| IN DISCUSSION
Public Programs
We look forward to continuing a robust public programming schedule online, welcoming participants from around the globe. We encourage you to explore our virtual programming and archive of past lectures.
IFA Coronavirus Information and ResourcesThe Institute: your destination for the past, present, and future of art.
Connect to the latest thinking about the arts from ancient times to tomorrow’s prospects. Become part of the conversation, keep up with our events calendar (further down this page) and choose from our extensive range of lecture series, special lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and conferences. Enjoy our video archive to catch up with previous events. Some of our lectures are broadcast live.
- The Ancient World
- Conservation
- Modern and Contemporary Art
- • Artists at the Institute
- • Artists in Conversation
- • Colloquium for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Middle East and South Asia
- • Crossing Boundaries
- • Great Hall Exhibitions
- • IFA Contemporary Asia
- • Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lectures
- • Latin American Forum
- • Points of Contact: New Approaches in Islamic Art
- • The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium on the Arts and Visual Culture of Spain and the Colonial Americas
- • Time-Based Media Art Conservation
- Annual Lecture Series
- Conferences and Workshops
- Medieval to Early Modern
- World Art
- • China Project Workshop
- • Crossing Boundaries
- • Colloquium for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Middle East and South Asia
- • IFA Contemporary Asia
- • Latin American Forum
- • Points of Contact: New Approaches in Islamic Art
- • Works in Progress Series
- • The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium on the Arts and Visual Culture of Spain and the Colonial Americas
2021 Calendar
- September
- Monday, September 13, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Jesper Nielsen, Associate Professor and Head of Studies, Department of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Title: Connecting the Dots: Tracing Teotihuacan's Imperial Presence in Early Classic Mesoamerica
LEARN MORE about Jesper Nielsen's talk RSVP required for Jesper Nielsen's talk [opens in new window]In this talk, Dr. Nielsen will discuss current knowledge of what may have been the largest empire in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history – controlled from the sprawling capital of Teotihuacan in the central Mexican highlands. For the past 20 years, this has formed one of Dr. Nielsen's own research topics, beginning with an examination of the spread of Teotihuacan iconography into the Maya area in the late 4th century. In the past decade Dr. Nielsen has been involved in work on Teotihuacan-style iconography in other parts of Mesoamerica, in particular the present-day states of Queretaro, Michoacan and Guerrero, and what has become increasingly clear is that Teotihuacan presence has left us with traces of an imperial iconography with a standardized repertoire of motifs related to warfare and conquest. The contours of a more complete image of a vast empire thus begin to emerge. At the same time, new findings at Teotihuacan itself adds to our understanding of how the metropolis attracted people from several of the provinces, revealing a highly complex interaction sphere between the centralized imperial power and some of its most distant enclaves.
- Monday, September 20, 2021, at 6:00pm
Title: Crafting Enlightenment: Celebrating a New Book Edited by Lauren Cannady and Jennifer Ferng
Speakers: Lauren Cannady, Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park; Jennifer Ferng, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Sydney; Laura Auricchio, Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Professor of Art History at Fordham University; and Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts
learn more about "Crafting Enlightenment" RSVP required for "Crafting Enlightenment" [opens in new window]Description: Please join the Institute in conversation with alumna Lauren Cannady, Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, Jennifer Ferng, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Sydney, and Laura Auricchio, Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Professor of Art History at Fordham University, on Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks, a new book edited by Cannady and Ferng that was recently published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, and contributor of a response essay to Crafting Enlightenment, will introduce the speakers and give brief remarks.
Crafting Enlightenment frames artisans from all corners of the 18th-century world—from Europe, the Ottoman Empire, viceregal Mexico, and colonial America to Mughal India, Qing dynasty China, and colonial Australia—as historical actors who responded to and translated European Enlightenment thinking through their production of architecture, ceramics, furniture and ornamental carving, gardens, clocks, illuminated manuscripts, and metalwork. Contributors to this book revivify the identities of 18th-century artisans and give shape to the networks that artisans formed at local and global levels to assert their diverse expertise and experience. With essays by Lauren Cannady, Dennis Carr, Frédéric Dassas, Jennifer Ferng, Emine Fetvaci, Neil Kamil, Dorothy Ko, Chandra Mukerji, Valérie Nègre, and Sugata Ray and responses by Florina Capistrano-Baker, Kaijun Chen, Thomas Crow, Richard Taws, and Nancy Um.
