| IN DISCUSSION
Public Programs
We look forward to continuing a robust public programming schedule online, welcoming participants from around the globe. We encourage you to explore our virtual programming and archive of past lectures.
IFA Coronavirus Information and ResourcesThe Institute: your destination for the past, present, and future of art.
Connect to the latest thinking about the arts from ancient times to tomorrow’s prospects. Become part of the conversation, keep up with our events calendar (further down this page) and choose from our extensive range of lecture series, special lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and conferences. Enjoy our video archive to catch up with previous events. Some of our lectures are broadcast live.
- The Ancient World
- Conservation
- Modern and Contemporary Art
- • Artists at the Institute
- • Artists in Conversation
- • Colloquium for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Middle East and South Asia
- • Crossing Boundaries
- • Great Hall Exhibitions
- • IFA Contemporary Asia
- • Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lectures
- • Latin American Forum
- • Points of Contact: New Approaches in Islamic Art
- • The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium on the Arts and Visual Culture of Spain and the Colonial Americas
- • Time-Based Media Art Conservation
- Annual Lecture Series
- Conferences and Workshops
- Medieval to Early Modern
- World Art
- • China Project Workshop
- • Crossing Boundaries
- • Colloquium for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Middle East and South Asia
- • IFA Contemporary Asia
- • Latin American Forum
- • Points of Contact: New Approaches in Islamic Art
- • Works in Progress Series
- • The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium on the Arts and Visual Culture of Spain and the Colonial Americas
2022 Calendar
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January
- Wednesday, January 26, 2022, at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Daniel Sandweiss, Professor of Anthropology and Quaternary and Climate Studies, Cooperating Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences and Global Policy, University of Maine
Title: New Flavors and Old Responses: El Niño, Disaster, and Resilience on the Coast of Peru
RSVP required for Daniel Sandweiss [opens in new window] learn more about Daniel SandweissDescription: El Niño is a recurrent perturbation of world class. Although centered in the Pacific Basin, it influences much of global climate, even the northeast US where winters tend to be warmer during canonical events. In the Pacific, the Peruvian coast is one of the regions most negatively affected. Normally a desert, the torrential rains brought by El Niño destroy the irrigations systems on which normal agriculture depends, while warming ocean waters reduce the biomass of what is usually one of the world’s greatest fisheries. We now know that El Niño has multiple flavors, each with its own set of challenges for Peru and elsewhere. These events aren’t new: they have been around for much longer than people have been in the New World, but their frequency and intensity have changed over time. In this talk, I will summarize what we know about El Niño’s presence over the last 15 millennia during which humans have been in Peru. I will also discuss some of the possible effects of El Niño frequency change on cultural development in the region and review the latest studies on how pre-European inhabitants met the challenges of El Niño and prospered over the long run despite them.
- Thursday, January 27, 2022, at 6:30pm
Series: Ancient Art and Archaeology
Title: Awash in Innuendo: Imperial Imagery and Allusion within the Baths of Caracalla
Speaker: Maryl B. Gensheimer, historian of Roman art and archaeology
RSVP required for Maryl B. Gensheimer's talk [opens in new window] learn more about Maryl B. Gensheimer's talkAcross the Roman Empire, bathing was a highlight of the day and an important social event. Indeed, baths were so prized that their patronage was a powerful public relations tool that could greatly enhance one's popular and political clout. It is hardly surprising, then, that as a spectacular gift to the people, the emperors commissioned eight magnificent baths in the city of Rome between 25 BCE and 337 CE. This lecture investigates the lived and visual experience of these Roman baths, the so-called imperial thermae, while also addressing the underlying ambitions of their imperial patrons.
This lecture focuses on the extensive decoration of the best preserved of these bath complexes, the Baths of Caracalla (inaugurated 216 C.E.). As I will demonstrate, this decoration was a carefully strategized ensemble intended to convey a particular message to a diverse Roman audience. I analyze the connotations of this sumptuous display, addressing the visual experience of the baths and revealing the decoration's critical role in articulating innuendo and advancing imperial agendas. By examining a variety of art media – architectural and freestanding sculpture, mosaic and other colored stone veneers – the case studies addressed in this lecture demonstrate that endowing monumental baths was a concern of dynastic legitimacy and imperial largess and elucidate the ways through which decorative programs successfully articulated these themes to their Roman viewers. Decorative choices, as we will see, were purposeful decisions by Caracalla and his architect to honor the emperor and to consolidate his power and reputation.
