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Public Programs
With the health and safety of our community in mind, the Institute's buildings will be open this spring only to students, faculty, and staff with classes held for students both remotely and in-person. 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.
2021 Calendar
- January
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
- February
- Tuesday, February 9, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Artists at the Institute
Speaker: Patty Chang
LEARN MORE about Patty ChangDescription: Patty Chang discusses her practice starting from performance, moving through video, expanding to research projects such as the acclaimed exhibition titled Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake 2009-2017 at the Queens Museum in New York, up to her current multichannel project Milk Debt on view at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn from March 5 to May 16, 2021. Chang is an artist working in performance, video, writing, and installation. Her early performance work was influenced by 1960s and '70s performance work, as well as identity politics of the 1980s and '90s. More recently, her work has been focused on site-specific, performative, narrative projects that deal with cultural imaginaries, the environment, and the body. Chang received her BA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fri Art Centre d’Art de Freibourg, Switzerland; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Times Museum in Guangzhou, China; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. She has received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Award, a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize, a Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant. She teaches at the University of Southern California. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
- Tuesday, February 16, 2021 at 2:30pm
Title: Jonathan Brown, No solo Velázquez
Speakers: Jordana Mendelson, Director of the King Juan Carlos I Center of NYU; Estrella de Diego, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid; Robert Lubar Messeri, Associate Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Professor Edward Sullivan, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor of the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Professor Reva Wolf, Professor of Art History at the State University of New York at New Paltz; Dr. Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado; Francisco Chaparro, Professor Brown's last Ph.D. student, and the editor and translator of the volume.
Description: This event will celebrate the publication of Jonathan Brown's new collection of essays, No solo Velázquez (Madrid: Cátedra, 2020).
LEARN MORE about "No solo Velázquez" Watch No solo Velazquez online [opens in new window]
The event is co-sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts and the King Juan Carlos I Center of NYU. Moderated by Jordana Mendelson (Director of the KJCC), with brief introductions by Estrella de Diego (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Robert Lubar Messeri (NYU/IFA), four speakers will comment on Professor Brown's texts: Professor Edward Sullivan (NYU/IFA), Professor Reva Wolf (SUNY New Paltz), Dr. Miguel Falomir (Director, Museo del Prado), and Francisco Chaparro (Professor Brown's last Ph.D. student, and the editor and translator of the volume).
A Zoom link will be sent to registered guests the morning of the event.
Estrella de Diego is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid (Spain) and an Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts in Madrid. She has held the King Juan Carlos I Chair of Spanish Culture and Civilization (NYU), the 13th Luis Angel Arango Internacional Chair at the Banco de la República (Bogotá) and theIda Cordelia Beam Distinguished Professorship. She is a widely published author in both fiction and non-fiction focusing and prolific curator. She is columnist for El País and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Prado Museum.
Robert Lubar Messeri is Associate Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. He served as Director of NYU/Madrid from 2014-2019, and has been a Trustee of the Fundació Joan Miró since 2014. A specialist in modern French, Spanish and Catalan art, he has published widely on Miró, Picasso and Dalí. He is currently co-editing the Edinburgh Companion on the art and visual culture of the Spanish Civil War.
Edward J Sullivan is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor of the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts of NYU where he also serves as Deputy Director. He is the author of over thirty books and exhibition catalogs on the visual arts of the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America and the Caribbean from the Early Modern period to today. He has curated many exhibitions in Europe, Latin America and the US. His most recent project was an exhibition and book on the Brazilian garden architect Roberto Burle Marx. He is currently writing a book on exhibitions and collecting of Latin American and Latinx art in New York from the twentieth century to the present and a study of the Catalan-Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller in Spain and France. Sullivan was the first PhD student of Jonathan Brown at the Institute.
Reva Wolf is Professor of Art History at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she teaches courses on art of the eighteenth century to the present and on art historical methodology. She has published widely on the artists Goya and Warhol, and on methodological questions. Among her recent publications is the co-edited book, Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020). She has held several fellowships, including at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Miguel Falomir (1966) holds a doctorate in art history. Between 1997 and 2015 he was Chief Curator of Italian Renaissance Paintings at the Prado Museum, where he curated, among others, the exhibitions Titian (2003), Tintoretto (2007), The Portrait of the Renaissance (2008), The Furies, political allegory and artistic challenge (2014), Dánae and Venus and Adonis, Titian’s first poesie for Felipe II (2014) and Lorenzo Lotto. Portraits (2018). Since March 2017 is the director of the Prado Museum.
He has been a Fulbright fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (1994-1995) and Andrew Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (2008-2010).
He is the author of several books and dozens of articles on Spanish and Italian Renaissance art and member of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Tiziano in Pieve di Cadore and the editorial boards of several magazines. In 2017 was awarded the Mongan Prize by Harvard-Villa I Tatti University.
Francisco J. R. Chaparro is an art historian based in Madrid, Spain. He was a Fulbright scholar to the US between 2011-2013. In 2019 he completed the PhD program at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where he defended a dissertation on Goya supervised by Jonathan Brown and Robert Slifkin. Francisco has held intern and research positions at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, MoMA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Met, and The Hispanic Society. A graduate of the Certificate in Curatorial Studies offered by NYU and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his most recent academic work includes his participation in the catalogue of an upcoming exhibition on Goya's graphic work at The Met.
- Thursday, February 18, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Duke House Exhibition Symposium
Speakers: Dr. Beverly Adams, The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art; Dr. Lori Cole, Associate Director and Clinical Associate Professor, XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement, New York University; Dr. Tatiana Flores, Professor, Art History & Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University; Dr. Susanna Temkin, Curator, El Museo del Barrio; Moderated by Dr. Edward J. Sullivan, Deputy Director, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. Organized by PhD candidate and co-curator Megan Kincaid.
Title: New Approaches to Fanny Sanín: Women Artists and Geometric Abstraction
LEARN MORE about "New Approaches to Fanny Sanín" Watch New Approaches to Fanny Sanín online [opens in new window]Description: The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to present New Approaches to Fanny Sanín: Women Artists and Geometric Abstraction, a panel discussion tracing the contributions of women artists to geometric abstraction. This event is held in conjunction with Fanny Sanín’s New York: The Critical Decade, 1971–1981, a solo exhibition exploring Sanín’s evolving practice during her first years in New York City. On view at The James B. Duke House, Fanny Sanín’s New York was made possible by support from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).