Lauren Cannady earned her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts in 2014. Prior to teaching in the multidisciplinary University Honors program at the University of Maryland, College Park, she served as Assistant Director of the Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program and, in 2019-2020, was a research fellow at the Huntington Library. She has published on comparative and visual thinking in the space of an early eighteenth-century curiosity cabinet and is writing a book on early modern garden patterns and taxonomies of knowledge in Northern Europe and colonial America.
Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Postgraduate Director at the University of Sydney. Her first area of research examines European architecture and the earth sciences during the long eighteenth century; her second area of research focuses on contemporary humanitarian issues related to asylum seekers and refugees in Oceania and Southeast Asia. Her forthcoming publications include a chapter for Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (University of Delaware Press) and an edited volume of essays Land Air Sea authored with Lauren Jacobi. Based on a collaboration with the National University of Singapore, her joint book Drawing Climate: Visualising Invisible Elements of Architecture with Birkhäuser will be in print this November.
Laura Auricchio, PhD, is Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Professor of Art History at Fordham University. A specialist in France and the United States in the Age of Revolution, her most recent book, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered, won the 2015 American Library in Paris Book Award. She is currently serving on the scientific committee of France in the Americas, a “collaborative bilingual digital library...which is the fruit of the cooperation between the National Library of France and 18 French, Canadian, American, and British cultural institutions and universities."
- Wednesday, September 22, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: IFA Contemporary Asia
Speakers: Professor Dipti Khera, Associate Professor of South Asian Art and Architecture at NYU; Dr. Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Professor Gayatri Gopinath, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU; and Dr. Brinda Kumar, Associate Curator, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Title: Traversing Multiple Realities of Contemporary American and Asian Art: Shahzia Sikander
learn more about "Traversing Multiple Realities of Contemporary American and Asian Art: Shahzia Sikander" RSVP required for IFA Contemporary Asia [opens in new window]In conjunction with the exhibition Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, jointly organized by the Morgan Library & Museum (on view through September 26, 2021) and the RISD Museum (November 12, 2021 - January 30, 2022), IFA Contemporary Asia is excited to present a webinar featuring the internationally celebrated Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander. Having established pioneering conversations since the 1990s between her contemporary art practice and South, West, and Central Asian manuscript traditions, Sikander exploded their storytelling potential within heterogeneous mediums over the past three decades. Sikander's paintings, video animations, mosaics, and sculptures incisively probe gender roles and sexuality, racial and colonial narratives. Her work playfully critiques Orientalist histories of art and America's global wars, poignantly centering the violence of empires, past and present, and displaying near and distant geographies as inextricably linked.
Professor Dipti Khera, Associate Professor of South Asian Art and Architecture at NYU, will introduce the panel. Three scholars will discuss the ideas and questions provoked by Sikander's wide-ranging artistic practice: Dr. Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Professor Gayatri Gopinath, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU; and Dr. Brinda Kumar, Associate Curator, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This discussion seeks to expand the understandings of Sikander's practice in relation to broader narratives about contemporary American and Asian Art; the framing of Asian diasporic artists in curatorial practice and museums; and the history of collecting and colonialism that Sikander has intertwined in interrogating migrations of peoples and objects in the longue durée.
Kelly Baum is Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has been working as a curator and scholar for over twenty years. She has organized dozens of exhibitions, among them Carol Bove: setting for A. Pomodoro; Nobody's Property: Art, Space, 2000-2010; Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980; The Facade Commission: Wangechi Mutu; and most recently, with Randy Griffey, Alice Neel: People Come First. Her writing has been widely published in books and periodicals, such as October and Art Journal. She received her PhD from the University of Delaware in 2005, and was a 2018 fellow in the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
Gayatri Gopinath is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic visual art and culture in anthologies and journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, and Social Text, as well as in art publications such as PIX: A Journal of Contemporary Indian Photography, Tribe: Photography and New Media from the Arab World, and ArtReview Asia.
