Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor
Daniel Apolonio, violin
Brielle Perez, piano

Brahms Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major
Daniel Apolonio, violin
Victoria Lin, cello
Brielle Perez, piano

Description: We typically imagine the Incas as a highland people—which is accurate, for the most part. But they also expanded their domain into various lowland regions, including westernmost Amazonia, an ecological context radically different from their traditional heartlands in the high Andes. The Inca presence in Amazonia remains one of the least understood aspects of their history and is also a topic beset by many myths and misapprehensions. In this talk, I aim to provide an up-to-date overview of the imperial expansions into the eastern forests. What exactly drew the Incas into Amazonia in the first place? How much did they already know about Amazonia prior to their arrival in the region? What sort of interactions did they have with the lowland communities they encountered? My answers to these questions will draw upon my own archaeological field research in the province of La Convención, Peru, as well as that of several colleagues, whose recent efforts have done much to expand our understanding of this under-studied region. Rather than a peripheral zone of highland empires, I will discuss the various ways in which western Amazonia played a vital role in Andean prehistory.

Darryl Wilkinson received his BA in archaeology and anthropology from Oxford University, after which he began his graduate studies at Columbia University, where he completed his PhD in 2013. Wilkinson has since held postdoctoral fellowships at Cambridge University, Rutgers University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his field research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust and the National Science Foundation. In 2020 he took up an appointment as assistant professor in the Religion Department at Dartmouth College.

Description: The work of the Italian painter Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1267–1337) is characterized by the unprecedented visualization of physical forces: weight, pulling, pushing and throwing. My lecture situates this observation within the shared, resonant space of the histories of art and science around 1300, with a focus on Giotto's "Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata" (Paris, Louvre). After contextualizing the image within contemporary Franciscan hagiography, I will refer to two fields in the history of physics – optics and ballistics – in which Franciscans played a prominent role and which they helped to reshape in a revolutionary way. My reconstruction of shared fields of investigation demonstrates how both art and science concurrently pose questions about the transmission, continuation, conceptualization, and representation of physical and physically effective numinous forces.

Frank Fehrenbach is an art historian who focuses on the interrelations between art, natural philosophy, and science in early modern Europe. He was a senior professor at Harvard University until 2013, when he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship at Hamburg University. Since 2019, he is co-director of the interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Study on Imaginaria of Force in Hamburg, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He published widely on Leonardo da Vinci, including the LVIII Lettura Vinciana (2020). Most recently, he published an extensive monograph on the concept of “enlivenment” in early modern Italian art (Quasi vivo. Lebendigkeit in der italienischen Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit, Berlin-Boston 2021).

Despite the prevailing Catholic belief that the original resting places of the martyr saints Peter and Paul are under their respective churches on the Vatican hill and on the via Ostiense, a debate persists regarding a mysterious location at the third milestone of the Appian Way. The current church of Saint Sebastian stands upon an early, modest place of worship for the apostles and a 4th-century ‘Basilica Apostolorum’. Drawing from a new interpretation of archaeological findings, epigraphic evidence and tomb decoration, I will contend that this area, once a pozzolana mine, was where the apostles were purportedly interred and their tomb(s) visited starting from the 2nd century, and I will chart the evolution of their veneration from a simple funerary reverence to a martyr's cult.

Barbara E Borg is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and has published widely on Greek and Roman art and archaeology. Over the past 15 years, she has focussed her research on funerary customs and the topography of the city of Rome and its surroundings. Recent publications include her two monographs Crisis and ambition: tombs and burial customs in third-century CE Rome (OUP 2013), and Roman tombs and the art of commemoration: contextual approaches to funerary customs in the second century CE (CUP 2019). Since 2022, she has been leading the project The INscribed city: urban structures and interaction in imperial ROME (ERC ADG 101054143 – IN-ROME). It aims to holistically map and describe the wide range of activities taking place in and around Rome and translate topographical patterns and urban structures into social relations to gain a better understanding of how this first mega-city of the world worked.

The IFA's Feminist, Queer, and Trans Forum is pleased to announce their inaugural guest lecture from the artist Baseera Khan. Demonstrating a vested commitment to engaging with materials and the conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption, Khan explores larger questions surrounding diasporic experience, the contingency of identity, and systems of oppression. In this lecture, Khan will trace their ongoing practice, moving through several recent bodies of work and introducing an upcoming series that will open in New York City this April.

Baseera Khan is a New York-based performance, sculpture, and installation artist interested in materials, color, and their economies, the effects of these relationships to labor and family structures, religion, and spiritual well-being. Khan's public art commission, "Painful Arc, Shoulder High," remains on The High Line Park, NYC located by the Standard Hotel until summer 2024. Khan mounted their first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2021-22), and mounted a solo touring exhibition for Moody Arts Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, Texas, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio (2022-2023). They have exhibited in numerous locations such as the Wexner Center for the Arts (2021), New Orleans Museum of Art (2020), Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, Munich, Germany, Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2019), Sculpture Center, NY (2018), Aspen Museum (2017), Participant Inc. (2017). Khan's performance work has premiered at several locations including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Art POP Montreal International Music Festival. Khan completed a 6-week performance residency at The Kitchen NYC (2020) and was an artist in residence at Pioneer Works (2018-19), Abrons Art Center (2016-17), was an International Travel Fellow to Jerusalem/Ramallah through Apexart (2015) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). Khan won an Artist Prize for the MTV/Smithsonian Channel TV docu-series, called The Exhibit in 2022-23. Khan is also a recipient of the UOVO Art Prize (2020), BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), NYSCA/NYFA and Art Matters (2018). Their works are part of several public permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, MN, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA. Khan received an M.F.A. from Cornell University (2012) and a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas (2005).

The Schmidt Trio currently resides in New York City and is in the process of completing their Bachelor’s Degree in Music Performance at New York University. The Schmidt Trio strongly believes in the representation of young artists and the creation of inclusive environments in the classical music industry. The ensemble takes inspiration from their mentor Giora Schmidt, who emphasizes the importance of young musicians advocating for themselves. In an age where conventional ideologies continue to stand, the trio recognizes the necessity for young artists to actively create their own opportunities to share their passions.

Three masterpieces of chamber music literature will be performed on March 30th, Takashi Yoshimatsu's Atom Hearts Club Piano Trio op. 70d, Sergei Rachmaninoff's Trio élégiaque no. 1 in G minor, and Claude Debussy's Piano Trio in G Major, L. 5. The program will last approximately one hour, including one five-minute pause.

Program

Takashi Yoshimatsu (1953-present)
Atom Hearts Club Piano Trio op. 70d
I. Allegro

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Trio élégiaque no. 1 in G minor (1892)

Pause

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Piano Trio in G Major, L. 5 (1880)
I. Andantino con moto allegro
II. Scherzo: Moderato con allegro
III. Andante espressivo
IV. Finale: Appassionato

Angel Guanga, violin
Noelia Carrasco, cello
Malka Bobrove, piano

We are delighted to welcome Danielle Orchard (b. 1985, Michigan City, IN) as our third and final artist in our Visions of Corporeality lecture series. Danielle Orchard is a painter currently residing in Amherst, Massachusetts who received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Indiana University, and her Masters of Fine Arts at CUNY Hunter College. Through Danielle’s sustained engagement with the female body, a subject which was particularly prominent in her 2023 solo show at Perrotin Gallery (“You Are a Serpent Who Will Return to the Ocean”), artist and viewer alike continually explore new elements behind the meaning of corporeality. While Orchard’s canvases may be bright in color, her figures portray a certain level of vulnerability that begs contemplation.

Nodding to the great painters of the modern era including Picasso and Matisse, Orchard’s paintings often reference their styles and subjects by portraying female nudes in a more abstract manner; the figures are portrayed in multi-perspectival Analytic Cubist style or abbreviated otherwise into solid contours and saturated colors. As she tackles depiction plane by plane, or each abstract part that she sculpts with thick impasto, Orchard is exploring the female corporeal representation. While the concept of female nude finds itself deeply ingrained in art history as a muse and more recently being established as a subject of study, Orchard adds depth by infusing her own experiences as a female artist, having trained, posed, and even taught in life drawing classes.

In narratives ranging from art historical tropes to contemporary leisure activities, the viewers can expect to find scenes of familiarity in Orchard’s work. By using popular motifs, Orchard eliminates the viewers’ guesswork in discerning the subject, directing their attention to her mode of expression instead. As the backgrounds or accompanying objects echo the body language of the women, depicted with muted emotions, the artist invites the viewers to empathize and contemplate the interiority of the models.