The panel features the presentations and perspectives of leading scholars Dr. Beverly Adams, Dr. Lori Cole, Dr. Tatiana Flores, and Dr. Susanna Temkin. Coinciding with a raft of scholarship that has enlivened the developments and styles engineered by women artists working in this idiom, the panel will contextualize Sanín’s work within this discourse. Moreover, this discussion seeks to reexamine the modernist understanding of geometric abstraction’s supposed “purity” through the critical lenses of gender, race, and nationality.
Dr. Beverly Adams is the Estrellita Brodsky curator of Latin American art at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Before joining MoMA, Adams was Curator of Latin American art at the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin. With Natalia Majluf, Adams most recently organized The Avant-garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s (2019). The catalogue for this exhibition was awarded the Association for Latin American Art Arvey Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award.
Dr. Lori Cole is Clinical Associate Professor and Associate Director of the interdisciplinary master’s program XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement at New York University. She previously taught at Brandeis University, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art and her writing has been published in Artforum, Cabinet, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, and The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. She is the author of Surveying the Avant-Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines (Penn State University Press, 2018).
Dr. Tatiana Flores is Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Director of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers’ Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities. She is the author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013), winner of the 2014 Humanities Book Prize by the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She curated the exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago for the Museum of Latin American Art as part of the Getty Foundation’s PST: LA/LA initiative. A 2017-18 Getty Scholar and member of the Harvard University Traveling Seminar on Afro-Latin American Art, Flores is President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). She is currently co-editing the volume The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History.
Dr. Susanna V. Temkin is Curator at El Museo del Barrio, and recently organized the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019. She is currently one of the co-curators of ESTAMOS BIEN: La Trienal, the museum’s first national-scale survey of Latinx art. Prior to El Museo, she served as Assistant Curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin earned her master’s and PhD degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research concentrated on modern art in the Americas, with a focus on Cuba. Temkin has published essays and reviews in the Rutgers Art Review, Burlington Magazine, and Hemispheres; contributed a chapter to the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, Alice Neel: People Come First (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) ; and authored the chronology of Concrete Cuba: Cuba Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s, produced by David Zwirner Books.
Moderated by Dr. Edward J. Sullivan, Deputy Director, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. Organized by PhD candidate and co-curator Megan Kincaid.
- Thursday, February 25, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Ancient Art and Architecture
Speakers: Roland Betancourt (UC-Irvine), Kathryn Howley (IFA), Stuart Tyson Smith (UC-Santa Barbara), Thelma K. Thomas (IFA)
Title: Approaches to Diversity in Antiquity
LEARN MORE about this Ancient Art and Architecture seminarDescription: In the wake of recent events in which alt-right and neo-Nazi groups have mobilized the ancient past as justification for white supremacy, it is more important than ever to critically examine the popular idea that the ancient world was a homogeneous place. Prof. Roland Betancourt (UC Irvine) and Prof. Stuart Tyson Smith (UCSB) will join the Institute’s Profs. Thelma K. Thomas and Kathryn Howley for a panel discussion on new scholarly approaches to diversity in antiquity, exploring how we might research different types of diversity in the ancient world and the ethical and methodological challenges that accompany such an endeavor.
Roland Betancourt is Professor of Art History and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the Director of the Visual Studies Program. In the 2016-2017 academic year, he was the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is also the author of Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), as well as Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Stuart Tyson Smith is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Director of the UCSB Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research. Since 2000 he has been co-director of the UCSB-Purdue Tombos Excavations in Sudan, which investigate an Egyptian colonial site of the late second-early first millennium BCE at the third cataract of the Nile. He is author of Wretched Kush (Routledge, 2003) and numerous articles on ethnicity, imperialism, and cultural entanglement in the ancient world.
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
- Tuesday, February 9, 2021 at 6:00pm
- March
- Tuesday, March 9, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: George Lau, University of East Anglia, Norwich
Title: An Offering Context at Pashash (A.D. 200-600): Camelid Imagery and the Lordly Commitment in the Ancient Andes
LEARN MORE about George Lau watch online [opens in new window]Description: For studying early Andean peoples when camelids became increasingly incorporated into social and political life, there is perhaps no better case than the Recuay culture (ca. AD 1 - 700) of ancient Peru. Recent investigations at the site of Pashash (Ancash) uncovered an offering cache including fired clay camelid objects, in the form of pendants, an effigy vessel and small figurines. The items and the context provide important evidence for new engagements, physical and conceptual, with camelids during the Recuay period. In particular, they were among the earliest expressions of lordly ‘commitment’ to camelids as wealth, and their depiction on portable valuables emphasizes their public ceremonial use in feasts and sacrificial offerings. The camelid items indicate that herded camelids became resources for noble identity and authority in northern Peru, and were increasingly seen as crucial for community well-being and social reproduction.
- Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 12:00pm
Speakers: Edward Sullivan, Helen Gould Shepard Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Sarah Kielt Costello, Associate Professor, University of Houston - Clear Lake; Paul R. Davis, Curator of Collections, The Menil Collection; John North Hopkins, Associate Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Laetitia La Follette, President, Archaeological Institute of America, and Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Title: Object Biographies: A Conversation on a New Volume
LEARN MORE about Object Biographies Watch Object Biogrpaphies online [opens in new window]Description: Please join the Institute for a conversation about the new book Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art, published in January by the Menil Collection and distributed by Yale University Press. The volume brings together 14 scholars of ancient Mediterranean art, cultural heritage, provenance research and museology to investigate objects lacking a documented archaeological context. At the center of debates on collecting and collections of such objects is the role of the museum, curator, scholar and museum-going publics in responsible stewardship. The editors will discuss the de Menils, their collection and the thrust of the volume. Laetitia La Follette, President of the Archaeological Institute of America and Professor of Ancient Art and Archaeology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will respond on the volume. The conversation will be moderated by Prof. Edward Sullivan, Deputy Director of the Institute, with time for questions from the audience.
Sarah Kielt Costello is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Humanities Program at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the State University of New York, Binghamton and her M.A. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. Her research areas include Mesopotamian and Cypriot prehistory and museum and heritage studies. She is a co-editor of several volumes, including the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World. Her work has also been published in the journals Cambridge Archaeological Journal and Antiquity. Dr. Costello has excavated in Cyprus, Turkey, Israel, and Greece.
