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Public Programs
The 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, choose from our extensive range of lecture series, special lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and conferences.
2023 Calendar
- January
- The events calendar is in the porocess of being updated. Please check this webpage for updates, or sign up for our mailing list.
- February
- Thursday, February 2, 2023 at 6:00pm
Series: Silberberg Lecture
Speaker: John Marciari, Charles W. Engelhard Curator, Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints, and Curatorial Chair, Morgan Library & Museum
Title: Drawing Trouble: Fakes, Forgeries, and the Complications of Connoisseurship.
learn more about John Marciari's talkFor as long as there has been an art market, fakes and forgeries have been sold, infecting the minds of consumers and critics with questions and doubts. Inspired by a recent rash of fake old master drawings that have appeared on the market, curator John Marciari looks in this lecture at some of the techniques used by forgers from the Renaissance to the present, and at some of methods (and coincidences) that have been used to uncover those deceptions. While expressing the need for connoisseurial expertise in navigating the field, he also reflects on the ways in which forgeries disrupt not only the market but also the scholarship on master drawings.
John Marciari is the Charles W. Engelhard Curator, Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints, and Curatorial Chair at the Morgan Library & Museum. His recent publications include the exhibition catalogues Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman and Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice as well as essays, entries, and reviews in a range of exhibition catalogues and scholarly journals. His monograph, Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, will be published in March 2023 to accompany an exhibition of Piranesi’s drawings at the Morgan.
- Friday, February 3, 2023, at 6:00pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Description: Jonathan Hay, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and Michele Matteini, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU will present on The Place of Chinese Painting Studies Today: A Conversation across Generations.
Learn moreAbout the China Project Workshop - Saturday, February 4, 2023 at 2:00pm
Series: NYU String Studies Chamber Music Concert Series
learn more about the String Studies ChamberTwo masterpieces of chamber music literature will be performed on February 4 at the James B. Duke House. The Debussy Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp will be followed by a performance of the Schubert Quartet No,. 14 in D minor “Death and the Maiden." The program will be played without intermission and will last approximately one hour. Both works will be performed by students from NYU Steinhardt’s Instrumental Performance program.
Program
The Debussy Trio students:
Olivia Putenney, viola
Tiffany Wu, harp
Annie Jung, fluteThe Violin Sonata students:
Daniel Apolonio, violin
Brielle Perez, piano - Monday, February 6, 2023, at 6:00pm
Series: Duke House Exhibition Opening
Title: Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos
learn more about the Duke House ExhibitionThe Institute of Fine Arts, New York University is pleased to present Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión’s third solo exhibition in the United States. Curated by Diana Cao, Tatiana Marcel, and Nicasia Solano, Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos provides an opportunity to examine the aesthetic and material interplay of text, fabric, and found objects in his oeuvre. We hope you will join the curators at 6:30 PM for a tour and discussion of the Spring 2023 Duke House Exhibition.
Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos showcases the artist’s embroideries on various readymade textiles executed between 1990 and 1994, highlighting the latter years of Centurión’s short, but prolific career. The four major works in the exhibition feature embroidered texts, juxtaposing floral images with both political and personal phrases. The accompanying archival display presents smaller textile works including the artist’s signature whimsical animal motifs and two sculptures from his Familia series.
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.
ISLAA
The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) advances scholarship and public engagement with art from Latin America through its program of exhibitions, publications, lectures, and partnerships with universities and art institutions. Ariel Aisiks founded ISLAA in 2011 to raise the international visibility of art from Latin America. The pursuit of this goal has led to ISLAA’s involvement in more than 400 lectures and conferences, 30 books, and 20 large-scale exhibitions.
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.
- Tuesday, February 7, 2023, at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Orlando Hernández Ying, Associate Curator, Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, NY
Title: “Castilla del Oro” and the Regional Evolution and Dissemination of Ancient Indigenous Metallurgic Iconography
learn more about Orlando Hernández Ying's talk Watch Ying's talk online [opens in new window]Description: “Castilla del Oro” was the name that Spanish settlers gave to the Central American territories from the gulf of Urabá in Colombia to the Belén River, in present-day Panamá. Stylistic similarities in the gold-copper casting along the Caribbean coasts of Colombia, Panamá, and Costa Rica, as well as in the West Indies, shed light on the seafaring vocation of Amerindian societies. This re-contextualization of the subject matter allows us to infer that the dissemination of the technical aspects of metallurgy traveled intimately intertwined with iconographic traditions that evidence traces of a pan-regional cultural exchange of cosmological ideas. This research aims at recreating the visual language and symbolism of these gold ornaments as they evolve and disseminate throughout the Isthmo-Colombian Area. Examples from the collection in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art provide a unique opportunity to compare firsthand these enigmatic ornaments from the various cultures that inhabited the region.
Dr. Orlando Hernández Ying has dedicated over 20 years to museums and higher education. In his native Panama, Dr. Hernández was the head curator of the Anthropology Museum (MARTA) and held the position of National Coordinator of Museums where he oversaw 18 museums across the country. His trajectory in the U.S. includes collaborations with MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Art Museum, the Walters Museum, and the Historic New Orleans Collection.
Hernández Ying has taught at NYU, CUNY, Tulane University, and the National University of Panama. His academic training includes an MA in Museum Studies from NYU and a doctoral degree in Art History & Criticism from the Graduate Center City University of New York.
Dr. Hernández Ying is currently a Curatorial Associate at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library and simultaneously, has been conducting stylistic research on the metallurgy of the Ancient Americas. His essay “In the Absence of the Written Word:” Ancient Gold in the Isthmo-Colombian Area, is included in Michelle Rich. Ed. The Arts of the Ancient Americas at the Dallas Museum of Art, hot off the press and available now.
- Monday, February 13, 2023, at 6:00pm
Series: Craig Hugh Smyth Lecture
Speaker: Cammy Brothers, Associate Professor, Northeastern University
Title: Michelangelo, Giuliano da Sangallo, and the Anti-Canon
learn more about Cammy Brothers's talkDescription: Much of the history of fifteenth and sixteenth century Italian architecture has been narrated in relation to the idea of canon formation. The protagonists of this narrative, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Antonio da Sangallo, Serlio and Palladio, are all seen as having made advances in the direction of establishing the true and correct formation of the classical orders. Later developments in classical architecture only further cemented this tradition. Despite the dominance of this interpretation, it omits the contribution of a number of prominent and important Renaissance and later architects, including but not limited to Giuliano da Sangallo, Baldassare Peruzzi, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, and later Borromini. Professor Brothers' talk will define this alternative tradition, particularly through the figures of Michelangelo and Giuliano, and argue that it constitutes an anti-canonical canon.
Cammy Brothers is an Associate Professor at Northeastern University, where she holds a joint appointment in Architecture and in Art & Design. She joined Northeastern in 2016 from the University of Virginia, where she held the Valmarana Chair and was Director of the Venice Program. She is the author of two monographs, Michelangelo, Drawing and the Invention of Architecture (2008) and Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome (2022). She has a third book project under way, “The Architectural Legacy of Islamic Spain,” which focuses on the cities of Granada and Seville in the aftermath of the reconquest.
- Wednesday, February 15, 2023, at 6:30pm
Series: The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium
Speakers: Dr. Irene Cioffi Whitfield
Title: Jean-Michel Basquiat: Wild Intuition
This program has reached capacity and registration has been closed. We are delighted by this positive response and hope you will join us for the next program in this series on Wednesday, February 22, 2023.
learn more about Irene Cioffi Whitfield's talkDescription: Today, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s position as one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century art is assured. In his wildly intuitive way, and while still a teenager, he knew exactly what was in store: “I’m going to be famous and I’m going to die young,” Basquiat was an explosive genius that worked at breakneck speed, as if gripped in a hurricane of creation. During his short life, which was extinguished by a heroin overdose at the age of 27, he produced nearly 2,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures, many of them on a gigantic scale. His themes were suitably grand: royalty, heroism and the streets. His artistic enterprise took in high and low and everything in between, and his ambition for personal legacy knew no bounds – he wanted to be king of the contemporary art world and he achieved this in his lifetime.