Enriched by the Industrial Revolution, many European governments embarked on major projects of urban renewal. Their plans differed, depending on the social and economic price they were willing to pay. The most ambitious of these projects was carried out by Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who set about transforming Paris into a city befitting an imperial power, with gleaming new boulevards, parks and gardens, public illumination, improved water supply and sewerage. Yet can we continue to see the city, unproblematically, as the epitome of modernity or, as Walter Benjamin famously put it, the capital of the nineteenth century? Paris was in fact the capital of an expanding colonial empire which more than doubled during the second half of the century. Instead of limiting ourselves to formal analysis of buildings and urban amenities, it is imperative to confront how the empire used urban space to give itself legitimacy, staging its conquests, exhibiting its cultural spoils, naturalizing the violence on which its aggressive imperialism was predicated, while at the same time erasing sites of memory dear to the working-class. In Paris, urban and colonial spaces were inextricably linked, and advanced innovations in engineering coexisted with forms of vernacular and subjugated knowledge. Labor, the mechanism that enabled the much-admired renovation of the French metropolis, has been largely ignored in architectural histories as has the invisible translocal workforce in French colonies abroad. We are only now beginning to explore these issues and the ways in which they transform our understanding of Paris as a product of a global colonial enterprise.

Esther da Costa Meyer, Professor emerita in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, has also taught at Yale and NYU. Her work has focused on both modern and contemporary architecture, and on issues of gender and design. The architectural practices of the old colonial powers have been another aspect of her research, as well as the resilient cultures of resistance in colonized nations. Da Costa Meyer’s book Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852-1870 (Princeton University Press) was published in February 2022. Her curatorial work includes Frank Gehry: On Line, at the Princeton University Art Museum (2008); at the Jewish Museum in New York, she curated Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design (2016) and co-curated The Sassoons (2023). During the past six years, her teaching has examined architecture’s complicity with climate change, the architecture of refugee camps around the world, and more recently, the impact of colonialism on architectural historiography.

Magali Lara, Luego lo lavo, from the series Historias de casa, 1984. Acrylic on canvas. 32 1/2 x 39 1/4 in. Image courtesy: Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)

The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University is pleased to welcome you to A Conversation with Magali Lara and Madeline Murphy Turner, a public program in association with the spring exhibition, Magali Lara: Interior Landscapes, on view in The James B. Duke House. Magali Lara, the exhibiting artist, will be joined by Dr. Madeline Murphy Turner, a recent IFA graduate and currently the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Drawings at the Harvard Art Museums. Together, they will share their valuable insights on Lara’s past and current practice, starting with the paintings on view in the exhibition and expanding into her multifaceted work with artists’ books and other media.

Curated by Angelina Medina, Giovanni Falcone, Katie Svensson, and Vivian Wu, Magali Lara: Interior Landscapes, presents four major paintings by Magali Lara, one of Mexico's most important living artists, highlighting her interior landscapes as acts of reclamation and healing.

Created between 1983 to 1995, the paintings on display in The James B. Duke House reflect the changing ways Lara articulated her own corporeal experiences and subjectivity. Her early domestic spaces grapple with memories of her childhood and the misogyny that surrounded her, while her later abstract works confront her personal experiences with grief and, simultaneously, consider the relationship between humans and the natural environment. Through her work, Lara contests the traditional expectations of women in Mexican society and proposes new avenues for expressing desire and recuperation.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) provided funding and extensive archival and research support. The works on view are on generous loan from the ISLAA collection.

Magali Lara, born 1956 in Mexico City, is an artist, curator, writer, and teacher. Since attending the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in the 1970s, Lara works across mediums, creating paintings, artists’ books, and installations. A leading figure in Mexican contemporary art, her work centers on themes, such as femininity, sexuality, emotion, and identity. Lara has collaborated with important figures in the world of Mexican art and literature, including Mónica Mayer (born 1954), Rowena Morales (born 1948), Carmen Boullosa (born 1954), Yani Pecanins (1954-2019) and others. Artworks by Lara are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, and The Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca among others. Exhibitions dedicated to Lara’s work have also been held around the world, including Magali Lara: Del cielo, Instituto Cultural de México, Paris, Magali Lara: Los ojos no, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Magali Lara: Glaciares, Visual Arts Center, Austin, and Magali Lara: Intemperie, Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Mexico City.

Dr. Madeline Murphy Turner is a curator and art historian from New York City. Her work centers on contemporary art from Latin America, with a special focus on ecology and gender in drawing and performance. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University with a dissertation titled "What Women Write: Artists' Books, Postal Objects, and Experimental Theater in Mexico City (1979-1992)." Currently, she is the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Drawings at the Harvard Art Museums. Previously, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Grey Art Museum, and Cecilia de Torres Gallery. Madeline has published essays, artist interviews, and critical texts about contemporary art in academic journals and exhibition catalogs, and has curated exhibitions, including Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe and Laura Anderson Barbata: Origins with Marlborough Gallery, New York. She has forthcoming essays about the mail art of Magali Lara and Polvo de Gallina Negra in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture; the photography of Suwon Lee in Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark (Cornerhouse Publications, 2024); and the collaborative artists' books of Magali Lara and Carmen Boullosa in Leer a la salvaja Carmen Boullosa (Peter Lang, 2024). Madeline is also co-editor, with Inés Katzenstein and María del Carmen Carrión, of an anthology about contemporary art and the environment in Latin America, which will be published in the fall of 2024 by the Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Special thanks to Edward Sullivan, Magali Lara, and Madeline Murphy Turner for their support for this exhibition and program.

This paper focuses on the bouleuterion / odeion at Teos and contextualizes the building’s chronology—considering the recent excavation results (Teos Archaeological Project of Ankara University and UPenn, 2022-), monumental building inscription, and relevant epigraphic documents—to address the variegated functions it fulfilled over time. It also tackles the ways in which the typological study of public monuments in the study of Greek and Roman architecture at large has affected our understanding of their design and meaning. By focusing on the long history of this building, I explore the ways in which ancient buildings were multifunctional and puncture our long-held idea that each designated building type must relate to a different function. The typological study of public monuments in the history of architecture is a project of the Enlightenment, but its approach continues to permeate the study of ancient architecture where typologies are an imperative tool of research. In analyzing this building and the rich epigraphic corpus with which it is related, my aim is to show how domains that we often assume to be separate—such as the political and cultural—were not always separate in these buildings. My analysis of the building types of bouleuteria and odeia more broadly and specifically in this region aims at providing an insight into the architectural design schemes that appeared in the Hellenistic and Roman East and the ways in which they served political and cultural transformations.

Mantha Zarmakoupi is an architectural historian and classical archaeologist and the Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Assistant Professor in Roman architecture in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her work addresses the broader social, economic, and cultural conditions underpinning the production of ancient art, architecture, and urbanism. She has published widely on Greek and Roman architecture and art—including monographs Shaping Roman Landscape: Ecocritical Approaches to Architecture and Wall Painting in Early Imperial Italy (Getty 2023) and Designing for Luxury on the Bay of Naples: Villas and Landscapes (c. 100 BCE – 79 CE) (Oxford University Press 2014), edited volumes The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum: Archaeology, Reception, and Digital Reconstruction (De Gruyter 2010), and Hermogenes and Hellenistic-Roman Temple Building in Greece and Asia Minor (University of Wisconsin Press, in progress)—as well as on late Hellenistic and Roman Delos. Her research on Delos extends the field of ancient urbanism in new directions to address the relationship between economic and social change with urban form. In the context of this project, she co-directed an underwater fieldwork survey around Delos (2014-21). She currently conducts an archaeological project in collaboration with Ankara University at the Bouleuterion at Teos, Turkey (2022–).

Mantha has a multidisciplinary training in architectural design (Athens), history and theory of architecture (Harvard), and classical archaeology (Oxford) and systematically fosters conversations across the fields of architecture and archaeology. For instance, her edited volume Looking at the City (Melissa, 2023) tackles architectural and archaeological perspectives in the study of ancient cities, and the research network she organized with Simon Richards and forthcoming edited volume on The Delos Symposia and Doxiadis (Lars Müller Publishers 2024) addresses the intertwinement of ideas on ancient urbanism in 20th century discussions on urbanism and ecology. Together with David Gissen and Jennifer Stager, they created for the 2021 Biennale of Architecture in Venice the research installation An Archaeology of Disability, which explores what it means to reconstruct lost elements of the Acropolis through the lens of human impairment (now touring in Greece).