Paul R. Davis, Ph.D., is Curator of Collections at the Menil Collection and oversees the museum’s holdings of art from Africa, Pacific Islands, the Americas, the ancient world, medieval and early modern Europe. His recent exhibition projects include ReCollecting Dogon, (February 3–July 9, 2017), Mapa Wiya: Your Map’s Not Needed, (September 13, 2019–February 2, 2020), as well as new installations of permanent collection galleries for the museum’s reopening in September 2018.
John Hopkins is Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. He is the author of The Genesis of Roman Architecture (Yale, 2016), winner of the Spiro Kostof Award of the Society of Architectural Historians, and co-editor of Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art (Menil/Yale, 2020) and Forgery Beyond Deceit: Fabrication, Value and the Desire for Ancient Rome (Oxford, in press).
Dr. Laetitia La Follette, Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and President of the Archaeological Institute of America, is an expert in Greco-Roman art and architecture and cultural heritage policy. As the AIA’s Vice President for Cultural Heritage (2011-2017), she helped coordinate testimony by archaeologists at the Washington, D.C. hearings of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, U.S. Dept. of State, on new requests for and renewals of Memoranda of Understanding between the U.S. and such countries as Italy, Greece, Peru, Cyprus, Cambodia and China to protect archaeological heritage. Her scholarship in the field of cultural heritage includes a 2013 edited volume on changing attitudes towards cultural and intellectual property, and more recent articles on looted antiquities and restitution in the US since 1970, and the impact of the 1970 UNESCO convention on unprovenanced Etruscan art in American collections.
- Friday, March 12, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Speakers: Marcus Bingenheimer (Department of Religion, Temple University) and moderated by Sebastian Heath (Institute for The Study of the Ancient World, NYU). Title: The Historical Social Network of Chinese Buddhism as a Visualization Tool - Thursday, March 18, 2021 at 12:00pm
Speakers: Michele D. Marincola, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Conservation, Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Lucretia Kargère, Conservator, Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gerhard Lutz, Robert P. Bergman Curator of Medieval Art, Cleveland Museum of Art; CT; Cybele Tom, Doctoral Student, Doctoral Student in Art History, University of Chicago; Assistant Conservator of Objects, Art Institute of Chicago
Title: Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère, The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture
LEARN MORE about The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture Watch The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Sculpture online [opens in new window]Description: This event will celebrate the publication of Michele Marincola's and Lucretia Kargère's new book,The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture (Getty Publications, 2020).
Michele D. Marincola is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Conservation of the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and a Fellow of the International Institute of Conservation. She holds an MA in art history and an advanced certificate in conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU., and prior to joining the University’s faculty as department chair and professor of conservation in 2002, she was Conservator for The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Professor Marincola’s research interests include the conservation and technical art history of sculpture, as well as the history and ethics of art conservation. She is the co-author of The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture (Getty Publications 2020) and editor of a new edition and translation of Johannes Taubert’s Polychrome Sculpture, Meaning, Form, Conservation (Getty Publications, 2015).
Lucretia Kargère is Conservator for Medieval sculptures at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has been the principal conservator for The Met Cloisters since 2002. She came to The Met in 1996, when she was awarded the first of several fellowships for the technical study and treatment of medieval sculpture. Lucretia has published a significant study of French Romanesque sculptures from The Museum collection, and is the co-author of The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture (Getty Publications 2020). She holds a BA from Brown University, and an MA in art history and advanced certificate in conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Gerhard Lutz has been the Robert P. Bergman Curator of Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art since May 2020. Beginning in 2001, he served as a curator at the Dommuseum Hildesheim, Germany; in 2016, he was appointed deputy director. Lutz has curated numerous exhibitions, such as Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He received his MA and PhD at Technische Universität Berlin, after specializing in Saxon and Westphalian crucifixes of the first half of the 13th century. Since then, he has repeatedly explored topics of medieval sculpture and metalwork. Most recently, Lutz co-edited “Christ on the Cross: The Boston Crucifix and the Rise of Monumental Wood Sculpture, 970-1200” (with Shirin Fozi). He is also a co-founder of the Forum Medieval Art.
Cybele Tom is a doctoral student of Art History at the University of Chicago, focusing on European medieval art, and Assistant Conservator of Objects at the Art Institute of Chicago, where one of her many projects was the conservation and examination of polychrome sculpture for the Deering Family Galleries of Medieval and Renaissance Art, Arms, and Armor. She received an MA in art history and an advanced certificate in conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU in 2013. She serves as Book Review Editor for the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation (JAIC).
We are delighted to offer a discount for this new publication - please use code: GPMM21 for 20% off for "The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture" as well as Michele Marincola's previous publication, "Polychrome Sculpture" through April 30, 2021: shop.getty.edu, or code G2014 through yalebooks.co.uk.
- Monday, March 22, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: IFA Contemporary Asia
Speakers: Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, the Whitney Museum of American Art; Ambika Trasi, Curatorial Assistant, the Whitney Museum of American Art; moderated by Professor Gayatri Gopinath, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, NYU.
LEARN MORE about IFA Contemporary Asia Watch Curators in Conversation online [opens in new window]Description: IFA Contemporary Asia is pleased to present the annual Curators in Conversation public program with Christopher Y. Lew and Ambika Trasi. Presented on the occasion of the Whitney's current exhibition Salman Toor: How Will I Know, Lew and Trasi will address the curation of contemporary South Asian diaspora art and the exhibition's engagement with queer, diasporic, and transnational identity.
Christopher Y. Lew is the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lew oversees the emerging artist program at the Museum and was co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Working with Ambika Trasi, he is co-curator of Salman Toor: How Will I Know. Lew has also organized Pope.L: Choir (2019), Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape(2018), and mounted the first US solo exhibitions for Sophia Al-Maria, Rachel Rose, and Jared Madere. He also organized Lucy Dodd's large-scale installation that was part of the exhibition Open Plan (2016). Prior to joining the Whitney, he was Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1 and organized numerous exhibitions there. Lew has contributed to several publications including Art AsiaPacific, Art Journal, Bomb, Huffington Post, and Mousse.