In terms of academic art history, he ascended to the highest echelons of painting practiced by Goya, Picasso, and Anselm Kiefer. The Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta of 1983 is one such work. Multi-layered in context and content, its complex meaning speaks across generations. All of Basquiat’s subjects are expressed in his singular and electrifying style – a brilliantly coloured mix of punk, cartoon, classical, linear, linguistic, and symbolic notation. Like the jazz musician Charlie Parker, who was one of Basquiat’s cultural heroes and features in his paintings, the artist’s extraordinary access to the ecstatic and destructive powers of creation extracted a terrible price on his perishable human life, but his body of work is everlasting.
Dr. Irene Cioffi Whitfield is a Jungian Analyst who is a member of The Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists in London, UK and the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association in New York City. Currently living and working in Italy, Irene received her Ph.D from the Institute of Fine Arts specialising in 18th Century Italian painting. Her work focuses on the intersection of art and psychology, especially the dangerous dynamics of the creative process. She has lectured internationally on the life and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
- Wednesday, February 22, 2023, at 6:30pm
Series: The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium
Speakers: Xavier F. Salomon
Title: Luigi Valadier in Nicaragua
learn more about Xavier F. Salomon's talkDescription: In January 1767, the silversmith Luigi Valadier (1726–1785) exhibited—in his workshop on Via del Babuino near the Spanish Steps in Rome—a monumental monstrance “destined for a principal church of Mexico, that is in the Indies of Spain”. The following year, on 17 September 1768, Valadier exhibited in his workshop more objects destined for that same “principal church” in Mexico: candlesticks, chalices and three altar lecterns. These works of art have been considered lost and have remained untraced for more than two hundred and fifty years. This lecture presents, for the first time, the unexpected finding of thirty objects by Valadier in the Cathedral of León in Nicaragua, where they have remained—unrecognized—since the eighteenth century, and will present new information as to how the objects travelled from Europe to Central America.
Xavier F. Salomon is the Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at the Frick Collection, since 2014. He was born in Rome and grew up between Italy and the United Kingdom. He was educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he received his BA in art history, his MA and PhD, with a thesis on ‘The Religious Artistic and Architectural Patronage of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (1571-1621)’. He has worked in a number of museums in the United Kingdom and in the United States, most notably at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London (where he was the Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator) and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (where he was Curator of Southern Baroque in the Department of European Paintings). He has curated a number of exhibitions, on artists such as Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa, Van Dyck, Goya, Murillo, Canova, and Tiepolo. In 2014 he curated the monographic exhibition on Paolo Veronese at the National Gallery in London. He is currently working on a catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Paolo Veronese, on the catalogue of Spanish paintings at the Frick Collection, and on a monograph on the Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera.
- Thursday, February 23, 2023, 6:30pm
Title: Selinunte Lecture: New Discoveries
learn more about SelinunteClemente Marconi is the James R. McCredie Professor in the History of Greek Art and Archaeology and University Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts–NYU; he is also Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Milan. A corresponding member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei he is the director of the Institute of Fine Arts–NYU and University of Milan archaeological mission at Selinunte.
Andrew Farinholt Ward is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Emory University, specializing in the art, architecture, and archaeology of ancient Greece. He is also the Field Director for the Institute of Fine Arts–NYU and University of Milan archaeological mission at Selinunte, and the Supervisor of Excavations for the American Excavations Samothrace.
This past summer our mission was able to resume work at the Sicilian archaeological site of Selinunte, with an international team of nearly 60 collaborators. Major discoveries were made in the lab and in the field concerning the history of the Greek settlement and ritual activity in its main urban sanctuary, particularly during the crucial first generations following its foundation. The mission has also embarked on a new collaborative project with the German Archaeological Institute to study Selinunte's Temples A and O, the results of which are already changing the way we understand these temples and the role of the acropolis before their construction.
- Thursday, February 2, 2023 at 6:00pm
- March
- Wednesday, March 1, 2023, 6:00pm
Title: Celebrating the publication of The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy by Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams
Moderated by Matthew Israel
learn more about The Story of NFTs Watch the Story of NFTs online online [opens in new window]Please join the IFA in conversation with alumna Nora Burnett Abrams(’15), Mark G. Falcone Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and NYU Steinhardt faculty Amy Whitaker to celebrate their new book The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy, co-published by Rizzoli and MCA Denver in March 2023. Alumnus Matthew Israel, author of A Year in the Art World and formerly Commissions Lead Open Arts at Meta, will introduce the speakers and serve as moderator for a discussion of the potential impact of NFTs in the arts.
The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy explores the history and future possibilities of blockchain and NFTs in the arts, and serves as a foundational text spanning the roots of NFTs in art history, specifically conceptual art practice, and the many intersecting stories of NFTs—knowledge stories, artist stories, democracy stories. The authors take the reader through the key concepts of NFTs and the underlying technology of blockchain, including their origins, their surprising connections to the history of artmaking and art collecting, and their potential to radically reshape the art world. The book invites the reader to engage with this new technology, to understand its connections to the longer arc of art history, and to help shape its future.
Amy Whitaker holds a PhD in political economy as well as an MBA from Yale, an MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, and a BA in art and political science from Williams College. A longtime blockchain researcher in the arts, she wrote the NFT primer for the 2022 Art Basel Market Report and is the author of numerous academic and general articles on blockchain. She is the author of four books, including Museum Legs, Art Thinking, and Economics of Visual Art, in addition to The Story of NFTs with Abrams. Whitaker is an associate professor in visual arts administration at NYU Steinhardt. She lectured previously at the Institute as part of the Conservation Center’s Topics in Time-based Media Art Conservation series, supported by the Mellon Foundation.
Nora Burnett Abrams is the Mark G. Falcone Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Among the youngest museum directors in the country, Abrams moved into the director role after nearly a decade as the organization’s lead curator. Her curatorial approach has been instrumental in bringing MCA Denver to where it stands today as a thought-leader in the field and incubator of ambitious and fresh ideas and projects. Her career began as an Exhibitions Assistant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was soon followed by the Graduate Curatorial Assistant role at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. Since arriving in Denver in 2010, Abrams has organized over 40 exhibitions and authored or contributed to over a dozen accompanying publications. She has taught art history at New York University and lectured throughout the country on modern and contemporary art. She holds art history degrees from Stanford University (BA), Columbia University (MA), and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (PhD 2015).
Matthew Israel is a curator, writer, and PhD (IFA, ‘11) art historian. Matthew was most recently Commissions Lead of Open Arts at Meta, where he helped lead Meta’s global art commissioning program and guided how contemporary artists engaged with Meta’s products. From 2019 through 2021, Matthew was Co-Founder and Chief Curator of Artful and from 2011 to 2019, Matthew was the founding Director of The Art Genome Project at Artsy and later was Artsy’s Head Curator. Matthew is the author of three critically-acclaimed books on contemporary art: Kill for Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War (2013); The Big Picture: Contemporary Art in 10 Works by 10 Artists (2017); and A Year in the Art World: An Insider’s View (2020), which will be released in paperback this June.
- Thursday, March 2, 2023, 6:00pm
Series: IFA Contemporary Asia
IFA Contemporary Asia is pleased to present A Conversation with Oscar yi Hou and Eugenie Tsai, moderated by Catherine Quan Damman.
learn more about IFA Contemporary Asia Watch IFA Contemporary Asia online [opens in new window]Presented on the occasion of the Brooklyn Museum’s current exhibition Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon, yi Hou will discuss his work’s engagement with histories both personal and cultural, and the representation of queer, diasporic kinship and identity.
Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, and is presented as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s annual UOVO Prize. yi Hou highlights the depth and multiplicity of queer Asian American subjects by recasting himself and close friends as popular characters and historical figures from both Western and East Asian cultures. Drawing from layered references that range from Hollywood film stills, East Asian art objects, to the media franchise Dragon Ball, yi Hou develops his own iconography of the “Chinese cowboy” that subverts the stereotyped, racializing signifiers of Asian American representation in Western visual history.
This discussion seeks to situate yi Hou’s practice in relation to broader questions about the limits and complexities of identity, as well as the political stakes of representation in a time of heightened racial antagonism and visibility. The artist will be joined in conversation by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Catherine Quan Damman, Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts.
Oscar yi Hou is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He was born and raised in Liverpool, England. Alongside his solo exhibition East of sun, west of moon at the Brooklyn Museum, yi Hou is recipient of the third annual UOVO Prize in 2022. In 2021 he presented A sky-licker relation and A dozen poem-pictures at James Fuentes, New York and JamesFuentes.Online, respectively. His work has also been included in exhibitions at the Royal Academy, UK; Asia Society, New York; T293 Gallery, Rome, Italy; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; and Sprüth Magers Online.
Eugenie Tsai is the John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Prior to joining the Brooklyn Museum, she was the Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and held several positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As an independent curator, Tsai worked on projects for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Berkeley Museum; and the Princeton University Art Museum.
Catherine Quan Damman is the Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she teaches and advises graduate work on feminist and queer approaches to global modern and contemporary art. She is completing her first monograph, Performance: A Deceptive History, with the support of a 2022–2023 ACLS Fellowship, and is a frequent contributor to Artforum and other publications.
- Friday, March 3, 2023, 6:00 – 8:30pm
Night of Ideas 2023 at the Institute of Fine Arts
Co-presented by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ukrainian Institute of America, the Institute of Fine Arts, and Villa Albertine
Title: Environmental Challenges and Land Rights
Learn moreabout the Night of Ideas - Tuesday, March 7, 2023, at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Severin Fowles, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University
Title: Capturing Images in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico: Comanche Rock Art as a Theater of War
learn more about Severin Fowles Watch Severin Fowles' talk online [opens in new window]Description: During the eighteenth century, an extraordinary artistic tradition arose among the Indigenous equestrian societies of the Great Plains. Characterized by iconographic celebrations of the exploits of warriors, the “Plains Biographic Tradition” included elaborately painted tipis and bison hide robes, and it eventually culminated in the famous ledger art of the nineteenth century. The largest and most diverse corpus of imagery, however, was created as petroglyphs on rock faces across the American West. In this presentation, I share the results of a decade-long effort to document a sprawling landscape of Plains Biographic Tradition rock art created by the Ancestral Comanche during their early eighteenth-century forays into the Taos region of New Mexico. Hundreds of incised panels depicting battle scenes, bison hunts, and horse raids have been recorded, revealing evidence of repeated Comanche efforts not just to archive their military prowess but also to artistically appropriate the rock art of their opponents. Collectively, the images invite us to ask: can images, no less than their human makers, be taken captive?
Severin Fowles is an anthropologist whose scholarship combines archaeological methods with perspectives drawn from Critical Indigenous Studies, Art History, Religious Studies, and Material Culture Studies to reimagine the history of the American West. He has directed excavations at archaeological sites spanning ten thousand years—from the camps of early foragers, to Ancestral Pueblo villages, to a Spanish colonial plaza community, to a 1960s hippie commune—and he has directed major surveys, including a decade-long rock art survey of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument and an ongoing survey of late pre-colonial and early colonial agricultural landscapes, the latter conducted on behalf of Picuris Pueblo in support of their struggle to reclaim land and water. He is the author of An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion (School for Advanced Research, 2013), which critically examined how secular understandings of “religion” have structured archaeological accounts of non-modern Indigenous communities, and he is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology (Oxford, 2017), the widest-ranging consideration of the intellectual history and theoretical commitments of archaeology in the American Southwest.
- Wednesday, March 8, 2023, at 6:00pm
Title: Celebrating the new publications of Thomas Crow and Robert Slifkin
California Countercultural Lives--and How They Mattered for Art
learn more about Thomas Crow and Robert SlifkinOur most recent books have converged on exemplary figures based in the San Francisco Bay area, where the international counterculture achieved its most concentrated and resonant expressions. The careers of these artists extend from the earliest origins of that great social experiment into its less conspicuous but powerful persistence into the decades that followed the 1960s. For all the attention that the art of this period has received, neither the region nor the rebellious individuals it fostered have been given their due, with art history the poorer for that oversight.
Thomas Crow is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts.
Robert Slifkin is a Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts.
- Tuesday, March 21, 2023, at 6:00pm
Series: Artists at the Institute
Speaker: Jordan Casteel
Title: Jordan Casteel Painting the Landscape
learn more about Jordan CasteelThe sensory influence of a landscape has the capacity to connect or divide us, to inform our movements through space and the manners in which we relate to our surroundings, and to one another. Jordan Casteel sources her subject matter from her own photographs of the people of color who share and shape an environment, directly informing her own accessibility to the collective experience. This lecture will explore the ways in which her various landscapes–from Harlem to the Catskills–have informed her practice.
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver, CO) received her BA from Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA for Studio Art (2011) and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2014). In 2020, Casteel presented a solo exhibition titled Within Reach at the New Museum, New York, in conjunction with a fully illustrated catalog published by the institution. Other recent museum solo exhibitions include Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, presented at the Denver Art Museum, CO (2019), and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, CA (2019–20). In recent years, Casteel has participated in group and permanent collection exhibitions at institutional venues such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2021 and 2022); Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2022); The Modern, Fort Worth, TX (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2022); Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2021); Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2021); Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AR (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); MoCA Los Angeles, CA (2018); Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2017 and 2016); and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017). Casteel is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2021).
- Wednesday, March 22 2023, at 6:00pm
Series: Silberberg Lecture
Speaker: Jennifer Stager, Assistant Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins
Title: Accounting for Colors
learn more about Jennifer StagerDescription: Ancient Greek philosophers sought to understand the phenomenon of color as an index of the visible world, explorations shaped by the ubiquity of material colors used by ancient artists to craft art and architecture in many different materials and media. Such colors demanded regular maintenance and care, acts of engagement far beyond the initial moment of artistic production. Making with material colors also required a complex supply chain involving the labor of many different people, often including enslaved people working in mines and artists’ workshops. Focus on materials and color rather than primarily shape and form in the study of the art of Mediterranean antiquity brings these expanded temporalities of making to the fore, both the labor that precedes making and that which persists after an object’s initial production. In turn, this shifts our attention from the named individual artist who has been at the methodological center for much of art history to the distributed and collective work of making and maintaining art. Reproductive technologies are a component of this collective work in their capacity to expand access to, circulate, and forge memories of images. Reproductions have also often selected for shape and form rather than the material particularity of colors. At other times, however, reproductions have been critical spaces for adding back colors to offer new forms of materialization and to craft new sensorial experiences. Accounting for colors, thus, opens up a series of connected theoretical questions about labor, time, collectivity, and care that inflect how we make sense of the world.
Jennifer Stager is a writer and art historian in the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Seeing Color in Classical Art: Theory, Practice, and Reception from Antiquity to the Present (2022) and, with Leila Easa, Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sappho’s Fragments to Viral Hashtags (2022).