“Every home opened its doors to me save for my ancestral abode,” wrote Armenian poet Mushegh Ishkhan in 1936. His was a generation of genocide survivors forced out of their homeland and scattered around the globe. A yearning to reenact erased histories and recreate inaccessible geographies—tucked behind the borders of Turkey—defined many of their lives and pursuits. The literary genre of the memory book (houshamadyanin Armenian) emerged from this cauldron: More than 300 published titles (and many unpublished ones) dedicated to Armenian-populated regions, towns, or villages in the Ottoman Empire were produced in the Armenian Diaspora since the 1920s. These works offer a window into the history, topography, genealogy, art, culture, customs, trades, crafts, and games in the region they cover—and present accounts of the crime that erased it all, explore its legacies, and document the rebuilding of communities in exile.

In this illustrated talk based on a forthcoming article, Mouradian explores the memorial book as a literary genre, art, and artifact. Guided by published and unpublished works and more than 20 research trips and pilgrimages to the very spaces the books celebrate and memorialize, Mouradian reflects on the agency of the houshamadyans and their enduring legacy.

Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, and the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress. He also serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the project on Armenian Genocide Denial at the NYU Global Institute for Advanced Study. Mouradian is the author of the award-winning monograph The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 (2021). He is also the co-editor of After the Ottomans: Genocide’s Long Shadow and Armenian Resilience (2023) and The I.B.Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy (forthcoming in 2024).

Though many Black artists who spent time in France experimented with abstract modes of production—thus impacting the trajectory of modernist abstraction—their efforts are often eclipsed by the constraining discourses around Abstract Expressionism and Civil Rights-era protest art. This roundtable will think through and beyond modernist aesthetics, constructions of Blackness, and geopolitical relations to probe the use of abstraction as a tool of subjective expression, radical politics, or opacity for Black artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Discussants:

Lewis R. Gordon, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of Philosophy, UCONN

Erich Kessel, Assistant Professor of African American and Black Diaspora Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU

Darla Migan, Art critic and Faculty Lecturer, Parsons School of Design, The New School

Denise Murrell, Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Moderated by JaBrea Patterson-West, Graduate Curatorial Assistant at the Grey Art Museum, NYU, and Ph.D. candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU

​*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed to those who join us by Zoom. Zoom details will be available upon registration for virtual attendees.

This event is co-presented by Grey Art Museum, NYU and co-sponsored by the Remarque Institute, NYU; and the Center for the Humanities, NYU.

In conservation theory and practice considerable attention (and anxiety) has been directed towards strictly delimited notions of authenticity in the context of contemporary artworks and the ways conservators intervene in their materialization(s). This talk considers how a methodology of attunement—figured in the context of conservation—helps bring attention to the ethics, politics, and principles inscribed within a work of art that might otherwise go un-sensed or be disregarded, as well as the varied ways in which conservation practices might attend to and promote them. Attunement is positioned as an individual and collective responsiveness (or Baradian “response-ability”) to that which we seek to provide care, where sedimented practices of musealization and habituated modes of thinking and doing conservation—often driven by colonialist and capitalist logics—are able to be generatively (re-)worked. In so doing, this talk considers how tuning into and becoming attuned to a work’s specificities aligns with an expanded notion of care.

Dr. Brian Castriota is Lecturer in Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media at University College London, Time-Based Media Conservator at the National Galleries Scotland, and Freelance Conservator for Time-Based Media and Contemporary Art at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He completed graduate-level training in conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2014, and earned a Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of Glasgow in 2019 as part of the Marie Skłowdoska-Curie ITN New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA). His research and publications largely focus on how ideas from poststructuralism, queer theory, agential realism, and postqualitative inquiry rework sedimented theories and practices of conservation, particularly in relation to contemporary artworks, their musealization, and their documentation for conservation purposes.

The Institute of Fine Arts and Aperture have partnered to establish a series of conversations that center photography as a creative act and means of responding to urgent questions in the world around us. This convening of photo-committed makers and thinkers will foster a critical yet community-oriented environment for reflection and learning. We aim to create a forum for exchange on why photography matters, even if, or especially because, its definition is elusive and its boundaries are porous.

The Photo Assembly was held on Wednesday, April 17, 2024. As a point of departure, we looked toward the impact and influence of artificial intelligence in photography. Erich Kessel, assistant professor of African American and Black Diaspora Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, introduced the topic to provide context for the conversation. Esteemed panelists Laurie Simmons, Minne Atairu, and Jonathan Beller, each shared presentations to generate an open conversation, followed by a moderated discussion with the audience.

Description: Long attributed to Rembrandt, the painting of the so-called Prophetess Hanna in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna is currently the focus of technical study and much-needed conservation treatment; its last restoration dates back some two hundred years. In preparation for the exhibition Rembrandt – Hoogstraten, Color and Illusion, works in the collection by both masters have been considered anew. The findings of the Rembrandt Research Project nearly three decades earlier formed the inevitable starting point of the endeavor, and were reevaluated through a new series of examination methods. An interpretation of the latest results, and the questions and decisions surrounding the conservation, will be presented for discussion.

Elke Oberthaler is head conservator for the paintings collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Her research focuses on conservation history and the technical study of European easel paintings from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. She has initiated interdisciplinary scholarly projects and has been co-curator for several exhibitions incorporating technical discoveries — including Vermeer (2011) and Pieter Bruegel the Elder (2018–19). In 2006, she was visiting conservator at the Courtauld Institute, London. She regularly lectures in the Vienna conservation programs and has served on several international conservation committees, among them those for Titian’s Pardo Venus (Paris, Louvre), Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter (Amsterdam and Dresden), and the Ghent altarpiece. She graduated from the conservation program of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to present the 2024 LindaNochlin Lecture, in honor of LindaNochlin (1931–2017), who was a trailblazing feminist art historian and the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute. The series’ inaugural event features Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and her lecture “Crafting Woven Histories.” A reception will follow.

While in theory there are many ways of curating an exhibition, in practice there are only a few. The canonical model emulates the reading of a printed page. As if illustrating a textual thesis, its argument unfolds sequentially, artwork by artwork around the gallery walls. More rarely, an exhibition spatializes and materializes a discursive set of arguments, interweaving less familiar curatorial strategies that embrace serendipity, circumstantial intervention, and retrospective recognition. Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction employs this latter mode—a form of crafting. Evolving somewhat organically, responsive to site and circumstance, its multidimensional structure asks the viewer to engage intellectually, corporeally, and sensorially in real space and time.

Lynne Cooke is Senior Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. From 2012-2014 she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. Prior to that she served as chief curator and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid from 2008 to 2012 and as curator at Dia Art Foundation from 1991 to 2008. In 1991, Cooke co-curated the Carnegie International, and has helmed numerous major shows since, including the 10th Biennale of Sydney (1996), Rosemarie Trockel: Cosmos (2012) and Outliers and American Vanguard Art, 2018. She has published widely, including texts on Agnes Martin, Francis Alys, Zoe Leonard, James Castle, and Bridget Riley.

Her most recent exhibition, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, is currently traveling across four venues in North America: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (September 17, 2023–January 21, 2024); National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (March 17 – July 28, 2024); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (November 8, 2024–March 2, 2025); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (April 20–September 13, 2025)

This event was made possible through the generous support of Valeria Napoleone XX.

As major stewards of artworks and their histories, museums have always held considerable responsibility in the cultural field. Situated in a space that is constantly evolving and confronted with new challenges (especially in the post-pandemic era), it is even more imperative for art institutions to consider how they balance selectivity and inclusivity. How can curatorial practices incorporate transnational and transdisciplinary approaches in order to expand the conventions of art history and exhibition making? How can we envision more diverse narratives in museum exhibitions, collections, and public programs? How can institutions engage multiple mediums and means to expand their address?

Urgent issues await; please join us for a conversation between Lesley Ma (Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Associate Curator, Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Hitomi Iwasaki (Director of Exhibitions/Curator at the Queens Museum) in conversation with IFA Contemporary Asia. This conversation aims to seek discussions around these issues through the lens of curating Asian and Asian American art in New York’s leading art museums.

The event will begin with a brief presentation by both Lesley Ma, Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Associate Curator, Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions/Curator at the Queens Museum. This will be followed by a conversation between the two curators as well as an audience Q&A.