Ambika Trasi is an artist and arts organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her research-based practice considers the coloniality of power within images and sites. Recent curatorial projects include Salman Toor: How Will I Know, co-curated with Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, Christopher Y. Lew at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and A Space for Monsters at Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, featuring works by Maryam Hoseini, Kaveri Raina, and Anjuli Rathod. Previously, Trasi was the managing director and curatorial assistant at Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW), where she worked on projects such as Lee Mingwei: Sonic Blossom, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015); THINKING CURRENTS, Seattle Art Fair (2015); and four iterations of ACAW's signature performance program, FIELD MEETING, hosted at Asia Society (2014 & 2016), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015), the 56th Venice Biennale (a collateral event, 2015), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2016). As a board member of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective from 2015-2019, Trasi was an exhibition manager for shows held at Queens Museum (2016) and Abrons Art Center (2017).
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. She is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005) and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (2018).
Organizing committee: Eana Kim, Titi Deng, Kristie Lui, Kolleen Ku, and Cindy Qian.
- Tuesday, March 23, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Silberberg Lecture
Speaker: Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, Professor of American Studies and Art History, Rutgers University
Title: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
LEARN MORE about Nicole R. FleetwoodDescription: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration examines the impact of the carceral state on contemporary art and culture. Focusing on art made in US prisons and in collaboration with artists and activists across the nation, Dr. Fleetwood explores various aesthetic practices and media of incarcerated artists who use penal space, penal matter, and penal time to produce art about carcerality. Her presentation will discuss the archive of the visual culture of US prisons that she has amassed over the past decade. It will also consider the strategies and techniques that imprisoned artists employ to create visual documents about their captivity. Working with the meager supplies and under state punishment, imprisoned artists find ways to resist the brutality and isolation of prisons, as they cultivate radical modes of belonging and abolitionist visions.
Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in Criticism and a recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Frank Jewett Mather Award, both for the College Art Association. She is also curator of the exhibition Marking Time, currently on view at MoMA PS1. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011).
- Wednesday, March 24, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Vera Tiesler, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mérida
Title: Heads, Skulls, and Sacred Scaffolds: New Insights on Late Maya Ritual Practices at Chichén Itzá (and Beyond)
LEARN MORE about Late Maya Ritual PracticesDescription: Although violence has been abundantly recorded in Maya iconography, only the last two decades of scholarship have seen methodological and interpretive strides towards a more nuanced study of ancient sacrificial practices involving humans. Recent revisions of the human mortuary record of Chichén Itzá has allowed the reconstruction of distinct sacrificial sequences. In this talk, Vera Tiesler, Research Professor and Coordinator of Bioarchaeology Laboratory, will review different choreographies of ritual slaughter by way of decapitation and/or heart extraction. Each procedure provides cues regarding the ceremonial devices and reifies ancient Maya concepts of the human body as a cosmic model and conduit. The talk will finalize with a number of thoughts regarding the shifts that led to the massification of ritualized violence and body display past the Maya collapse, as showcased at Chichén Itzá. Yucatán, and four other late Maya urban centers. -
Thursday, March 25, 2021 at 12:30pm
Series: Ancient Art and Architecture
Speaker: Rubina Raja, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark and director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s centre of excellence Centre for Urban Network Evolutions
Title: "The most beautiful female portrait I have ever seen"
Palmyrene Funerary Portraiture and Its Significance for the Study of Ancient Portrait Representations
LEARN MORE about Rubina Raja's talkDescription: In the 1920s and ‘30s the Danish archaeologist Harald Ingholt undertook archaeological work in Palmyra and investigated more than 100 graves. Ingholt’s interest in Palmyra was originally spurred by his knowledge of the collection of Palmyrene funerary portraits in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, an institution where he also worked for five years as a curator. In 1928, he published his higher doctoral dissertation Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur, where he presented a typological and chronological study of more than 500 funerary portraits. This work – published in Danish – has remained a standard work since then. Taking its point of departure in Ingholt’s work and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s collection, the Palmyra Portrait Project team has since 2012 been collecting all known funerary portraiture from the city in order to create a comprehensive corpus. The corpus holds more than 4,000 portraits at present, making it the largest group of funerary portraits from the Roman world stemming from one place. This lecture takes the corpus as its point of departure and focusses on giving an insight into this unique material and its significance for our understanding of trends and traditions in local portrait representations in Roman Palmyra. Furthermore, the lecture draws in new research done on Ingholt’s excavation diaries and connects this to objects in the corpus, showing the importance of considering archival material and fieldwork notes when reevaluating earlier studies.
Rubina Raja is a Professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark and director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s centre of excellence Centre for Urban Network Evolutions. She heads the Palmyra Portrait Project, Archive Archaeology and Circular Economy and Urban Sustainability projects – all collective research projects focusing on the archaeology, history and cultural heritage of Palmyra in Syria. She directs fieldwork projects in Rome and the Middle East. Raja’s research focusses on societal and urban developments and networks from the Hellenistic to the medieval periods, iconography, religion and religious life in Antiquity. While being a classical archaeologist, she also works in the fields intersecting archaeology and natural sciences bringing high definition studies of the past to the forefront. Her most recent books include a translation and edited version of Ingholt’s Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur from 1928 (Brepols, 2021) and the new collection catalogue of the Palmyra collection in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 2019).
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Friday, March 26, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Speakers: Wenpeng Xu (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois Chicago) and moderated by Hsueh-Man Shen (The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU).
Title: Export-oriented Porcelain Economy in Song-Yuan China: Production Strategies, Networks, and Interaction at Dehua
- Monday, March 29, 2021 at 12:00pm
Series: The New York Aegean Bronze Age Colloquium
Speakers: Thomas Brogan, Chrysa Sofianou, Melissa Eaby and Yiannis Papadatos Topic: “Sopata, Mesorachi, and Papadiokampos: A View of the Cretan Bronze Age from the Periphery”
- Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 4:00pm
Celebrating a New Book by Jean-Louis Cohen
Frank Gehry, a Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings
LEARN MORE about Frank Gehry, a Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings Watch Frank Gehry, a Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings online [opens in new window]Description: Pritzker Prize–winner Frank Gehry is widely considered one of the world’s most important living architects. Much of the genius of Gehry can be found in his drawings, works of art in their own right, whose progressions from paper architecture to built poststructuralist reality have changed our own visual landscape forever.