- Saturday, March 25, 2023 at 2:00pm
Series: NYU String Studies Chamber Music Concert Series
learn more about the NYU String Studies Chamber Music Concert SeriesTwo masterpieces of chamber music literature will be performed on March 25th, Bacewicz's Fourth String Quartet will be followed by a performance of Schubert's Trout Quintet. The program will be played without intermission and will last approximately one hour. Both works will be performed by students from NYU Steinhardt’s Instrumental Performance program.
Program
Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969)
String Quartet No. 4 (1951)
Jessica Gehring and Jade Schoolcraft, violins Matthew Ryan, viola
Victoria Lin, celloFranz Schubert (1797-1828)
Piano Quintet in A Major, D. 667 “Trout” (1819)
Logan Chiang, violin
Isadora Banyai, viola
Zoe Hale, cello
Lindsey Joslin, bass
Malka Bobrove, piano - Wednesday, March 28, 2022, 6:00pm
Series: Samuel H. Kress Lecture
Speaker: Barbara H. Berrie, Head of the Scientific Research Department and Senior Conservation Scientist at the National Gallery of Art
Title: Shimmery and Shiny: pigments used to depict light
learn more about Barbara H. Berrie Watch Barbara H. Berrie's talkonline [opens in new window]
Description: Early modern artists desired mimetic effects, striving to depict glossy silk, reflective armor, or translucent flesh. The artist and author Leon Battista Alberti (1402-1472) said depicting gold using other materials was a sign of artistic skill. Using analysis of pigments, this presentation seeks to question whether painters tried to exploit the inherent optical qualities of pigments, such as lustre or transparency, to imitate the visible world.Barbara H. Berrie is head of the scientific research department and senior conservation scientist at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She provides scientific and technical support to all aspects of conservation and preservation of the National Gallery’s collections. She also studies history of use of artists’ pigments.
- Wednesday, March 29, 2023 at 6:00pm
Series: Latin American Forum
Title: Documenting the Americas: Archives, Libraries and Research in Modern Latin American and Latinx Art
A Panel with Josh T Franco, Ruth Halvey, Ostap Kin, Louisa M Raitt, and Lori Salmon
Moderated by Edward J Sullivan, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
learn more about Documenting the AmericasDescription:
This panel will address the subject of the proliferation of research tools, libraries – both public and private – collections of ephemera associated with modern and contemporary art practice, and other sources of information within the fast-growing field of studies in the history of twentieth and twenty-first century art by Latin American and U.S. based Latinx artists throughout the Americas as well as in other parts of the world.
A distinguished group of researchers in this area will convene to discuss their own work and the institutions they represent. Each expert will share with the audience the widely diverging methods they employ to disseminate vast and diverse forms of knowledge, from the papers of artists, scholars, and collectors, to ephemera, traditional assemblages of books and journals and, of course, the fast-evolving new digital tools employed to understand the ever-expanding modes of information gathering and diffusion.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Josh T Franco is head of collecting at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. In this role, he leads the team that works to identify, investigate, and acquire personal papers, institutional records and other primary sources that tell the stories of American art. In addition to ensuring the preservation of these records at the Smithsonian, Franco advises researchers working in the Archives, making them aware of materials relevant to their pursuits. Franco also oversees the Oral History team at the Archives. From 2015-2017, he was Latino collections specialist at the Archives. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Franco was an Artist-Guide at 101 Spring Street, Judd Foundation, the preserved New York home and studio of artist Donald Judd. He completed his PhD in Art History at Binghamton University in 2016.
Ruth Halvey has held the position as the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Bibliographer for Latin America at the Museum of Modern Art Library since 2019. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University, specializing in contemporary Mexico. She has worked as an editor and translator and has taught at Fordham University and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Ostap Kin is the Archivist at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).
Louisa M Raitt is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts. Specializing in art of the Global Iberian Empire from the 16th-18th centuries, Louisa’s specific research interests pertain to artistic expressions of religio-political controversies, the fabrication and trade of export objects, and production and collection as vehicles of self-fashioning. Her dissertation, “The Frontiers of Femininity: Self-Fashioning in Female Portraiture in Viceregal New Spain, 1665-1821,” offers new insight into female religious and secular portraits and their function as vehicles of social mobility. From 2020-2021, Louisa served as the Marica and Jan Vilcek Curatorial Fellow for Colonial Latin American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Upon completion of her fellowship, she was hired in the Thomas J. Watson Library as a Research Associate and Bibliographer for Latinx and Hispanic American art for a year-long collection assessment and expansion project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Lori Salmon is the Head of the Institute of Fine Arts Library at New York University, where she administers the Stephen Chan Library of Fine Arts and the Conservation Center Library through the Division of Libraries.
- Thursday, March 30, and Friday, March 31, 2023
The Seventh Annual Symposium of Latin American Art
Making Space, Making Place: Marking the Americas
learn more about The Seventh Annual Symposium of Latin American ArtThe Seventh Annual Symposium is presented by the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, the Institute for Latin American Studies, and the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.
This event was advised by Dr. Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Sheppard Professor in the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts; Dr. Lisa Trever, Lisa and Bernard Selz Associate Professor in Pre-Columbian Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University; Dr. Jerónimo Duarte-Riascos, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures; and Dr. Alexander Alberro, Virginia Bloedel Wright Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University.
Keynote lectures by Dr. Adriana Zavala, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, and Associate Professor, History of Art, Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora, Tufts University and Dr. Delia Cosentino, Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, DePaul University. Dr. Adriana Zavala and Dr. Delia Cosentino are the co-authors of the forthcoming publication, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan: Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City (University of Texas Press).
Read more on ifalatinamerica.org
- Wednesday, March 1, 2023, 6:00pm
- April
- Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at 6:00pm
Series: Silberberg Lecture
Speaker: Joanna Fiduccia is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art, Yale University
Title: Vanishing Point: Alberto Giacometti and the Crisis of the Figure
learn more about The Silberberg LectureThe Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti spent most of World War II in a hotel room in Geneva, laboring over figurines no larger than a fingernail. Crafted out of plaster and set on tiny plinths, these works resemble miniature monuments. Yet their incessant production and destruction draw them closer to the vulnerabilities of bodies in wartime. Giacometti’s figurines press the limits of perception, inverting fascist fantasies of boundless national corporeality. They also recast the artist’s early Surrealist abstraction into a precursor of his modernist figuration. In this lecture, Joanna Fiduccia examines Giacometti’s most peculiar sculptures to show how their scale and redundancy transform minimal sculptural material into the means of representing a brittle social body in crisis.
Joanna Fiduccia is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. A specialist of European modern art and the historical avant-garde, she is also the author of essays and reviews on contemporary art. Her current book project, Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism, explores the relationship between artistic crisis, nationalism, and modern belonging through Giacometti's sculpture during the 1930s and 1940s. A second project underway traces the emergence of scale in modernist notions of authenticity, a concept as vital to the formation of global markets as it was to modern philosophical debates on the category of the human.
- Friday, April 7, at 6:00 pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Description: Hu Jun, University of California, Berkeley will present on A Brief History of Small (and Inadequate) Pictures. The discussion will be moderated by Jonathan Hay (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU).
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Tuesday, April 11, 2023, at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Laura Filloy Nadal, Associate Curator for the Art of the Ancient Americas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Title: From Moctezuma to Charles the Fifth: A glimpse into the Cultural Biography of an Ocelot-Hide Shield
learn more about Laura Filloy Nadal's talkTwo magnificent Pre-Columbian feathered pieces from the Habsburg collection now at the Weltmuseum in Vienna have aroused the curiosity of several researchers and the general public. “Motecuhzoma’s” Headdress and the Canine Shield have been examined from various perspectives and are considered exceptional sources for studying pre-Hispanic Mexican feather art. The uniqueness of their materials and meanings, as well as their aesthetic qualities and perceived value, led to their preservation and care by the Austrian imperial family. Less known is a shield made of feathers, gold, and ocelot hide, which left Mexico before the early sixteenth-century conquest of Tenochtitlan and eventually arrived at the Habsburg court in Vienna. In the mid-nineteenth century, Maximilian of Habsburg (1832–67), as emperor of Mexico, requested its repatriation to install in a new public museum he conceived for the Mexican capital. After entering this museum in 1866, the shield immediately became an essential piece of the country’s patrimonial collection. This presentation will survey the cultural biography of the Cuexio chimalli of Chapultepec—how it was made and used, what it means, how and why it was collected, and how it has been preserved and displayed during its recent history.