Lesley Ma joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Spring 2022 as the inaugural Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Associate Curator of Asian Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. From 2013 to 2022, she was founding Curator, Ink Art at M+, Hong Kong, a museum for global visual culture that opened in 2021. Prior to M+, she curated projects at Para Site, Hong Kong and was Project Director at Cai Guo-Qiang’s studio in New York. She earned her A.B. in History and Science from Harvard College and M.A. in Museum Studies from New York University. Her Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego, focused on abstract painting in postwar Taiwan.

Hitomi Iwasaki is Director of Exhibitions/Curator at the Queens Museum. She has worked on landmark exhibitions including Cai Guo-Qiang (1997); Out of India (1997), Global Conceptualism: Points of Origins 1950s-1980s (1999–2001), Caribbean: Crossroad of the World (2012), and After Midnight: Indian Moderns and Contemporary Indian Art (2016), as well as numerous site-specific solo projects with Johanna Unzueta, Daniel Bozhkov, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Sable Elyse Smith, Jewyo Rhii, among many others. She organized Bringing the World into the World (2015), a major exhibition that centered around the Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York and its 50th anniversary with fifteen cross-generational international artists, and most recently major solo exhibitions by Patty Chang (2018), Christine Sun Kim (2022), Aliza Nisenbaum (2023), and Aki Sasamoto (2023-24). Hitomi won the International Association of Art Critic’s (IACA) Curator’s Award Best Project in a Public Space, 2009-2010 with Duke Riley. She has produced artist books including Patty Chang: Wandering lake (2018, with Dancing Foxes Press) and Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection (2024, with C.A.R.A.). Hitomi received her B.A. in Visual Communication Theory from Kyoto Seika University, Japan, M.A. in Museum Studies, from NYU as well as post graduate studies in Art History from CUNY/Graduate Center.

Technical imaging by a conservator is commonly used to record an artwork’s changing appearance and reveal details of artistic practice and condition. Drawing on the study of paintings by Alfred Sisley, Mark Rothko, Francesco Clemente, and other modern artists using standard visible, raking and specular light photography, infrared reflectography, ultraviolet examination, and x-radiography, this talk will explore recent discoveries of meaning and materiality. Employing fundamental examination methods helped to contextualize these paintings and informed their safe display. However, significant analytical projects can sometimes leave us with unanswered preservation questions. The techniques described can be applied to nearly any other object to help understand the world around us. In a final discussion of works by Darrel Ellis, the conservator’s practice of close looking – here replicated in detail photographs – will consider how the artist’s body of work melds photography and painting.

Jen Munch is currently the Judith Praska Visiting Assistant Professor in Conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts, where she teaches a course on technical imaging for conservators. Jen is the owner of Jen Munch Art Conservation, a Brooklyn, NYC-based private practice specializing in the care of modern and contemporary paintings for collectors, museums, galleries, artists, and their estates.

She has worked in conservation and collections care since 2011 with prior roles at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Phillips Collection, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Cambridge, MA public art collection, and Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, as well as several private practices focused on the care of paintings and contemporary art. Jen earned her M.A. and Certificate of Advanced Study in Art Conservation from the State University of New York at Buffalo State College and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University & School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Jen is a Professional Associate (peer-reviewed) of the American Institute for Conservation and currently serves as the Chair of AIC’s Contemporary Art Network, a group dedicated to creating meaningful connections and learning opportunities for conservators of contemporary art.

As museums work to define their role in promoting social diversity, there is a growing need to expand our understanding of the Americas in a way that captures the multiple and rich identities associated with the term. We can look to artists—often ahead of social and institutional discourses—for insight into what the continent of America was, is, and should be. Dr. Iglesias Lukin will provide a brief history of artistic and curatorial projects that have considered the Americas through a Hemispheric lens and address how these predecessors have influenced her vision for exhibition programming at Americas Society, where she has led the Art Department since 2019.

Aimé Iglesias Lukin is an art historian and curator. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, she has lived in New York since 2011. Her Ph.D. in art history from Rutgers University, titled “This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York 1965–1975,” became a show at Americas Society in 2021. She completed her M.A. at The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and her undergraduate studies in art history at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her research received grants from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Terra and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations, and the ICAA Peter C. Marzio Award from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her writing has been presented at conferences internationally and published by prestigious museums and academic journals, including the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. She curated exhibitions independently in museums and cultural centers and previously worked in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, and Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires.

Based in Los Angeles, Refik Anadol Studio conducts interdisciplinary research on the relation between the human mind, data aesthetics, machine learning technologies, and nature. Coining the terms “AI Data Painting,” “AI Data Sculpture,” and “latent city,” Anadol has been reflecting on new multi-sensory forms of narrating collective memory in physical and virtual spaces and inviting his audience to imagine Generative Realities. In this talk, Anadol will share the research and production journeys of his Studio's internationally renowned artworks, which collectively offer a dramatic rethinking of our many environments. The artist will also shed light on his most recent interdisciplinary collaborations with various scientists and communities around the world to build a bridge between nature-themed data and generative art.

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is the Director of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles and Lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. Anadol’s work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Taking the data that surrounds us as primary material, and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol offers us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expands the possibilities of interdisciplinary arts. Anadol’s site-specific data paintings and sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, collective experiences, public art, decentralized networks, and the creative potential of AI. Anadol’s work has been exhibited at venues including MoMA, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Art Basel, National Gallery of Victoria, Venice Architecture Biennale, Hammer Museum, Arken Museum, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Ars Electronica, Istanbul Modern, and ZKM | Center for Art and New Media. Anadol has received a number of awards and prizes including the Lorenzo il Magnifico Lifetime Achievement Award for New Media Art, Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, Columbia University’s Breakthrough in Storytelling Award, and Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award.

Please join the Institute for the first of its Close Readings series in a conversation with John Hopkins, Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art, about their new book, Unbound from Rome: Art and Craft in a Fluid Landscape. Published by Yale University Press in 2024, Hopkins’ book is an investigation of makers, materials and the role that craft communities played in the creation of sociocultural practices in ancient Italy. The book covers some of the period’s most iconic works, including luxury bronze objects; sacred temple sculpture crafted over three centuries, votive offerings, monumental tombs and colossal buildings. A key purpose of the book is to question an idea of Rome that has focused on elite production and the textual record; Hopkins instead calls attention to the lesser-known—often silenced—actors who were integral players. The result is a book that takes as a central tenet the dismantling of imperialist culture-conglomerates, including the notion of a Roman world, Roman period, and Roman Art and promotes instead a world of multiplicity, fragmentariness and co-presence.

Leading a discussion with the Author will be Josephine Crawley Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University.

John North Hopkins is Associate Professor of the art and archaeology of ancient Mediterranean peoples in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. They are author of The Genesis of Roman Architecture (2016, Yale, winner of the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians), Unbound from Rome: Art and Craft in a Fluid Landscape, 650-250 BCE (2024, Yale), and co-editor of Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art (2020 the Menil Collection and Yale) and Forgery Beyond Deceit: Fabrication, Value and the Desire for Ancient Rome (2023, Oxford). They are also director of the Antefixa Project and co-director, of the Quirinal Project, two collaborative cultural heritage research initiatives built through international partnerships with Italian universities, museums and superintendencies of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Josephine Crawley Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Worcester College, Oxford. She has degrees from Oxford and UC Berkeley, has taught in America, Italy and the UK, and co-directed the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, as well as to radio and television programmes. In January 2025 she takes up the Professorship of Ancient History at Cambridge University as the first woman to hold that post.

“It has to be from here, right this instance, my cry into the world” is a line by Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, which appears in both English and Spanish on artist Antonio Martorell and architect Segundo Cardona’s memorial dedicated to the thousands of victims of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. Focusing on the bilingualism and diasporic nature of Latine commemorative visual culture through three case studies, this talk examines how contemporary memorials that are part of a surge of twenty-first-century disaster monuments, respond to entwined Latin American and US tragedies. A close analysis of memorials by Martorell and Cardona, Freddy Rodríguez, and Scherezade Garcia illuminate innovations in material and aesthetic inquiries in commemorative works. The memorials under discussion embrace an aesthetics of post-disaster politics, which this study defines as an attempt to balance a representation of destructive forces such as societal and environmental instability while creating a nurturing, regenerative, and caring environment for visitors.