Written by architecture scholar Jean-Louis Cohen in direct collaboration with the architect, this comprehensive multivolume publication will contain exhaustive documentation of each of Gehry’s projects. Each volume of the catalogue will include insightful texts and high-quality images of individual works and preparatory drawings, along with provenance information, exhibition history, and bibliographic information.
Trained as an architect and a historian, Jean-Louis Cohen holds since 1994 the Sheldon H. Solow Chair for the History of Architecture at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. He has published more than thirty books, including: Building a New New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture (2020), Frank Gehry; Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings ; Volume One, 1954-1978 (2020), Le Corbusier : The Built Work (2018), France, Modern Architectures in History (2015), Le Corbusier: an Atlas of Modern Landscapes (2013), The Future of Architecture. Since 1889 (2012), Architecture in Uniform (2011), and Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR (1992).
Among the exhibitions he has curated are the centennial show "L'aventure Le Corbusier," at the Centre Pompidou (1987); "Architecture in Uniform," and "Building a New New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture," at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (2011 and 2019); "Le Corbusier: an Atlas of Modern Landscapes," at the Museum of Modern Art (2007). He received in 2014 the special mention of the jury for his French pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
- Tuesday, March 9, 2021 at 6:00pm
- April
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Wednesday, April 7, 2021 at 6:30pm
Series: The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium
Speaker: David Pullins
Title: "Juan de Pareja, seeing beyond Velázquez"
with David Pullins, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
LEARN MORE about David Pullins's talkDescription: The Afro-Hispanic painter Juan de Pareja's life and artistic personality have been overwhelmingly read through the lens of Diego Velázquez, in whose household Pareja was enslaved for over two decades and who portrayed Pareja in the well-known portrait in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the nineteenth century, however, before the public accessibility of Velázquez's portrait and while Spanish art was still being written into the canon, writers and collectors treated Pareja as an independent figure with a depth and nuance that has been lost. This lecture aims to recenter Pareja by contextualizing what is known of his life and enslaved labor in seventeenth-century Spain while also attending to what we can glean from Pareja's own paintings executed following his manumission in 1654. Rather than read Pareja's artistic legacy as the product of years spent in Velázquez's studio, his paintings will be interpreted as the result of an extended Grand Tour education and the artist's response to his Madrid School contemporaries. Because some of the most conventional art historical tools – questions of stylistic development, influence, attribution and patronage – have been almost entirely ignored in Pareja's case, beginning to articulate his artistic agency using his canvases as primary evidence helps us to shift his position from remarkable subject to remarkable producer of works of art.
David Pullins, Associate Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is responsible for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French, Italian and Spanish painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He received his MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and his PhD from Harvard University with a dissertation that addressed workshop practices in eighteenth-century France. He has published widely on seventeenth- through nineteenth-century paintings, drawings, and prints.
The Colloquium is the product of the generosity and continuing support of Roberta and Richard Huber, and we thank them heartily for making the current year’s activities possible.
- Monday, April 12, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Andrew Finegold, University of Illinois at Chicago
Title: Metonymy in Mesoamerican Art
LEARN MORE about Andrew Finegold's talk Wacth Andrwe Finegold's talkonline [opens in new window]Description: In ancient Mesoamerica, images often directly responded to the forms, materials, or functions of their supports, or otherwise implicated their physical and social situatedness. In pointing to their contexts, such images can be understood as indexical according to the system of signs developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, but the close relationship between an image and its material conditions can also be classified as metonymical. Metonymy refers to expressions of contiguity or association; it is an additive form of expression, arising from adjacency in the same way that meaning is created grammatically through the combination of sequential terms in a phrase. In the elaboration of existing grounds with imagery deemed appropriate to them—and especially in the construction of teixiptlameh as embodiments of numinous forces—Mesoamerican artists regularly pursued an additive, associative practice of image making. This talk will argue that metonymy was more than a particularly favored representational trope in Mesoamerica, and that its consistent deployment can be directly linked to the ontology of images within an indigenous worldview.
- Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor in Conservation and Technical Studies Lecture
Speaker: Lynda Zycherman
Title: Fraternal Sextuplets: Technical Examination of Picasso's Glass(es) of Absinthe
LEARN MORE about the Praska lecture watch the Praska lecture online [opens in new window]Description: Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe (1914) is a series of six uniquely painted bronze sculptures. This presentation compares the different versions to discover similarities and differences in the edition. Close visual and instrumental examination revealed information about Picasso’s sculpting method, collage techniques, technical information about the bronze casting, and damages and restorations. The six castings have a consistent and unique metal composition when compared to published alloy analyses of the foundries active in Paris at the time.
We have confirmed Picasso’s use of found materials in conjunction with artist-made materials, revealed the hitherto hidden assembly technique of the three elements of the composition, and identified the paint medium and some of the pigments. These findings will be germane to scholars invested in the Glass of Absinthe series as well as those studying Picasso’s use of polychrome technique.
Lynda Zycherman has served as Conservator of Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art since 1984. Previously, she was an Associate Conservator at the Freer Technical Laboratory, Smithsonian Institution and worked in the laboratories of the Metropolitan Museum and the Corning Museum of Glass. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history from City College of the City of New York, CUNY, and her M.A. in Art History together with the Certificate in Art Conservation from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts.
Over the past 36 years at MoMA, Lynda has researched a wide variety of topics including Minimalist sculpture, sculpture utilizing electric lights, Fluxus, and Pop sculpture. Her current interest is the technical examination of sculpture by Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi.
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Friday, April 16, 23, 30 and May 7, 2021 at 3:00pm
Series: The IFA / Frick Collection Symposium on the History of Art
The Symposium will be held via Zoom, with live captioning during each session.
