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.