Marisa Lerer is Director of Education at Creative Capital Foundation. Prior to joining Creative Capital, she was Associate Professor of modern and contemporary art history and Chair of the Art History & Digital Media Art Department at Manhattan College. She specializes in monuments, memorials, and public art and her publications have focused on art under dictatorship in Latin America, memorials dedicated to victims of state-sponsored terrorism, and contested subjects and aesthetics in Latine public sculptures. She was the George Gurney Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, among others, for her current book project on Latine public memorials. She received her Ph.D. at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

The ISLAA Forum is a platform sustained in partnership with the Institute of Studies for Latin American Art (ISLAA).

Parchment has been a support material for manuscript writing for centuries, yet its various types, preparation methods, and the identification of the animal species used have not been thoroughly studied. This oversight has often resulted in inaccuracies and misleading information in the physical descriptions of manuscripts. My research integrates visual analyses, practical parchment-making experiments, and biomolecular studies to provide more precise insights into parchment production techniques across different historical periods and geographical regions. This approach aims to enhance the accuracy of manuscript descriptions, particularly for those from the Late Antique to the Romanesque period, with special emphasis on select Insular and Carolingian codices.

Jiří Vnouček is a conservator with expertise in parchment, illuminated manuscripts, and bookbinding. Since March 2024, he has served as a Senior Researcher and Conservator at The Royal Danish Library. From 2018 to 2023, he was a researcher for the Beasts to Craft project. Jiří holds a Doctorate in Medieval Studies from the University of York, UK. His research is centered on biocodicology, a pioneering approach to the study of parchment manuscripts.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is a ground-breaking human rights law passed by Congress in 1990 requiring museums and federally funded institutions to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian Organizations. In the 30 years since its enactment, however, numerous regulatory gaps hindered the Act’s implementation and prompted confusion among museums and federally funded institutions. New regulations took effect in January 2024, radically altering the repatriation process, and making other material changes to NAGPRA. This lecture will discuss the new regulations, and will provide crucial guidance and suggestions on best practices for implementation.

Rob Roy Smith is a partner with the international law firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP resident in the firm’s Seattle, Washington office. He is co-team leader of the firm’s Native American Practice Group. Mr. Smith exclusively practices federal Indian law. He advises Indian tribal clients on all aspects of federal, state, and tribal law, including tribal sovereignty, economic development, natural and cultural resource protection, taxation, and gaming. Mr. Smith is dedicated to helping Indian tribal governments achieve their goals. Whether as general counsel or special litigation counsel, Mr. Smith consistently finds the best legal and business solutions to benefit tribal communities.

Mr. Smith has successfully represented Indian tribal governments, individual Indians, and tribal businesses in high-stakes litigation before tribal, state, and federal courts, including numerous appellate courts, and the Washington and Idaho Supreme Courts, on issues ranging from protecting tribal sovereign immunity to securing treaty rights. Mr. Smith has extensive experience litigating and advising clients with respect to cultural resource and sacred sites protection, including repatriations under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. He has also handled over one billion dollars in financing transactions for tribal governments and tribal businesses.

Mr. Smith was born in New York City. He is a 1997 graduate of the College of the Holy Cross, and he received his juris doctor cum laude from the Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College in 2000, with a Certificate in Natural Resources and Environment Law.

This talk will tell the story of a decades-long antiquities investment scheme orchestrated by a very well-known Manhattan dealer and an insurance salesman based in Detroit. By the end, it involved nearly a hundred investors, three hundred ancient artworks, and seven university museums. The story did not end well for most of the participants. The talk will examine the risks and ethics of the financialization of antiquities, and also raise questions about the relationship of museums to the art market.

Elizabeth Marlowe is Professor of Art History, Chair of the Art Department, and Director of the Program in Museum Studies at Colgate University. She earned her Ph.D in Roman art history at Columbia University, and has published widely in both scholarly and popular venues on Roman imperial art, museum ethics, and cultural property. Recent publications have focused on the Benin Bronzes, the Elgin Marbles/Parthenon Sculptures, museum labels, and an ongoing case concerning a group of Roman bronze statues looted from Turkey.

‘Even Better Than the Real Thing: Curating the Whitney Biennial’ will unpack the curatorial process and thematic structures of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, co-curated by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli. The exhibition, the 81st edition of the museum’s landmark series, is the longest-running survey of contemporary American art. Iles and Onli sought to organize an exhibition that would feel like being inside a ‘dissonant chorus’, as participating artist Ligia Lewis described it; a provocative yet intimate experience of disparate voices that collectively probe the cracks and fissures of the current moment. The show’s subtitle, ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’, addresses questions around our understanding of what is real, from AI to rhetoric around gender and authenticity, transphobia, and long histories in America of deeming people of marginalized race, gender and ability as subhuman – less than real. The exhibition amplifies the voices of artists confronting those legacies, and provides a space where difficult ideas can be engaged and considered. It is a gathering of artists who are exploring the relationship between the body and subjectivity, the psychological implications of architectural space, material agency, sonic space, trans-national Indigenous discussions, and the growing precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds around us. The lecture will unpack these loose themes, exploring how the affective relational structures of the exhibition can function critically at a moment of high nostalgia in the American psyche, as a framework for considering what new forms of relationality might look like.

Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her curatorial focus is contemporary art and moving image art of the 1960s and 1970s, from a global perspective. She is part of the senior curatorial team at the Whitney, and builds the film and video part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Iles’ exhibitions include surveys of the work of Louise Bourgeois, Dan Graham, Donald Judd, Paul McCarthy and Sharon Hayes, exhibitions of Cauleen Smith, Kevin Everson and Lorna Simpson, and four major thematic exhibitions of moving image art: ‘Signs of the Times: British Film, Video and Slide Installation in Britain in the 1980s’, ‘Scream and Scream Again: Film in Art’, Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977’, and ‘Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 19180-2016. She co-curated the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials, and the 2024 Whitney Biennial ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’ with Meg Onli. Iles publishes widely, and is a member of the Graduate Committee of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, a Faculty member of the School of Visual Arts Curating program, and a Visiting Critic in Columbia University’s Fine Art department. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in the History of Art by Bristol University, England, in 2015.

The Basilica Aemilia at the Forum Romanum is one of the most important buildings of ancient Rome due to its location, size and splendor. Compared to most other buildings, it is particularly well preserved. However, it is only in recent years that the surviving parts of the imperial building have been documented and examined. On this basis, a very detailed reconstruction of the building and its history has been achieved.

The lecture 1) justifies a new method for dealing with dislocated finds at the Forum Romanum, 2) provides an insight into the work behind the reconstruction in case studies on individual components and 3) discusses the limits of stylistic dating in Augustan Rome. Building on this, the lecture 4) will deal with the qualities of the architecture itself.

While research in recent years has mainly described Augustan architecture in Rome diachronically as a power-political argument to justify the Principate, relying heavily on literary and numismatic sources, the exceptionally good state of preservation of the Basilica Aemilia offers a unique opportunity to examine in detail the visual strategies with which an architectural complex of superlatives in Augustan Rome generated aesthetic pleasure and appropriate atmospheres.

Johannes Lipps is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar joining the Departments of Classical Studies and Art History at the University of Pennsylvania from April to October 2024. He studied Classical Archaeology (main subject), Ancient History, Papyrology, Epigraphy and Numismatics of the Ancient World at the Universities of Marburg (2000–2002), Rome (2002–2003), Bonn and Cologne (2003–2006). After completing his dissertation “The Basilica Aemilia on the Forum Romanum. The Imperial structure and its architectural decoration” at Cologne in 2008, he received the “Reisestipendium” from the German Archaeological Institute and traveled to large parts of North Africa and the Near East. This was followed by postdoctoral positions in Rome and Munich. He was Junior Professor in Tübingen and is University Professor of Classical Archaeology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since 2019, where he was Head of the Department of Classical Studies from 2021 to 2023.

His research focuses on ancient architecture, sculpture and urbanism in Rome and the Roman provinces. He has conducted excavations and surveys in Pompeii and Tunisia, as well as research projects at the Roman Forum, the Palatine Hill, the Vatican and in various German cities such as Augsburg and Mainz. Since 2023 he is leading the 24-year academy project "disiecta membra. Stone Architecture and Urbanism in Roman Germany". His last books dealt with Roman monumental architecture in Augsburg (2016), the so-called House of Augustus on the Palatine in Rome (2018) and the sensational discovery of a Salus statue in Roman Mainz (2023).