Learn more about the Frick symposium -
Friday, April 16, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Speakers: Phillip Bloom (Huntington Library), moderated by Julia Orell (University of British Columbia)
Title:The Pleasures of Gardens in Song (960–1279) China
- Thursday, April 20, 2021 at 12:00pm
Series: The New York Aegean Bronze Age Colloquium
Speaker: Brendan Burke
Topic: “Mycenaean Eleon in Eastern Boeotia: from the Shaft Grave Era through the Post-Palatial Period"
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Wednesday, April 21, 2021 at 3:00pm
Series: Time-Based Media Lecture
Speaker: Hélia Marçal, Lecturer in History of Art, Materials and Technology at University College London
Title: Conservation Between Performance and Participation
LEARN MORE about Hélia MarçalDescription: Conservation has long been recognized as a social activity, aimed at preserving objects and artworks as manifestations of values, affects, and stories. But how can conservators reconcile the values of past, present, and future generations, of local communities and global organisations, of the art institution and the public sphere? This presentation will look at conservation through the lens of performativity to address issues of representation, the politics of participation, and the social landscape in conservation. By exploring the challenges posed to conservation by performance and other forms of socially-engaged art, this lecture will reflect on how these types of artworks reframe conservation aims in the public sphere. Issues of representation and misrecognition in decision-making processes will be analysed through feminist epistemology – namely through Nancy Fraser's work. The presentation will then address the ways in which rethinking conservation through performance allows us to acknowledge the realms of difference and inclusion in our profession. Finally, the lecture will question and reflect on some of the ways in which we can bring new perspectives of compassionate care for artworks, objects, and people to the center of conservation practice.
Dr. Hélia Marçal is a lecturer, researcher, and conservator based in London. She was appointed Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Art, Materials, and Technology at University College London's Department of History of Art in 2020. Prior to this appointment, she worked as a Fellow in Contemporary Art Conservation and Research of the Andrew W. Mellon funded research project "Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum at Tate and a Science Manager at the Institute of Contemporary History (Universidade Nova de Lisboa). She has been the Coordinator of the Working Group on Theory, History, and Ethics of Conservation of the International Council of Museums' Committee for Conservation since 2016.
This lecture series is generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Wednesday, April 21, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Samuel H. Kress Lecture
Speaker: Sue Ann Chui
Title: New narratives for Old Masters: reflections on works by Gerard David and Ercole de’ Roberti
LEARN MORE about the Kress lectureDescription: Beyond the pictorial narrative that a painter presents, the artist and the work of art share another story through the materiality of the object. A conservator’s work, in collaboration with scientists and curators, often reveals the choices an artist makes in the matter and the process of artistic production, and the life that the work has had since leaving the studio. Two such studies of panel paintings from the 15th century will be presented: the wings of a triptych by the Flemish artist Gerard David; and a pair of predella panels by the Ferrarese artist Ercole de’ Roberti. Both projects culminated in separate focus exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum that put a spotlight on the materiality of the artworks. The manufacture and treatment of the paintings, the challenges and the opportunities for displaying them alongside the discoveries made possible by conservation research will be shared.
Sue Ann Chui joined the staff of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC as Painting Conservator in 2019 specializing in the care of panel paintings. Prior to this, she was Associate Conservator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles where she worked for fourteen years. Sue Ann earned her MA in Art History and Diploma in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 1999 after completing her internship at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, a department of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge. Through her treatments and technical studies of Old Master Paintings, she has contributed to exhibitions, and has published on the materials and techniques of artists that include Andrea del Sarto, Ercole de’ Roberti, and the workshop of Leonardo da Vinci.
This lecture is generously funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
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Thursday, April 22, 2021 6:00pm
Series: Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture
Title: Inaugural Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture with Hank Willis Thomas
LEARN MORE about the Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture Watch the Sam Wagstaff lecture online [opens in new window]The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to announce that Hank Willis Thomas will give the inaugural Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture in conversation with New York based artist, Chris Berntsen.
Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a former member of the New York City Public Design Commission.
Chris Berntsen is a New York based artist who uses photography to explore themes related to queerness, identity, and intimacy. Chris' work has been exhibited in MoMA PS1, Aperture Foundation, New York, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. He received his BFA from New York University's Tisch School of Arts and is an MFA candidate at Hunter College, New York. He has worked alongside artist Hank Willis Thomas for the past fourteen years.
About the Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture
This new lecture series honors the legacy of Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. (November 4, 1921 – January 14, 1987). Wagstaff attended the Institute of Fine Arts in the 1950s, studying Italian Renaissance Art under Richard Offner, and went on to become a notable American art curator, collector, and patron of the arts. Through his influential collecting, teaching, and curatorial work, Wagstaff promoted photography as a fine art medium. His groundbreaking collection was purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984, constituting the cornerstone of its newly formed Department of Photographs. Sam Wagstaff’s devotion to the medium contributed to its rising status over the years. We are delighted to celebrate his achievements by naming our annual photography lecture in his honor. -
Tuesday, April 27, 2021 6:00pm
The Paul Lott Lecture
Speaker: Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Title: An Evening with Max Hollein
LEARN MORE about Max HolleinThe Institute of Fine Arts invites you to a lecture given by Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this talk, Max Hollein will address The Met's development as an institution, its history, and the contemporary moment of museums.
Appointed Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in April 2018, Max Hollein is responsible for guiding the Museum's artistic vision and all of its programming, research, and collection initiatives. An accomplished director for 20 years, Hollein oversees The Met's curatorial, conservation, and scientific departments; exhibition and acquisition activities; education and public outreach; as well as the libraries, digital projects, publications, imaging, and design.
Prior to joining The Met, he was the Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where his tenure was characterized by visionary programming, pioneering acquisitions, and rigorous fiscal management. Previously he simultaneously led the Schirn Kunsthalle, the Städel Museum, and the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, Germany, as Director and CEO, all of which experienced significant growth and increased attendance during his tenure.
Born in Vienna, Hollein studied at the University of Vienna (Master of Art History) and the Vienna University of Economics (Master of Business Administration). He began his career at New York's Guggenheim Museum as Chief of Staff to the Director and six years later assumed his leadership role in Frankfurt. Hollein has published and lectured widely and has organized a number of major exhibitions in modern and contemporary art. He is a member of supervisory and advisory boards of major cultural institutions worldwide, including the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; National Gallery, Prague; and Neue Galerie, New York. Named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2009 and a recipient of the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and the Arts, he received the Goethe badge of honor (the Hessian Ministry of Culture's highest accolade) in 2016, among other international awards.
This program is made possible with generous funding from the Paul Lott Lectureship.