Laura Filloy Nadal holds a B.A. in restoration from the National School of Conservation, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in archeology from the Sorbonne in Paris. In 2022, she was designated associate curator of Ancient American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before, she served as senior conservator in the Conservation Laboratory of the National Museum of Anthropology, and as a professor at the National School of Anthropology and History and at the National Conservation School, both part of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, teaching the methodologies for archaeological conservation courses. Among the distinctions she has received are her appointment as a member of the National System of Researchers-Mexico; the Paul Coremans Award for the best conservation work for the restoration of the jade funerary mask of Pakal, ruler of Palenque; and an honorable mention, Alfonso Caso Award in archeology, for her doctoral thesis, which is forthcoming with the Fondo de Cultura Económica.
- Wednesday, April 12, 2023 at 6:00pm
Series: Latin American Forum
Title: Curating the Nation
A Lecture by E. Carmen Ramos, Chief Curatorial and Conservation Officer, National Gallery of Art, Washington
THIS LECTURE WAS POSTPONED
learn more about The Latin American ForumModerated by Edward J. Sullivan, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University In 2021, the National Gallery of Art in Washington embarked on a new course after it redefined its mission, vision, and values, which are all deeply grounded in deepening and expanding the museum’s collections and its service to audiences. In this talk, E. Carmen Ramos will discuss how she has navigated her new role and worked to embody the ideas of being an audience centered institution and being of the nation and for all the people.
E. Carmen Ramos is Chief Curatorial and Conservation Officer at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She leads the curatorial and conservation teams as they serve the nation and beyond through collections development, ground-breaking scholarship, art conservation, and scientific research. Ramos previously served as the acting chief curator and curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), where she built one of the largest collections of Latinx art at a museum of U.S. art. She organized award-winning exhibitions including ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now (2020), Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013), and Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography (2017). In addition to her numerous catalogues, her scholarship appears in American Art, and in books including Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture and Identity on the Island.
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.
- Friday, April 14, 2023 at 9:30am
Series: The IFA / Frick Collection Symposium on the History of Art
The Symposium was held via Zoom. Live captioning was provided.
Learn Moreabout the Frick Symposium - Monday, April 17, 2023, at 6:00pm
Title: Judith Praska Visiting Assistant Professor in Conservation and Technical Studies Lecture with Rebecca Gridley
Innovation, Inspiration, Imitation: Restoring Austrian Façon de Venise Glass
learn more about the Praska Lecture Watch the Praska lecture online [opens in new window]Fascination with Venetian glass has persisted for centuries, spurring production of imitations for the royal courts of Renaissance Europe and luring modern-day tourists via ferry to the island of Murano, the historic glassmaking center of Venice. In this presentation, Rebecca Gridley will focus on two intricate and ornately decorated blown-glass vessels, produced a la façon de Venise (in the style of Venice) in Austria in the late 16th century. Now part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exceptional collection of Renaissance glass, the vessels were bequeathed to the museum in 1891 by Edward C. Moore, a renowned New York silversmith and designer for Tiffany & Co. Rebecca will discuss the original context and manufacture of these objects, their role in Moore’s fascinating collection, and the recent efforts to prepare them for exhibition, touching on the history of glass repair, recent innovations in glass conservation, and the challenges unique to restoring this material.
Rebecca Gridley is an Associate Conservator at Art Conservation Group, a private practice in New York specializing in objects conservation that serves museums, private collectors, galleries, foundations, and auction houses. She previously worked as an Assistant Objects Conservator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was responsible for the treatment of Decorative Arts objects for the renovated British Galleries. Rebecca has a special interest in glass and ceramics; she has published on glass conservation and lectured on ceramics technology, and recently co-edited Recent Advances in Glass and Ceramics Conservation 2022 for the ICOM-CC Glass and Ceramics Working Group. A Professional Associate of American Institute for Conservation, Rebecca has served in various leadership and volunteer positions for AIC since 2015. She holds a BA in Art History from Yale University, and an MS in Conservation and MA in Art History & Archaeology from the Conservation Center of The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.
- Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at 6:00pm
Series: The Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture
Title: Aziz + Cucher: XXX- 30 Years of Art, Life and Collaboration
Description: The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to announce that Aziz + Cucher will give this year's Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture.
learn more about The Sam Wagstaff Photography LectureAnthony Aziz (b. 1961, USA) and Sammy Cucher (b. 1958, Peru) have been a collaborative team since 1992, after meeting as graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. They are members of the Fine Arts faculty at Parsons School of Design/The New School and live in Brooklyn.
Their interdisciplinary work is project-based and idea-driven, with outcomes ranging from video and photography to screenprinting, digital animation, sculpture and large-scale jacquard tapestries. The images, objects and installations they produce are meant to reflect on the boundaries of identity at a time when these are becoming increasingly fluid and undefined.
Aziz + Cucher have exhibited their work extensively, including at the 46th Venice Biennale, MASS MoCA, Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, the Biennale de Lyon, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the List Visual Art Center at MIT, the National Gallery of Berlin, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, among others.
An artist monograph marking the 30th anniversary of their artistic collaboration was published by La Fábrica Editions (Madrid) in 2022 and will be available in the U.S. in May, 2023. It includes more than 130 color reproductions of their work as well as insightful essays by independent curator Agustín Perez Rubio and cultural critic Aruna D’Souza, as well as a conversation with pioneering digital artist Lynn Hershman Leeson.
- Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at 6:00pm
Series: NY Aegean Bronze Age Colloquium
Speaker: Jeffrey S. Soles, Department of Classical Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Title: The Rise and Fall of a Rich Minoan Town in Crete: 50 Years of Greek-American Collaboration Excavating at Mochlos
learn more about The Seventh Annual Symposium of Latin American ArtDescription: Settled as early as 3100 BCE, the small village of Mochlos grew into an important town in the Middle and Late Bronze Age partly because of its location on an important trade route that connected the Aegean to the Near East and allowed its inhabitants to prosper, and partly because of its function as a center of production that met the needs of the surrounding population and travelers passing through on ships. It also came to play an important role in the religious activities of the region and was a sacred place to those who lived there and to many visitors who came as pilgrims to its shrines.
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Thursday, April 20, 2023, at 6pm
Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lecture Series
Speaker: Juan José Lahuerta
Title: Against Realism: Pseudo-mysticism, anti-communism, and mass entertainment in the religious painting of Salvador Dalí ca. 1950s
learn more about the Varnedoe Lecture Watch the Varnedoe lecture online [opens in new window]In the Europe of the reconstruction after the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, the discussion about religious art – or about the possibilities of such art – became a central theme of ideological debates, beyond what is strictly religious and beyond art itself. In defeated countries like Germany and Italy – or, in its own way, also in Spain –, and in victorious countries like France, the Church acted as the transmitter of an idea that connected the totalitarian ideologies apparently repressed at the end of the war with strategies of the material and moral recovery of a devastated society. What was to be a “new” religious art, actually anchored in the most tragic and immediate past, represented a “restoration” in which anti-communism was clothed in a kind of mystical pseudo-spirituality and, at the same time, exhibited with the sentimental means of mass entertainment. An art, in short, as necessary as it was reactionary, characteristic of the beginnings of the Cold War. The religious work of Salvador Dalí in the 1950s, and especially his Christ of Saint John of the Cross, painted in 1951, summons all the elements of this complex equation in an exemplary way. After all, hadn't Dalí spent his American years, the forties and fifties, assaulting – and conquering – the mass media and, in particular, trying to break into Hollywood cinema? This lecture will try to analyze the history, the models, and the purposes of this painting in the context of the ideological crisis marked by the Cold War – crisis that, in the field of art, adopted profoundly revisionist terms.