Brinda Kumar is an Associate Curator in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where she has worked on several exhibitions including Nasreen Mohamedi (2016), Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (2016), Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body, 1300-Now (2018), Home Is a Foreign Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context (2019), and Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (2020). Brinda completed her BFA at the College of Art, New Delhi, and her MA at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her PhD dissertation at Cornell University focused on the history of collecting Indian art in America in the twentieth century, and she conducted research through fellowships from Cornell University, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Frick Collection. She is the author of several essays for museum catalogues, and has published articles from her doctoral research on Okakura Kakuzo and Ananda Coomaraswamy.
Pioneering Pakistani American artist, Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting pre-modern and classical Central and South-Asian manuscript painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. By bringing the non-western art-historical visual vernacular into dialogue with contemporary international art practices, Sikander’s multivalent and investigative work examines colonial archives to readdress orientalist narratives in western art history. Interrogating ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through imperial and feminist perspectives Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculpture explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories. Recipient of the MacArthur genius grant and US Medal of Art, Sikander's work has been exhibited and collected internationally and currently her early works from 1988-2003 are on view at the Morgan Library NY and will travel to RISD Museum in fall 2021 and MFA Houston in spring 2022.
- Tuesday, September 28, 2021, at 6:00pm
Title: Summer Projects Day I: Time-based Media projects
The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of presentations from current conservation students on their summer 2021 work projects.
learn more about Summer Projects Day RSVP required for Summer Projects Day [opens in new window]Presentations will include:
Sasha Arden
Documentation and treatment projects for the Thoma Foundation collection, including digital artworks and traditional mediaJames Hughes
Documentation and conservation of a time-based media sculpture titled Color Panel v1.0 (1999) by John F. Simon, Jr. at the Brooklyn MuseumJosephine Jenks
Forming a preservation strategy for three interactive digital stories from The New York Times in the Cooper Hewitt's collectionFelice Robles
Conservation treatment of a Woodburytype at The Better ImageThere will be a question and answer session following the presentations.
- Wednesday, September 29, 2021, at 6:30pm
Series: The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium
Speakers: Marie Tanner, independent scholar and author, and Edward J. Sullivan, Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art
Title: Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian's Poesie for King Philip II of Spain
learn more about "Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian's Poesie for King Philip II of Spain" RSVP required for "Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian's Poesie for King Philip II of Spain" [opens in new window]Please join the Institute of Fine Arts for a conversation between author Dr. Marie Tanner and Edward J. Sullivan, Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, as they discuss Dr. Tanner's new book, Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian’s Poesie for King Philip II of Spain.
Between 1554 and 1562 Titian, the unequaled Venetian Renaissance painter, worked on his series called the Poesie - six paintings of mythological themes with deeply sensual content. They were commissioned by King Philip II of Spain and are now dispersed in museums in Europe and the United States. These works (currently together in an acclaimed exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) are key monuments of the Italian Renaissance and also served as inspiration for artists of later generations such as Peter Paul Rubens and Diego Velázquez. In her timely study, Marie Tanner offers a nuanced and often surprising reassessment of one of the great picture cycles of Western art.
Dr. Marie Tanner received a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (1976; 1970). She specialized in Renaissance Art and Architecture, studying with Erwin Panofsky, Richard Krautheimer, Ludwig Heydenreich, Colin Eisler and other distinguished Professors. She took a related minor at Columbia University in Italian Literature and Philosophy, studying with Paul Oskar Kristeller, Maristella de Panizza Lorsch and John Charles Nelson.