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Wednesday, April 28, 2021 6:00pm
Les choses américaines: American Objects
Speaker: Edward J. Sullivan
LEARN MORE about Edward J. Sullivan's talkDescription: Professor Edward Sullivan will present an English-language version of a recent (Zoom) lecture for The Paris Institute for Political Studies (Sciences Po) as part of a seminar organized by Professor Laurence Bertrand Dorléac and entitled “Les choses” (“Things”). Professor Dorléac is currently preparing an exhibition for the Louvre on this topic, envisioned as a meditation on still life and objects that extends beyond the classic definition of the “nature morte.” The lecture is called “American Things” as it concentrates, in the form of several specific modules (or “galleries” in an imaginary exhibition), on a variety of manifestations of interest in both inert commodities and what we could call “sentient objects.” Each of them is viewed through the lens of their socio-political circumstances and the intra-history of themes such as colonialism and oppression, endemic to nations throughout the Western Hemisphere.
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 and 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.
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Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 12:00pm
Series: Ancient Art and Architecture
Speaker: Maurizio Harari, Professor of Etruscan and Italic Archaeology and Director of the Archaeological Museum at the University of Pavia, Italy
Title: Imagining the Etruscans: Modern European Perceptions of an Ancient Italian Civilization
LEARN MORE about Maurizio Harari's talkPlease join us for the keynote talk of the New York Workshop of Etruscan Art given by Maurizio Harari.
The New York Workshop of Etruscan Art is an initiative promoted jointly by Columbia University and New York University. The ambition of the workshop is to advance our understanding of the artistic and visual dimensions of pre-Roman Italy by promoting discussion and sustained reflection on their role within the field of Etruscan studies, but it does not prescribe a specific intellectual agenda. This year, the workshop will: advance discussion of buildings, their roofs and decoration and the avenues they provide to investigate production processes, networks of interaction and creation, the sacred image and the porousness of Italic arts; reflect on the impact of 3D-modeling and reconstructions on our understanding of Etruscan aesthetics; present new findings from the Corpus Speculorum Etruscorum; present unpublished bronze figurines of subordinate characters; explore the relation with comedy of the imagery of Praenestine cistae. The keynote talk will investigate the ideological history of the discipline of Etruscology vis-à-vis modern European perceptions of the past. The full program and details are available online.
Since the late rise of Humanism and through a real crescendo in the 18th to 20th centuries, the Etruscans, an ancient people of pre-Roman Italy, became (and remain) a subject of lively discussions among scholars, as they saw a wide popularity in pseudo-scientific exploration and publication. This lecture aims to explore the ideological features of the foundation process of a highly specialized, but often self-referential discipline, so-called "Etruscology,” which only saw its real scholarly development in the first half of the 20th century. In that context, this major branch of scholarship was created with its roots in the rather complicated connections between the Italian territorial situation of Etruscan civilization and the European dimension of its reception and popularization.
Maurizio Harari is Professor of Etruscan and Italic Archaeology and Director of the Archaeological Museum at the University of Pavia, Italy. Author of over 200 publications, his reach focuses on Etruscan and Italic art and archaeology, especially issues of image making and meaning, wall painting, Etruscans of the Po-River region, and the sacred and political institutions of Etruscan cities. Co-Director of excavations at the Italian site of Verucchio since 2011, he is also a specialist in the historiography of Etruscology and its situation within the archaeological disciplines of Europe and the Mediterranean. He has collaborated widely across Europe, including with the European Research Council and on publication of the Enciclopedia dell’arte antica classica e orientale and the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, and he is fellow and member of multiple institutions, including the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Etruschi ed Italici.
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
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Wednesday, April 7, 2021 at 6:30pm
- May
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Wednesday, May 26th at 3:00pm
Series: Time-Based Media Lecture
Speakers: J. Soto, Arts Administrator and Consultant, and Sally Szwed, Director of Artist Initiatives from Eyebeam
Title: Shifting online: Responsive transformations in art and technology
LEARN MORE about J. Soto's talk RSVP required for J. Soto's talk [opens in new window]Join Sally Szwed and J. Soto from Eyebeam, an organization focused on supporting justice-driven artists working with technology, for a presentation and discussion on how the organization radically pivoted their support for artists, as well as public engagement strategies in both shape and scale at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. Brought about by the conditions of 2020, these shifts provoke larger questions of the role of artists in the rapidly changing digital environment, sustainability, accessibility of digital spaces, and the possibilities when artists reclaim this type of technology in their work.
In this lecture the two will share some specific examples of inventive artist work that was produced in this formative moment, as well as strategies Eyebeam is undertaking to continue meaningful engagement with artists and the public as we continue to build community in the digital realm.
J. Soto is an arts administrator and consultant invested in the intersectional community histories and present of queer people of color and disabled people. Soto's work focuses on how to create more equitable practices and access to resources in the arts and dance field. His work and writing can be found in Original Plumbing, Apogee Journal: Queer History, Queer Now Folio, American Realness 2018 Reading series, and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive, and Grant Makers in the Arts GIA Reader. His work is deeply influenced by his experiences as a queer transgender Latino who grew up in the Bay Area, with roots in Southern Arizona and the borderlands. He serves as the Manager of Programs and Inclusion at Eyebeam.
As Eyebeam’s Director of Artist Initiatives, Sally Szwed guides the organization's core artist support programs, youth education, and public engagement. Sally believes that artists are vital enactors of societal change, and are essential for inventing a radically equitable future. Sally is an accomplished arts leader in NYC. She previously directed the Creative Time Summit, an international convening on the intersection of art and politics. Sally grew the Summit in both scale and ambition, building an expansive global community while traveling iterations of the program to the 56th Venice Biennale and around the world. She holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts.
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Wednesday, May 26th at 3:00pm
- June
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Thursday, June 3 at 6:00pm
Series: Great Hall Exhibition Public Program
Speakers: Cauleen Smith, artist, and Mabel O. Wilson, a Professor Architecture and Professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University.