Juan José Lahuerta is a professor of History of Art and Architecture at the Barcelona School of Architecture, where he was the Director of the Gaudí Chair. He has been a professor at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura, in Venice, holder of the King Juan Carlos Chair of Spanish Culture and Civilization at New York University, Senior Curator of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, and Chief Curator of the National Museum of Art of Catalonia. He has published books on art and architecture, like for example Antoni Gaudí, Architecture, Ideology and Politics (1992); El fenómeno del éxtasis. Dalí ca. 1933 (2004); Le Corbusier. Espagne. Carnets (2001); Le Corbusier e la Spagna (2005); Estudios antiguos (2010); Religious Painting. Picasso and Max Von Moos (2015); Photography or Life: Popular Mies (2015); On Loos, Ornament and Crime (2015); Marginalia. Aby Warburg, Carl Einstein (2015); Antoni Gaudí. Ornament, Fire, and Ashes (2016); Romanesque Picasso (2016, with E. Philippot); Arte en la época del infierno (2021). He is a member of the scientific committee of the Milan based review Casabella, and founder and director of Mudito & Co., an independent editing house based in Barcelona.
- Saturday, April 22, 2023, 9:15 AM to 4:45 PM
Incorporation: Consumption Beyond the Gaze
A collaboration between The Institute of Fine Arts and the Université de Fribourg
learn more about Incorporation: Consumption Beyond the GazeAlthough the term incorporation (and its cognates in many Latinate languages) often functions metaphorically, its ability to denote the integration of any two entities is intimately linked to the centrality of the body, the corpus. This one-day conference presenting work in progress explores a range of practices in which words and images were consumed by being taken into the body, quite literally incorporated.
Common to many cultures, practices of logophagy (the ingestion of words) and iconophagy (the ingestion of images) have often been depicted as anomalous, marginal, or primitive within a post-Enlightenment tradition that has privileged the disincarnated gaze as the culturally sanctioned mode of consumption. By contrast, this pioneering collaboration between NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Fribourg will highlight concepts and practices of consumption through incorporation drawn from a range of traditions, exploring the phenomenon in a comparative transhistorical and transcultural frame.
Support for this event is provided by the Institute of Fine Arts’ Gulnar Bosch Fund.
Full schedule - Monday April 24th, 6pm
Series: IFA Contemporary Asia
IFA Contemporary Asia is pleased to present a panel discussion, “Asian Video Cultures on the Global Electronic Superhighway,” on the occasion of the exhibition Signals: How Video Transformed the World, on view at The Museum of Modern Art through July 8, 2023.
Speakers: Stuart Comer, Michelle Kuo, Jeannine Tang, Ryan Lee Wong
learn more about Asian Video Cultures on the Global Electronic Superhighway Watch “Asian Video Cultures on the Global Electronic Superhighway”online [opens in new window]Flickering signals of video continually transform, convert, and reconfigure visual culture around the globe, as artists have harnessed video not only as an experimental medium for expression, but as a network for communication and agent of social change. Featuring over 70 media works drawn primarily from MoMA’s collection, the exhibition Signals explores the omnipresence of video in our daily lives and its global reach as a circuit for public participation, propagandistic persuasion, and even political resistance.
This discussion will develop from Signals’s spotlight on video practices from Asia, to question: what is the place of Asian video cultures within the relentlessly networked, seemingly borderless landscape of global media? How has video posed a promise of global access, technological power, and electronic democracy; and how have artists circumvented the medium’s co-optation into a means of state surveillance and control? Ranging from Fujiko Nakaya’s guerilla broadcasts and collective activism in the 1970s, Nam June Paik’s exuberantly international transmissions in 1984’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell, Amar Kanwar’s ode to the political and humanitarian situation in Myanmar, to Tiffany Sia's urgent yet counter-spectacular documentation of the 2019 Hong Kong protests via iPhone, this discussion will situate new media practices from Asia within the contemporary transnational context.
Following a presentation by exhibition curators Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance and Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art; two scholars will discuss the ideas provoked by the exhibition’s exploration of Asian new media: Jeannine Tang, Assistant Professor of Modern/Contemporary Art History & Visual Studies at the New School; and Ryan Lee Wong, independent writer, critic, and curator.
Stuart Comer is The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In addition to Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023, with Michelle Kuo) and helping to reimagine the Museum’s collection galleries, his other recent projects at MoMA include Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? (2021), member: Pope.L, 1978-2001 (2019), Haegue Yang: Handles (2019), and Tania Bruguera: Untitled (Havana, 2000) (2018). He also leads The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio and is currently overseeing the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Asia research group and The Fund for the Twenty-First Century. Prior to joining MoMA. Comer was co-curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2014 Biennial and served as the first Curator of Film at Tate Modern, London.
Dr. Michelle Kuo is The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In addition to Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023, with Stuart Comer), her exhibitions include Refik Anadol: Unsupervised (2022), Amanda Williams: Embodied Sensations (2021), Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman (2020), and New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (2019). Kuo has published and lectured publications More than Real: Art in the Digital Age (2018), Acting Out: The Ab-Ex Effect (2011), and a forthcoming volume on the postwar organization Experiments in Art and Technology. She also serves as a critic at the Yale School of Art and on the advisory board of the Museum Brandhorst, Munich. Prior to joining MoMA, Kuo was the Editor-in-Chief of Artforum International from 2010 to 2017.
Dr. Jeannine Tang is an Assistant Professor of Modern/Contemporary Art History & Visual Studies at The New School. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art, exhibition and curatorial history, histories and theories of colonization and diaspora, and feminist, queer and transgender studies. She participated in the Singapore Art Museum’s Curatorial & Research residency in 2022, where she focused on early cyberfeminist net art collectives and their international networks in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Her writing can be found in Artforum, Art Journal, and many other publications.
Ryan Lee Wong is an independent writer, critic, and curator based in Brooklyn. He authored the novel Which Side Are You On and published essays and criticisms on the intersections of the arts, race, and social movements. His recent writings can be found in LA Times Image, The Margins, Frieze, and Hyperallergic. He also curated the exhibitions Serve the People (2014) at Interference Archive and Roots (2017) at Chinese American Museum, which focused on the Asian American movements of the 1970s. Currently, Lee Wong is the Administrative Director of Brooklyn Zen Center in Brooklyn.
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Wednesday, April 26, 2023, at 6:00pm
Series: The Duke House Exhibition
Title: Craft and Curation
learn more about Craft and CurationThis event brings together Dr. Mariano López-Seone (New York University), Diana Flatto (University of Pittsburgh), and independent curator Megan N. Liberty for three presentations and a lively panel discussion facilitated by Diana Cao, Tatiana Marcel, and Nicasia Solano, the curators of Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos.
Expanding on the themes of materiality in Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos, Craft and Curation will discuss curatorial practices that have included Centurión, craft practices in Latin America in the 1990s, and craft based curatorial practices in an international contemporary context. Bringing together scholars and curators from a variety of backgrounds, this program will emphasize the versatility of craft, and Centurión’s unique body of work.