Please join us for an afternoon symposium on George Rickey held at the Institute of Fine Arts' Duke House. One of the pioneers of kinetic art, George Rickey (1907-2002) left an indelible mark on the history of modern sculpture. This one-day symposium will bring together six leading scholars to consider Rickey’s work and legacy, situating his practice alongside other figures such as Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, and Jean Tinguely and addressing his art’s engagement with modern architecture and landscape design, commercial manufacturing, cybernetics, and the cultural history of postwar Germany where he lived and worked for many years.

The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of presentations from current conservation students on their summer 2024 work projects.

Alayna Bone
"The Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, Turkey"

Elizabeth Torres
"Archaeological Excavations in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace, Greece"

Minyoung Kim
"The American Antiquarian Society"

Adrian Hernandez
"Smithsonian National Museum of American Art & The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston"

Featuring Susette Min and Joshua Chambers-Letson, this roundtable will explore the complexities of Asian American art through a candid and critical lens, moving beyond traditional acts of recuperation, insistences on ontological framings rooted in inclusion or critique while also resisting romanticized views of Third World activism. Central to our discussion are recent provocations such as the artist Simon Leung who asks whether Asian American art can be considered a theory of democracy? This query prompts us to examine whether this perspective inadvertently transforms Asian American art into a census or population project, where the pressures of inclusion overshadow the necessity of disagreement and friction. Art historian Marci Kwon highlights the ethical dilemma when engaging with Asian American artists—the challenge of respecting, rather than attempting to resolve, the inherent paradoxes in their work. This notion aligns with Susette Min’s exploration in her book Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art, which scrutinizes the limitations and possibilities within the field.

As Asian American art garners increasing attention from institutional and market sectors, there is an urgent need to develop new languages and terminologies that capture its multifaceted nature. At the same time, to what degree is Asian American art an unreal, or perhaps, an undead fiction along the lines Ocean Vuong observes of drag queens in his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: as "unicorns stomping in a graveyard." How do we reconcile with the dead who lie in the open even as new histories attempt to unmoor artists and artworks from the purgatory of being perpetually adjacent to suspect ideations of modernism, "America," or the "global?"

Joshua Chambers-Letson is the Chair of Performance Studies and Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Completing a book on queer love and loss for NYU Press (forthcoming 2025), JCL is also the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America; co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o and of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok.

Susette Min is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis where she teaches Asian American studies, art history, and cultural studies. She is the author of Unnamable Encounters: the Ends of Asian American Art (NYU, 2018). She is also an independent curator. Formerly, she was the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at The Drawing Center and has curated exhibitions at The Asia Society, Whitney Museum of American Art, apexart, Berkeley Art Museum, Blaffer Art Museum, and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. She has published articles in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, American Quarterly, Panorama, Trans-Asia Photography Review, Social Text, Art Journal, Amerasia Journal and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is currently curating an exhibition on Asian American art and writing a book on art, immigration and terrorism.

Central Mexican artist-scribes, known as tlahcuilohqueh in Nahuatl, adopted striking visual strategies to depict the unseeable. This analysis establishes a visual grammar for understanding how invisibles are rendered in the Borgia Group of manuscripts, a set of five stylistically linked divinatory manuscripts that survived the purges of Mesoamerican books in the colonial period. Comparison with images providing the third, visual narrative in the Florentine Codex shows how those strategies started to shift in the first fifty years of Spanish domination in Mexico. Where textual evidence for the agency of invisibles contrasts starkly with an absence of those forces in their visual depiction, a message of resilience emerges instead. Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of art historical, linguistic, and ethnographic methodologies, the study highlights themes of interrelation and metonymy across Nahua modes of representation, discourse, and knowledge generation. Finally, this historical research is related to revitalization efforts in contemporary Nahuatl-speaking communities where unseen forces continue to affect order, health, and wellbeing in the present day.

Alanna S. Radlo-Dzur is an art historian of Indigenous arts in the Americas. With a background as a filmmaker and lens-based artist, she is Postdoctoral Research Associate in Indigenous and Native North American Studies in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Her dissertation considers the graphic depiction of invisible concepts— from the sensorium to the divine—in postclassic and early colonial Nahua artistic traditions of central Mexico. A second project explores the fluid roles of diplomats, huaqueros, museum staff, and art dealers in the history of collecting Precolumbian objects of Gran Nicoya on the Pacific coast of Central America. Her work with the Florentine Codex Initiative at the Getty Research Institute and the K’acha Willaykuna Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Art and Humanities community at Ohio State University demonstrate her advocacy for language revitalization and the creation of open-access projects that open archives to empower Indigenous communities.

Dr. Radlo-Dzur joins the faculty of the University of Rochester as an assistant professor of Art History in Jan 2025.

A group of baths in northern Syrian and southern Anatolia feature large halls or lounges which are generally referred to as “social halls,” offering facilities for resting, socializing, but also, overnight stays—an uncommon function among the plethora of functions of a Roman bath. In Serdjilla, a small agricultural town near Aleppo, separated from the main bath across a courtyard is a two-storied pavilion which has been interpreted as an inn. I have described these baths as the “hall-type” baths. Often located on trade routes, they offered their customers not only the comforts of a hot bath after arduous journeys, but also safe lodgings, much like the network of caravansarays of medieval Anatolia. As the most commodious public space available in small towns and extra-urban settings, these baths might have been the ideal place for human contact, assembly and interchange, their new function bridging classical, late antique and medieval worlds.

Fikret Yegül is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara; he also holds a MArch from University of Pennsylvania. A member of Sardis Archaeological Expedition since 1964, Yegül has published some ten books and over 100 articles and essays on Roman art, archaeology, architecture and urbanism of which 27 are on Roman baths, bathing, and water culture. His Baths and Bathing in the Classical World received the Alice D. Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians (MIT Press, 1994). Recent publications include Roman Architecture and Urbanism (co-authored, CUP; PROSE Award, 2020); The Temple of Artemis at Sardis (2 volumes, Harvard University Press, 2020); Hamid’in Öyküsü-Leyleklerin Dönüšü (a novel, 2023); Temple of Artemis at Sardis and Hellenistic Temple Tradition in Asia Minor (CUP, in print)

The Institute of Fine Arts Alumni Association Board invites you to attend the eighth annual Alumni Weekend lecture. The lecture will be followed by the IFA's Alumni Reunion.

Distinguished Alumni Speaker: Esther Bell, PhD '11

Guillaume Lethière and his Worlds

Born in Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832) was a leading figure in French painting during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The son of a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman of mixed race, Lethière moved to France with his father at age fourteen. He trained as an artist and successfully navigated the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath to achieve the highest levels of recognition in his time. A favorite artist of Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte, Lethière served as director of the Académie de France in Rome, as a member of the Institut de France, and as a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. A well-respected teacher, he operated a robust studio that rivaled those of his most successful contemporaries. Despite his remarkable accomplishments and considerable body of work, Lethière is not well known today. This talk will shed light on Lethière’s extraordinary career, while situating the artist within a vast colonial network in which he firmly participated.

After its presentation at the Clark, the exhibition will travel to the Musée du Louvre in Paris and will be on view there from November 13, 2024–February 17, 2025.

Esther Bell is the deputy director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator at the Clark Art Institute. Prior to joining the Clark, Bell was the curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Previously, she served as the curator of paintings, drawings, and sculpture at the Cincinnati Art Museum. A specialist in French art, Bell has organized and co-organized a number of exhibitions, including Guillaume Lethière (2024-2025); Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (2022–23); Renoir: The Body, the Senses (2019–20); Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade (2017); and The Brothers Le Nain: Painters of Seventeenth-Century France (2016–17).

Over the past decade, scholars and art institutions across the Americas have observed a notable rise in the incorporation of spiritual beliefs into the practices of Latin American and Caribbean artists. Witchcraft, Shamanism, Paganism, Santería, Vodou, Obeah, Candomblé, and Divination have, not without controversy, become central themes in contemporary art discourse within communities of Indigenous artists, artists of color and beyond. These spiritually infused artistic explorations resonate with current decolonial and racial justice concerns, but their resurgence is far from coincidental.

In this program two advanced graduates with close ties to the IFA (Julián Sánchez from Columbia and Horacio Ramos from the Graduate Center at CUNY) will discuss their work in various Latin American venues in preparation for their PhD dissertations. Both speakers will address issues of race and aesthetic practices, subjects with which they also grappled during their recent activities as Curatorial Research Fellows at the Cisneros Institute at the Museum of Modern Art.