Title: A Conversation between Cauleen Smith and Mabel O. Wilson
LEARN MORE about the Great Hall Exhibition Public Program RSVP required for the Great Hall Exhibition Public Program [opens in new window]Description: Presented in conjunction with the current Great Hall Exhibition, Cauleen Smith, H-E-L-L-O: To Do All At Once, artist Cauleen Smith will engage in a conversation with Mabel O. Wilson, the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, a Professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. Smith’s short film, H-E-L-L-O, centers New Orleans’s cityscape and history of jazz performance through the lens of experimental film and science fiction in order to critique the racialized logics of the built environment and offer a possible salve through alternate modes of communication, creative practice, and placemaking. Wilson’s extensive scholarship on the racial dynamics embedded within architectural history and insistence on art’s ability to reflect incisive connections between race and architecture provides another inroad into contextualizing Smith’s long-standing examination of space both through film and her expansive multi-media practice. This conversation seeks to reaffirm these “spaceways”––Smith’s neologism for the physical environments that structure the navigation of the Black body through public spaces and historical memory.
Cauleen Smith (b. 1967, Riverside, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. She was recently the recipient of a solo presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Cauleen Smith: Mutualities (February 17, 2020 — January 31, 2021), as well as a major career survey organized by MASS MoCA, Cauleen Smith: We Already Have What We Need (May 25, 2019 — March 15, 2020). She has also had solo exhibitions at Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The High Line, New York; and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Her work is currently on view in a two-person exhibition with Theaster Gates at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions including the 2017 Whitney Biennial and Prospect.4, New Orleans (2017). She has participated in group exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; New Museum, New York; San Diego Museum of Art; and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the 2020 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize from The Studio Museum in Harlem, the inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2016, as well as the 2016 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film/Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, and a Rauschenberg Residency in 2015. Most recently, in 2019, Smith was an artist-in-residence at Artpace. Smith was born in Riverside, CA and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a B.A. in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 1991 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998. Smith studied with Trinh T. Minh-ha, Angela Davis, and Lynn Hershman Leeson at San Francisco State University. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2007. Smith is Professor at CalArts School of Art.
Mabel O. Wilson is a Professor of Architecture as well as a Professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. She also serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-director of Global Africa Lab. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2017), Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012/21) and the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020) with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis. With her practice Studio&, she is member of the architectural team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021) currently on view at MoMA. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?)—an advocacy project to educate the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor.
This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Valeria Napoleone XX. We extend special thanks to the artist for lending the work on view, and additional thanks to her gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey. Megan Kincaid and Summer Sloane-Britt curated the exhibition. Lizette Ayala designed the website. Miquael Williams contributed to the exhibition as an advisory curator, and Dr. Edward J. Sullivan provided faculty support.
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Wednesday, June 16, 11:00 am- 1:00pm
Series: Time-Based Media Lecture
Title: Experiential Conservation: The Media Preservation Initiative Model at the Whitney
LEARN MORE about J. Soto's talk RSVP required for "Experiential Conservation:" [opens in new window]
Launched in 2018 to address the needs of one of the largest time-based media art collections in the world, the Whitney’s Media Preservation Initiative (MPI) has reshaped the Museum’s understanding of its own collection and highlighted the need for a more comprehensive stewardship of time-based media (TBM) art. A holistic approach has been developed through sustained dialogue across several departments with the MPI team, whose inter-disciplinary specialists have re-catalogued, researched, and carried out preservation measures at the component level on 600 TBM artworks in just three years. In addition, through MPI the Whitney has pioneered a new system for preservation that equally foregrounds material, digital, and artistic integrity, scholarly research, and access. In this talk, Whitney staff will discuss their vision for the Museum’s TBM collection, while the MPI team recounts some of their greatest challenges and collaborative successes.
Hosted by the Time-based Media Art Conservation program at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
WMAA and MPI bios for webinar
Carol Mancusi-Ungaro serves as the Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research at the Whitney Museum of American Art and for over a decade as Founding Director of the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at the Harvard Art Museums. For nineteen years she served as Chief Conservator of The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. During that time she founded the Artists Documentation Program wherein she interviews artists about the technical nature of their art (adp.menil.org).
Dr. Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her curatorial focus is moving image art, the work of emerging artists, and art of the 1960s and 1970s. She builds the Whitney’s collection of film and video, and is part of the curatorial team that shapes the Museum’s artistic program. She is a member of the Graduate Committee of the Center of Curatorial Studies at Bard College, a Faculty member of the curatorial program at the School of Visual Arts, and a visiting critic in the Fine Art Department of Columbia University.
Farris Wahbeh, Director of Research Resources, works within the field of cultural informatics to enhance access to art and archival collections. He oversees the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and maintains the Museum’s Special Collections and the Permanent Collection Documentation Office. Farris has gained experience from a wide range of institutions, including Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Provenance Index, the Creative Audio Archive in Chicago, Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, as well as the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and Saudi Aramco’s King Abdulazziz Center for World Culture
David Neary is the Project Manager of the Media Preservation Initiative. He is a graduate of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program and also holds an MA in Film Studies from University College Dublin. He has worked to preserve the film collections of institutions including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, MoMA, and the Oregon Historical Society.
Savannah Campbell is Media Preservation Specialist, Video and Digital Media at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has previously been a Fellow in Magnetic Media Preservation at The Standby Program and has worked on audiovisual preservation projects for the Dance Heritage Coalition, CUNY TV, and Crawford Media Services. Savannah holds an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University.
Brian Block has coordinated the Whitney’s effort to enhance its time-based media documentation practices in his role as Project Researcher. He created new templates for centralizing and analyzing TBM artworks and uses these tools when generating research data about the Museum’s TBM holdings. Brian is a 2018 graduate of UCLA, where he received a Master of Library & Information Science degree with a specialization in Media Archival Studies.
Christopher Bernu is the Project Cataloguer for MPI. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Museum and Exhibition Studies program. His previous experience includes projects for the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the DuSable Museum of African American History.
Nicholas Carbone is the Media Preservation Specialist in film and slide works for the Media Preservation Initiative. In addition to his work there, he is also the Audiovisual Archivist for both the Trisha Brown Dance Company and the video artist Mary Lucier. In the past, Nicholas has worked on projects at the Carolee Schneemann Foundation, the Andy Warhol Film Project, Bard College and Artists Space.
Image caption: Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984), Movie Mural, 1965-68. Multiple 35 and 16mm films, black-and-white and color, sound and silent, durations vary, transferred to video, with black-and-white and color slide projections. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Film and Video Committee. Photograph by Ron Amstutz. © Estate of Stan VanDerBeek
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Thursday, June 3 at 6:00pm
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.