Megan N. Liberty is the Art Books section editor at the Brooklyn Rail and co-founder of Book Art Review. In 2023, she curated the traveling exhibition Craft & Conceptual Art: Reshaping the Legacy of Artists' Books. Her writing appears in Hyperallergic, ArtReview, Artforum.com, art-agenda, Art in America, Frieze, NY Review of Books, LA Review of Books, White Review, Art in Print, and elsewhere. She was a 2019-20 AICA/USA and Creative Capital/The Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writing Workshop participant. She has an MA in Art History, with distinction, from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and a BA in English from Dickinson College, PA.
Mariano López Seoane is a writer, researcher and curator based in Buenos Aires and New York. He is currently the director of the Graduate Program on Gender and Sexuality at UNTREF in Argentina. He also teaches Latin American literature, cultural studies and queer studies at the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU. López Seoane has curated exhibitions and coordinated public programs for ISLAA, MALBA, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Buenos Aires International Book Fair and Art Basel Cities. He has written extensively on contemporary Latin American literature and arts, focusing on the cultures of sexual and gender dissidents in the Americas, Latin American instances of queer studies and queer activism, and figurations of drug culture and drug related violence in Latin American narrative, film and visual arts. His publications include the volume of essays Donde está el peligro. Estéticas de la disidencia sexual (2022) and the novel El regalo de Virgo (2017).
Diana Flatto is a PhD candidate in the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh currently based in Buenos Aires with the support of a Fulbright Research Fellowship. Her dissertation examines the role of women in shaping antifascist visual culture between Argentina and Uruguay during the 1930s and 1940s. She was previously Assistant Curator at Americas Society, New York, where she co-curated exhibitions of modern and contemporary art of the Americas including Joaquín Orellana: The Spine of Music and assisted on exhibitions including Feliciano Centurión: Abrigo.
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Thursday, April 27, 2023, at 6:00pm
Series: Artists at the Institute
Speaker: Buck Ellison
Title: Notes On Little Brother
learn more about Asian Video Cultures on the Global Electronic SuperhighwayBuck Ellison will discuss Little Brother, his contribution to the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It’s Kept. Comprised of six photographs and a film, Little Brother was made between 2017 and 2022. In this work, Ellison imagines Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater, as he might have appeared on his Wyoming ranch in 2003, the year the firm received its first U.S. contracts to engage in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ellison carefully staged every piece in this project—hiring actors, sourcing props, researching filming locations—and combed through tax filings, transcripts of congressional hearings, military contracting price lists, as well as Prince’s autobiography in order to create this meticulous portrait.
Buck Ellison (b. 1987, San Francisco, lives and works in Los Angeles) received BAs in German Literature and Visual Arts from Columbia University, New York in 2010 and an MFA from the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 2014. His work produces a deep network of inquiry into how whiteness and privilege are sustained and broadcast. Recent exhibitions include Buck Ellison: Little Brother at Luhring Augustine, New York, 2023; the 16th Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art: manifesto of fragility, Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, 2022; Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It's Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art; Made in L.A. 2020: a version, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and The Huntington Libraries and Museum, Pasadena, 2021. Ellison has been profiled in ArtForum, Art Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times and Texte zur Kunst. His work is in the collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art); MOCA Los Angeles; and The Whitney Museum of American Art.
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Friday, April 28, 2023, at 6:30pm
The Great Hall Exhibition: Mónica Félix Screening
Learn More About Monica Felix's screening - The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates, or sign up for our mailing list.
- Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at 6:00pm
- May
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Friday, May 5, at 6:00 pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Title: Perpetual Flow: Drain Systems in Western Han Rock-Cut Tombs
learn more about the China Project WorkshopDescription: Ziliang Liu, Dartmouth College will present on “Perpetual Flow: Drain Systems in Western Han Rock-Cut Tombs.” The discussion will be moderated by Alain Thote (École pratique des Hautes Études and Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Paris).
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Saturday, May 6, 2023, 10:00 am
Etruscan Workshop and Celebration of the life and work of Larissa Bonfante
Program for the Celebration of the life and work of Larissa BonfanteProgram
10:00-10:30 am: Welcome
10:30 am-12:00 pm: Celebration of the Life and Work of Larissa BonfanteFormal Remarks: Michael Peachin, Francesco de Angelis, Nancy Th. De Grummond, Blair Fowlkes-Childs, Sophie Crawford-Brown
12:00-1:00 pm: Reception -
Monday, May 8, 2023, at 6:00 PM
Book Launch: Duke House and the Making of Modern New York
The recently released volume Duke House and the Making of Modern New York; Lives and Afterlives of a Fifth Avenue Mansion offers an investigation of the history of the edifice which is home of the Institute of Fine Arts since 1959.
learn more about Duke House and the Making of Modern New YorkEdited by Jean-Louis Cohen, Daniella Berman, and Jon Ritter, the publication collects contributions authored by graduates of the Institute, established and emerging scholars, and practitioners to reconstruct the genesis of the Dukes’ home in the context of early 20th century Manhattan, analyzing its design, its construction, its decoration, and its metamorphosis from an elite residence to an educational institution.
Join us on May 8th to celebrate the publication with a presentation by the editors on this collective project and its contribution to the history of New York’s architecture, followed by a conversation with many of the book’s authors!
More about the Book
Featuring new archival research and previously unpublished photographs and architectural plans, this volume fundamentally revises our understanding of the development of modern New York, focusing on elite domestic architecture within the contexts of social history, urban planning, architecture, interior design, and adaptive re-use. Contributions from emerging and established scholars, art historians, and practitioners offer a multi-faceted analysis of major figures such as Horace Trumbauer, Julian Francis Abele, Robert Venturi, and Richard Kelly. Taking the James B. Duke House, now home to NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, as its point of departure, this collection provides fresh perspectives on domestic spaces, urban forms, and social reforms that shaped early-twentieth century New York into the modern city we know today.
Contributions by Daniella Berman, Mosette Broderick, Alisa Chiles, Grace Chuang, Jean-Louis Cohen, Isabelle Gournay, Christie Mitchell, Theodore Prudon, Jon Ritter, and Matthew Worsnick.
The book is available from Brill.
The Editors
Jean-Louis Cohen is the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Trained as an architect and an art historian in Paris, Cohen has curated many exhibitions and published more than forty books.
Daniella Berman is an art historian and curator specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. Trained at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, Berman has contributed to various exhibitions and their publications including Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022).
Jon Ritter is Clinical Professor in the Department of Art History, Urban Design and Architecture at New York University. President of the Society of Architectural Historian’s New York Chapter, Ritter holds a doctorate from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.
- Friday, May 12, 2023, at 3:00 PM
Series: Time-Based Media Lecture
Book Launch: Conservation of Time-Based Media Art
learn more about the Conservation of Time-Based Media Art Watch the Book Launch for the Conservation of Time-Based Media Art online [opens in new window]This hybrid event celebrates the publication of Conservation of Time-Based Media Art, the first book to take stock of the current practices and conceptual frameworks that define the emerging field of time-based media conservation. The editors Deena Engel and Joanna Phillips are joined by chapter authors to discuss the communal process of putting practice to paper.
The book was written and compiled by a diverse group of time-based media practitioners around the world, including conservators, curators, registrars, and technicians. Designed as a handbook, it offers a comprehensive survey of specialized practices that have developed around the collection, preservation, and display of time-based media art. Divided into 23 chapters with contributions from 36 authors and 85 additional voices, the narrative of this book provides both an overview and detailed guidance on critical topics, including the acquisition, examination, documentation, and installation of time-based media art.
Conservation of Time-Based Media Art serves as a critical resource for conservation students and for a diverse professional audience who engage with time-based media art, including conservation practitioners and other collection caretakers, curators, art historians, collectors, gallerists, artists, scholars, and academics.
There will be presentations and panels by the editors and chapter authors from 3PM to 4:50PM EDT, followed by an in-person reception at the Institute of Fine Arts from 5PM to 7PM EDT.