Horacio Ramos is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.He holds an MA in Art History and a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the Pontificia Universidad Universidad Católica del Perú. He has worked in the curatorial departments of the Museo de Arte de Lima, El Museo del Barrio, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Julián Sánchez González is a PhD candidate in Art History at Columbia University and a former Fulbright Scholar. He completed his MA in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts. He has held research fellowships at the Museum of Modern Art, Cisneros Institute, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University, and the Heyman Center for the Public Humanities at Columbia University.

The ISLAA Forum on Latin American Art is sustained in partnership with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). This event series brings artists, scholars, and critics of the arts of the Americas to the Institute of Fine Arts, providing a platform for discussions and debates about diverse issues pertaining to contemporary arts and visual cultures throughout the hemisphere. For more information on the ISLAA Forum on Latin American Art, please visit our webpage

Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and 2024 Visiting Professor in Catalan Studies, NYU in conversation with Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Associate Professor, Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, Princeton University

Dr. Elvira Dyangani Ose is currently the director of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). She has been the director and chief curator of The Showroom in London, as well as lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a member of the Thought Council, Fondazione Prada. Dr. Dyangani Ose has previously been curator of the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art; curator of international art at Tate Modern, London; artistic director of Rencontres Picha – Lubumbashi Biennial, Democratic Republic of the Congo; curator of contemporary art at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville; senior curator at Creative Time in New York; and curator of contemporary art at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Before academia she had a career as a registered nurse. Her first book is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021). She is writing a second monograph about the plantation and medicine called Empire States of Mind with Duke University Press and is co-editor of Beyond Boundaries: Seeing Art History from the Caribbean (Yale UP, 2025). She is a member of the American Antiquarian Society, was the 2022 Terra Foundation Rome Prize Fellow, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and co-curated the installation by Sonya Clark called The Descendants of Monticello, with Monument Lab in June 2024. She directs the research hub Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism www.artandcolonialmedicine.com.

Join us for a compelling evening featuring bestselling author and philosopher Jason Stanley and esteemed architect and professor Milton S.F. Curry as they delve into the intricate themes of historical and architectural erasure. This event, centered around Stanley’s new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (Simon & Schuster) and Curry's pioneering journal, CriticalProductive: A Journal of Architectural Urbanism and Cultural Theory (MIT Press), promises to provoke thought and inspire dialogue. Stanley and Curry will explore how erasures manifest in both history and architecture, examining the implications of these processes on our collective future. Stanley’s work dissects the mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes manipulate historical narratives, while Curry provides critical insights into the built environment and its role in shaping cultural memory.

Central to the discussion is the distinction between acceptable architectural erasures—those that contribute to progress—and problematic ones that reinforce oppressive ideologies. This conversation will also touch upon the relationship between architectural erasures and educational erasures, highlighting the ways in which both shape our understanding of the world. In addition, Stanley and Curry address the pervasive concept of "decadence" within contemporary right-wing politics, unpacking how this term is leveraged to undermine progressive narratives. This event offers a unique opportunity to engage with two thinkers as they explore the core values of democracy, and the fascist forces eroding free expression and open intellectual inquiry today.

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of six books, including How Fascism Works and How Propaganda Works. Stanley is a member of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School and serves on the advisory board of the Prison Policy Initiative. He writes frequently about authoritarianism, democracy, propaganda, free speech, and mass incarceration for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, and many other publications.

Milton S. F. Curry is a Professor of Architecture and Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Engagement at Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP); founding editor of CriticalProductive and principal of Milton Curry ProjectStudio design consultancy. In addition to publications on architecture race theory, and diversity in the practice and profession of architecture, Curry is leading the curatorial team at work on three exhibitions on the life and work of the award-winning LA-based Black architect Paul R. Williams, slated to open simultaneously at LACMA, the USC Fisher Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute in 2026.

How did Deana Lawson reclaim the idea of a citizenry of photography, providing a revisionist twist on Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man” thematic? Who are the creative interlocutors blurring the line between theory and activism in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments to Solidarity? What does it mean “to look without fear” in Wolfgang Tillmans’s worldview? How did Christopher Williams visualize The Production Line of Happiness? Why did Louise Lawler espouse a process of continuous re-presentation, reframing, and restaging of her images in the present? This lecture focuses on an intergenerational group of artists whose engagement with photography’s multiple lives, exhibition-making contexts, and viewers’ receptions has not only changed museological conventions but forged perceptive links between progressive politics and institutional transformation. These artists’ intersectional strategies—ranging from anti-authorial models of authorship to the preservation of forgotten stories of labor, gender, and race in contemplating the construction of a world built on solidarity and creativity—offer a meditation on history as a projective process of consciousness-raising.

Roxana Marcoci is Acting Chief Curator and the David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art. Major exhibitions she curated include LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity (2024); An-My Lê, Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières (2023); Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear (2022); Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum (2022); Carrie Mae Weems: From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (2020); Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW (2017); Zoe Leonard: Analogue (2015); From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (2015); Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness (2014); The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook (2012); The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (2010). A contributor to Aperture, Art in America, Art Journal, Document, and Mousse, she has co-authored and edited the three-volume Photography at MoMA (2015/17). The recipient of the 2011 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellowship, Marcoci is co-founder of MoMA’s Forums on Contemporary Photography and of C-MAP’s Eastern and Central

This evening celebrates the Whitney Museum's current landmark exhibition Edges of Ailey, the first major museum show devoted to choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). The exhibition’s Curator Dr. Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney, will be in conversation with Claire Bishop, art critic and Presidential Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Edwards and Bishop will together consider the art and legacy of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the place of dance and performance in contemporary museums and art history.

Dr. Adrienne Edwards is Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She curated “Edges of Ailey,” an exhibition, performances, and catalogue on the choreographer Alvin Ailey that opened at the Whitney in September 2024; cocurated “Quiet as it’s Kept: 2022 Whitney Biennial;” and was president of the International Jury of the 59th Venice Biennale. Previously, she served as curator of Performa in New York and as curator at large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In addition to over fifty interdisciplinary performance and moving image commissions, Edwards’s curatorial projects have also included the exhibition and catalogue “Blackness in Abstraction” presented at Pace Gallery (2016), the traveling exhibition and catalogue “Jason Moran” at Walker Art Center, ICA Boston, and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018–19); “Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise,” a series of performances based on a text cowritten by Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten at the Whitney (2020); Dave McKenzie’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, “The Story I Tell Myself,” and its pendant performance commission, “Disturbing the View,” at the Whitney (2021); the performance collective My Barbarian’s twentieth anniversary exhibition and catalogue at the Whitney (2021–22); and Every Ocean Hughes's “Alive Side,” a four-part project including two performance commissions, video installation, exhibition, and a catalogue, co-published with Moderna Museet in Stockholm, at the Whitney (2023). She was part of the Whitney’s core team for David Hammons’s public art monument Day’s End. Edwards has taught art history, visual studies, and dance studies at New York University, the New School, and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Claire Bishop is an art critic and Presidential Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Walther Koenig, 2013), and a book of conversations with the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. She has two new publications, both 2024: Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso) and Merce Cunningham’s Events: Key Concepts (Koenig). She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, a Contributing Editor of Artforum, and her essays and books have been translated into twenty languages.

This past summer saw a major step forward in the work of the archaeological project on the Acropolis of Selinunte of the Institute of Fine Arts–NYU and the University of Milan. The new permit, issued by the director of the Archaeological Park, Dr. Felice Crescente, has extended the area of operation of our project to the entire main urban sanctuary. Covering two hectares, this was one of the largest sacred areas in the Greek Mediterranean during the Archaic and Classical periods, well known for its abundant monumental architecture but still largely unexcavated underneath the levels of the Punic phase (ca. 300–250 BCE). This extension has led to remarkable new finds related to the original articulation of the area during the past excavation season, including the peribolos wall to the south, a previously undocumented monumental entrance at the northwest corner, and a new Archaic cult building and banqueting halls north of Temple D. The work this past summer has also produced remarkable new finds in Temple R, particularly as regards the earliest phase of Greek settlement between ca. 628 and 570 BCE.

Join us to hear Roland R. R. Smith speak about the most recent work carried out by NYU-IFA at Aphrodisias in southwest Turkey, in collaboration with Oxford University. Aphrodisias is one of the most important sites of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean, with superbly preserved public buildings and monuments. Marble-carving was a noted Aphrodisian speciality in antiquity, and the excavated remains of the city’s statues, sarcophagi, and architectural reliefs are abundant and of spectacular quality.