She is the author of Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian’s Poesie for King Philip II of Spain, London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2018; Jerusalem on the hill: Rome and the vision of Saint Peter's Basilica in the Renaissance, London & Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2010; The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993, “Titian’s Poesie for King Philip II of Spain,” (Ph.D. New York University, 1976). Her articles include “Concordia in Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ;” “Passion Booty in Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ;” Imperial Themes in Piero della Francesca’s True Cross Cycle;” and articles on Giorgione’s Fête Champêtre; Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, and several articles on St. Peter’s Basilica. Her recent talks include The Bull with the Fiery Eye: Titian’s Europa for Philip II and Statecraft (Renaissance Society of America, Boston 2017); Donatello and Lucretius (Renaissance Society of America, New York; 2014); Pope Nicholas V and Jerusalem Imagery in Mid-Quattrocento Rome (Renaissance Society of America, Venice, 2010); Lucretius and Leon Battista Alberti, (Renaissance Society of America, 2021).
She was awarded the Wittenborn Prize for The Last Descendant of Aeneas (1993) and the Kingsley Porter Prize, for “Chance and Coincidence in Titian’s Diana and Actaeon” (l974).
She received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993), and the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, (l978-79). She was the Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. in 1996.
She was Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and at Queens College of the City University of New York. She is currently an independent scholar.
Edward J. Sullivan is Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts where he is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art. His fields of research, teaching and curating concern the Americas, especially the Spanish, Portuguese and French-speaking countries of North and South American and the Caribbean, as well as Latinx art. He is the author of more than thirty monographs on art and visual cultures from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas and beyond, to the Philippines in the Spanish colonial era.
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
- Monday, September 13, 2021, at 6:00pm
- October
- Tuesday, October 26, 2021, at 6:30pm
Series: Walter W.S. Cook Lecture
Speaker: Lisa Conte, Head of Conservation, 9/11 Memorial & Museum Title: Malleable Memories and an Evolving History: Preserving the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s Collection
learn more about Preserving the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s Collection" RSVP required for the Walter W.S. Cook Lecture [opens in new window]Description: A distinguishing feature of many objects in the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s collection is that they preserve truths about the lives of the people they intersected with. They also provide an entry point for understanding the grief, discontinuity, and eventual hope that ensued after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Objects vary widely in medium and inherent condition and include evidence of the atrocity, memorial and tribute items, artworks, and historical records, documenting a day that changed the world. Some represent the culmination of a rapid-response collecting initiative that began within days of the event. In New York City, this enterprise preserved examples of the community response and objects recovered from the Ground Zero disaster site. These efforts were made even though there was no way of knowing, at that point, exactly what role these artifacts would play in the remembrance of this history.
Preserving artifacts in the collection is complicated. Often there are no ideal aesthetics to strive for. To the contrary, physical wear, dust, and visible evidence of trauma can add, rather than detract, from an object’s historical and emotional resonance. Determining what aspects of an object are significant, and what, if anything, warrants intervention, requires careful study, as any alteration can directly shape a still evolving history. Engaging with stakeholders outside the museum realm who are fluent with the details of this fateful event and those it claimed or scarred is essential. But even then, the process is imperfect. Memories of traumatic events can be fallible. And our interpretation of things can change.
Highlighting illustrative examples, this talk will consider how the Museum’s preservation strategies attempt to maintain the authenticity and humanity of objects that illustrate a very complex history, from the lives of those killed to the way people came together in inspiring ways as they faced a collective traumatic experience. It will also consider how working with a collection born of an act of contemporary terrorism can affect us as museum professionals.
Lisa Conte is the Head of Conservation at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. She specializes in the conservation of modern and contemporary works on paper, and has previously held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Scott Gerson Conservation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received her BA in English and Studio Art from William Smith College and an MA in Art History and an Advanced Certificate in Conservation from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Her current research interests include the ethical considerations related to the preservation of spontaneous memorials.
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
- Tuesday, October 26, 2021, at 6:30pm
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates. Many of our recent lectures are available to watch online in our events archive. If you wish to receive information on our upcoming events in your inbox, please subscribe to our mailing list.