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Tuesday, May 23, 2023, at 6:30pm
Series: Great Hall Exhibition
Title: Discussion Panel with Mónica Félix, Laura Bravo López, and Mariem Pérez Riera
learn more about the Discussion Panel with Mónica Félix, Laura Bravo López, and Mariem Pérez Riera RSVP required for the Discussion Panel with Mónica Félix, Laura Bravo López, and Mariem Pérez Riera [opens in new window]The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to present its second programming event for the spring Great Hall Exhibition, Estelio. Building upon the themes of migration, femininity, the multiplicity of identity, anticolonialism, and environmentalism as presented in Estelio, the discussion will feature artist Mónica Félix in conversation with Professor Laura Bravo López from the University of Puerto Rico, and film director Mariem Pérez Riera.
Estelio features seven videos by Puerto Rican artist Mónica Félix (b. 1984). Translated into English, estelio is “stellium,” an astrological phenomenon in which three or more planets align under a single zodiac sign. In this exhibition, excerpts of the artist’s rich videography come together for the first time, each individual work a star within a larger constellation. Throughout her oeuvre, Félix explores the entwined histories of femininity, migration, and colonialism—creatively navigating what she calls “los rincones comprometidos de esta vida viajera,” (“the compromised corners of this traveled life”).
About the panelists
Laura Bravo, Ph.D.
Professor
Art History Program
University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus
Laura Bravo holds a Ph.D in Art History from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). Funded by a grant of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, she has been a researcher at the Tate Britain, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. She has been Chair of the Art History Program at the University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras Campus, where she currently works as a Professor. Bravo has been Coordinator for Faculty Research Initiatives, in the Office of the Dean for Graduate Studies and Research, UPRRP (2018), and Summer Visiting Scholar at PLAS (Program of Latin American Studies) in Princeton University (2018). Bravo has been principal investigator for projects on Puerto Rican contemporary art and migration (2015-2018), and recently, on photography and illness (the human body between the medical and the artistic gaze (2020-2023). Laura Bravo is author of Ficciones certificadas: Invención y apariencia en la creación fotográfica (1975-2000), coeditor of Counterstreaming: Measuring the Impact of Cultural Remittances, a special issue of Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College (CUNY, 2016) and Geopolítica de la diferencia: Discusiones sobre género y migración en la cultura visual contemporánea, a special issue of Arte y políticas de identidad journal (Universidad de Murcia, 2018).
She is coauthor in nearly twenty books on art history and visual culture, being the most recent: The Mediatization of the Artist (Palgrave-McMillan, 2018), Álbum de familia y prácticas artísticas. Relecturas sobre autobiografía, intimidad y archivo (Universidad Internacional Meléndez Pelayo, 2019), and Con la casa a cuestas. Migración y patrimonio cultural en el mundo hispano, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla, 2020). She has been the founder and editor of Visión Doble: Journal of Art History, of the UPR Art History Program.
She has curated more than fifteen exhibitions and art projects in museums and art galleries in Puerto Rico and in Spain, such as the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and Museo de Las Américas (San Juan); the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art, at the University of Puerto Rico; the Art Gallery at the University of Salamanca, and Las Naves Contemporary Art Space in Valencia (Spain), among many other independent spaces.
She is coauthor and editor of several long exhibition catalogs, such as Universos paralelos: transvergencias fotográficas entre España y Puerto Rico (Universidad de Salamanca and UPR, 2013), and coauthor in Isla: Regarding Paradise, Center for the Arts Gallery, Towsond University (2018). Her most recent curatorial project and publication, Ida y Vuelta [Arrivals and Departures]: Migration Experiences in Puerto Rican Contemporary Art, has been exhibited in the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art at the UPR, Río Piedras Campus (2017-2018), Taller Puertorriqueño (Philadelphia, 2022-2023), and Hunter East Harlem Gallery, Hunter College (CUNY, 2023).
Mariem Pérez Riera
Director and Producer
Maramara Films
Mariem is the director and producer of the New York Times critic’s pick documentary "Rita Moreno, Just A Girl Who Decided To Go For It” which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival acquiring a theater distribution with Roadside Attractions and later a TV release on PBS American Masters and Netflix. Born in Puerto Rico, Mariem, at age nine, performed in the leading role of the movie "The Two Worlds of Angelita". It was after that experience that she decided to become a film director.
Her latest feature film, starring actor Ismael Cruz Córdova, “San Juan, beyond the walls”, is a historic documentary about the 500 years of the city of San Juan, which became one of the top box office hits for 2022 in the theaters of Puerto Rico.
With 20 years of experience as director, editor, and producer, she is a Sundance Momentum fellowship member with a trajectory of awarded documentaries such as "De Puerto Rico Para El Mundo", "Diez En La Música", Emmy winner "Croatto, La Huella De Un Emigrante", and “Cuando lo pequeño se hace grande”.
She is also the co-director and editor of the comedy feature "Maldeamores" (executive produced by Benicio Del Toro) which won several international awards including Best First Feature, Audience Award, Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress. Mariem is the founder of Maramara Films, where she has produced and directed brand content, commercials, the web comedy series "Chamacas" and other documentaries.
This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Valeria Napoleone XX.
We extend special thanks to the artist for lending her works on view. Lillian Beeson, Laura Sofía Hernández González, Barbie Kim, and Kaylee Moua Nok curated the exhibition. Jason Varone designed the website and Professors Catherine Quan Damman and Christine Poggi provided faculty support.
- Tuesday, May 30th, 9:15 am
TItle: Reformulating BEVA™ 371
Description: Please join us on May 30th, 9:15 am ET (GTM: 13:15) for a one-day seminar and discussion around “Reformulating BEVA™ 371.” This seminar will include discussions on the development of Beva 371, what makes the ethylene vinyl acetate copolymer a unique lining adhesive for paintings on canvas, and how the currently available Beva 371, which replaced the original in commercial production about 15 years ago, differs from the original copolymer’s performance.
learn more about Reformulating BEVA™ 371 RSVP required for Reformulating BEVA™ 371 [opens in new window]Speakers will introduce new formulations being developed jointly with conservators and scientists (referred to as the “Akron formulations”), which are designed to emulate the performance of the original lining adhesive first used in 1970. The Akron formulations have approximately the same low-temperature setting attributes as the original Beva 371. In addition to presenting work on developing viscous solutions and solvent-free films, we will be discussing other innovations in making the Akron formulation more sustainable. This project is a collaboration between the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and University of Akron’s Polymer Chemistry and Polymer Engineering program. This project is indebted to the cooperation of CPC and CTS, current suppliers of Beva 371 to the US and EU, who we hope to continue working with to disseminate this material to the conservation community. It has been generously supported by the Getty Foundation as part of its Conserving Canvas initiative.
9:15am: Welcome. (Michele Marincola).
9:20am: Introduction, Justification, and Goals. (Chris McGlinchey)
9:50am: Adhesion Principles of Thermoplastic Polymers. (Ali Dhinojwala)
10:40am: BEVA™371 at the 1974 Greenwich Conference on Comparative Lining Techniques: a pivotal moment. (Chris McGlinchey)
11:20am: Discussion: Q and A, lining and balancing the aesthetic and engineering needs of a painting.
12:20pm: Break.
1:30pm: Discussion: Selecting from the palette of lining adhesives and methods based upon considerations inherent to the painting.
2:00pm: Deconstructing and Reconstructing BEVA™371. (Rebecca Ploeger)
2:40pm: Break.
3:00pm: The Akron Formulations of BEVA™371: Screening candidates & exploring new ways to process it. (Dharamdeep Jain)
4:00pm: Group discussion.
- The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates, or sign up for our mailing list.
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Friday, May 5, at 6:00 pm
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates, or sign up for our mailing list.