The 2024 season at Aphrodisias was rich in interesting and unexpected results. The discoveries of a powerful marble ‘portrait’ of Zeus and of an underground cult chamber in the House of Kybele were both major surprises. The Kybele House complex was equipped with ritual apparatus and small high-quality marble cult figures of Aphrodite, Apollo, Athena, and Kybele – for private pagan worship that continued much longer than anyone could have expected, into the early seventh century. This discovery is of substantial historical significance.

Roland Smith is an expert in Greek and Roman art, with a special interest in the visual and urban culture of the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. He taught at the IFA from 1986 to 1995 and has been director of the NYU Aphrodisias project since 1991. He retired from his position as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford University in 2022, and now devotes more time to Aphrodisias and the publication of the project’s results. He is currently also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Bilkent University in Ankara.

During the 1º Congresso Nacional do Negro (August 1950), playwright and activist Abdias Nascimento proposed the creation of the Museu de Arte Negra. Although Nascimento lacked the resources to establish the museum as a physical institution, it became a lifelong project of Black collectionism. The Museu de Arte Negra was conceived to address the underrepresentation of Black artists in the growing post-World War II debates about the creation of modern art museums in Brazil. By examining the careers of painters contemporary to Nascimento such as Wilson Tibério and Tomás Santa Rosa, I will explore the conditions that led to the activist’s proposal. Through these experiences, I will analyze the responses to racial inequalities in art institutions as part of an intellectual tradition that the Hip Hop group Racionais MCs described in 1997 as “the side effect this system created.”

Bruno Pinheiro an Art Historian specializing in the Arts and Visual Culture of the African Diaspora in the Americas. He holds a Ph.D. from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), where he analyzed the trajectories of artists of African descent who were active during the mid-twentieth century in Salvador (Brazil) and their circulation in local and international art institutions. Currently, he is a Leonard A. Lauder Postdoctoral Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2024-2026), where he is working on his book project ‘Black Modernism in the Americas: the transit of ideas on art and race’. The results of his research were presented in papers published in Afterall Journal, and Oboe Journal, as well as in other peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and digital editorial projects.

Please join us for our next Close Reading: Authors at the Institute of Fine Arts-NYU event, featuring Prita Meier, who teaches African and Indian Ocean art history at the IFA. She will be in conversation with Cajetan Iheka, Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University and a renowned scholar of African arts and literature.

Professor Meier recently published The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast (Princeton University Press, October 2024), the first history of photography from coastal East Africa. The book showcases over 200 previously unpublished photographs from public and private collections across Africa, Asia, the United States, and Europe. Immersing readers in African networks of trade and travel, the book shows how photographs are not static images but mobile objects with remarkable shape-shifting qualities. Beginning with the earliest photographs introduced through seaborne commerce, the medium’s integration into the cultural landscape was swift. Photographs functioned as objects of decoration, good taste, and cosmopolitanism, but were also used by local elites and foreigners to coerce and objectify enslaved people. Through more than a decade of archival and ethnographic research in Zanzibar, Mombasa, and Lamu, Professor Meier repositions Africa’s islands and port cities at the center of global discussions on vernacular photography.

Prita Meier is Associate Professor of African art history at the Institute of Fine Arts and in the Department of Art History at New York University. In addition to The Surface of Things, Professor Meier is the author of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (2016) and co-editor of World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean (2017), which accompanied an exhibition she co-curated, which received two National Endowment for the Humanities grants. She also has served as a co-PI with Nancy Um, Associate Director for Research and Knowledge Creation at the Getty Research Institute, for Indian Ocean Exchanges, an international collaborative research project funded by the Getty.

Cajetan Nwabueze Iheka is Professor of English, director of the Whitney Humanities Center, chair of the Council on African Studies, and head of the Africa Initiative at Yale University. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (2018) and African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (2021). Both books have won multiple awards, including the African Studies Association Best Book Prize, the Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association. He has also coedited African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (2018) and Environmental Transformations, a special issue of African Literature Today.

Conservators are taught that caring for artworks relies on managing environments, retaining original material, and avoiding radical interventions that are difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. Such tenets, ingrained into our practice during our training, don’t quite apply to works subject to rain, wind, birds, vandals, skateboarders, untested new materials, and, in the case of integral architectural works, outliving their support buildings. Good care of these works constantly challenges time-honored conservation ethics and approaches. But practitioners of outdoor public art conservation also frequently grapple with fundamental truths about the nature of repair and the conservator’s place within the world of artmaking and stewardship. This lecture will explore how this type of thinking works and how it has led the author to consider its potential to reverberate outside the field of conservation to engender personal and societal repair.

Rosa Lowinger is an art conservator specializing in sculpture, monuments, integral architectural artworks and contemporary art. A 1982 conservation graduate of the Conservation Center at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, she is the founder of RLA Conservation, LLC, a practice with offices in Los Angeles and Miami. Rosa is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and the 2009 Booth Rome Prize Fellow in Conservation at the American Academy in Rome, where she conducted a study of the history of vandalism. In addition to her practice, Rosa writes about conservation for general audiences. She has curated the exhibits Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure, American Seduction (Wolfsonian, 2016) and Concrete Paradise: Miami Marine Stadium (Coral Gables Museum, 2013). Her books include Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt: 2006) and Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House: 2023).

Featuring Kathryn Howley, Erich Kessel, and Nadia Yala Kisukidi, this roundtable will consider the many afterlives of “ancient” Africa, focusing particularly on Pharaonic Egypt. Using the Met’s current exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now as a springboard, we will examine how Africa’s pre-modern history is constantly being reimagined in relationship to modern and contemporary art and politics. We will consider the implications of presenting African kingdoms and kings as a source of Black civilizational greatness, exploring how Black artists and intellectuals engage with the African past to advance alternative visions of freedom and identity. Additionally, we will discuss the role of civilizational discourse in global liberation movements, diasporic racial formations, and nationalism. Join us for lively debate and informal discussion as we explore the implications of remaking and consuming the past.

The moderator for the roundtable will be Prita Meier, Associate Professor of African Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.

Kathryn Howley is the Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. An archaeologist and art historian, she investigates the role of material culture in intercultural exchanges, focusing on Egypt and Nubia during the first millennium BCE. Her research combines Egyptological, anthropological, and art historical approaches to explore how objects shaped social systems and cultural interactions. She directs fieldwork at Sanam, Sudan, examining Nubian use of Egyptian material culture under the Kushite dynasty. She is currently completing her first book, The Royal Tombs of Nuri: Interaction and Material Culture Exchange between Kush and Egypt c. 650-580 BC.

Erich Kessel is Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora and African-American Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. His research examines how racial violence shapes the conceptual and historical frameworks of visuality, aesthetics, and embodiment. Integrating interdisciplinary approaches from Black Studies, Marxist critique, psychoanalysis, and media theory, his work interrogates art, images, and exhibitions as reflections of racial hierarchies and capitalism. His current book project investigates the racial, aesthetic and political-economic work of the idea of the image across a variety of artistic practices, media, and forms of sociality since the 1970s. He is co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979–1989.

Nadia Yala Kisukidi is Associate Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is a philosopher specializing in French and Africana thought. She has taught at the University of Geneva and Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis and served as Vice-President of the Collège International de Philosophie (2014–2016). A fellow at Columbia University's Institute for Ideas and Imagination (2022–2023), she co-curated the Yango II Biennale in Kinshasa. Her works include Bergson ou l’humanité créatrice (2013), Dialogue transatlantique with Djamila Ribeiro (2021), and the novel La Dissociation (2022). Kisukidi also contributed to Colonisations. Notre histoire (2023) and Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relations (2023).

"A small painted wooden box, per se, would hardly be thought too promising an item in the inventory of a great collection,” Georg Swarzenski, curator at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, admitted in 1947, before going on to declare the fifteenth century, when this object was made, in fact, “the great period of the chest.” Not only were painted wooden boxes to be found throughout Europe at that time; they were the crucible, I will argue, in which the modern easel painting was forged, and from which it has never escaped, making its every instantiation, among other things, an exercise in holding and being held.

Amy Knight Powell is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California and a 2024-2025 Member at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her first book is Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (Zone Books, 2012). Her current project is Picture Box: A Small History of the Easel Painting, a part of which she will present.