Maryl B. Gensheimer is a historian of Roman art and archaeology. Her research focuses on the art and architecture of the city of Rome, on the Bay of Naples, and in Asia Minor. She is particularly interested in ancient cities and urban life, and the social structures and interdependent systems of urban design and urban infrastructure that impacted the ancient experience of monuments and spaces. She holds a B.A. in art history from Williams College (2005) and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical art and archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2013). Dr. Gensheimer's work has been recognized by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), Center for Ancient Studies at NYU, Graduate School of Arts and Science at NYU, Lemmermann Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and US-Italy Fulbright Commission. Most recently, Dr. Gensheimer's first book, Decoration and Display in Rome's Imperial Thermae, was awarded the 2020 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities by the Council of Graduate Schools.
- The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates, or sign up for our mailing list.
- Wednesday, January 26, 2022, at 6:00pm
- February
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Friday, February 4, 2022, at 6pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Description: Julie Bellemare, Ph.D. Bard Graduate Center; Jane and Morgan Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will present on her project “Neither Jade nor Stone”: Agate Carvings for the Qing Court."
The discussion will be moderated by Michele Matteini (Department of Art History and The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU). RSVP required For the China Project Workshopw [opens in new window] -
Tuesday, February 8, 2022, at 6:00pm
Series: Artists at the Institute
Speaker: Jeremy Deller
RSVP required for Jeremy Deller's talk [opens in new window] learn more about Jeremy DellerJeremy Deller (b. 1966 in London; lives and works in London) studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute and at Sussex University. Deller won the Turner Prize in 2004 for his work ‘Memory Bucket’ and represented Britain in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. He has been producing projects over the past two decades which have influenced the conventional map of contemporary art. He began making artworks in the early 1990s, often showing them outside conventional galleries.
Deller has exhibited extensively worldwide with selected solo exhibitions including: Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); ‘The Infinitely Variable Ideal of the Popular’, CA2M, Madrid (2015), touring to MUAC, Mexico City, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires and Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao (2016); ‘English Magic’, British Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013), touring to William Morris Gallery, London, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol and Turner Contemporary, Margate (2014-2015); ‘Joy in People’, Hayward Gallery, London (2012).
Deller has curated numerous projects, recent exhibitions include: ‘Iggy Pop Life Class’, Brooklyn Museum (2016); ‘Love is Enough: William Morris and Andy Warhol’, Modern Art Oxford (2014).
- Wednesday, February 16, 2022, at 6:30pm
Title: Celebrating a New Book: Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism
RSVP required for Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism [opens in new window] learn more about Tropical Aesthetics of Black ModernismThis event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art History, NYU.
Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism examines the creative manifestations of black modernism, and explicates how tropicality functioned as a key unifying element in African Diasporic art. In this book, I argue that crucial artworks of the Caribbean modern art movement and of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as performance traditions ought not be viewed as being particular to their geopolitical parameters but rather as part of a larger African Diasporic mission. Given this reality, I contend that a discourse of internationalism existed in the realm of visual art and performance. By examining the art of Aaron Douglas and Wifredo Lam, as well as the performances of Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou and early twentieth-century Carnival masqueraders in Trinidad, I explicate how their representations of tropicalia are reflective of the unique yet complex relationship that black people of these respective regions have with the terrain they inhabit – land on which many of the enslaved ancestors labored. Despite this traumatic legacy, these creative works nonetheless show how this land is revered by their inhabitants who recognize them for their beauty, not with any intention to transform it but rather to accept it. This ideological heeding to nature should be viewed as an alternative modernity that counters the idea of transforming ‘undeveloped’ nature for the sake of capitalist expansion. In so doing, there is a particular political enterprise at stake, one that dissociates the land with the history of slavery and thereby reclaiming it. Artists such as Wifredo Lam and Maya Angelou are thus highlighting the internationalist ethos of Pan-Africanism through their visual explorations of landscapes -- terrains which are mostly tropical -- and are therefore geopolitically uniting areas such as the Southern United States and the Caribbean. Ultimately, this book seeks to illuminate the desire for early twentieth-century black Atlantic peoples to engender a sense of belonging to the citizenry, and a particular kind of claim to the land that they inhabit, which speaks to a desire for home.
Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History and the Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text, and Art Journal. Noël’s book, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Duke University Press, February 2021), offers a thorough investigation of how Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century were responding to colonial and hegemonic regimes through visual and performative tropicalist representation. It privileges the land and how a sense of place is critical in the identity formation of early twentieth-century artists as well as their creative processes. Noël is working on a new book tentatively titled Diasporic Art in the Age of Black Power. This book seeks to examine the impact of the Black Power Movement on visual art as it emerged in the political, historical, and social contexts of the United States of America and the Anglophone Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s. Noël is the 2021-2022 Smithsonian Terra Foundation Senior Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her research has also been supported by The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Moreau Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame. She has also received a number of grants and fellowship from Wayne State University.
- 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, February 4, 2022, at 6pm
- March
- The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates, or sign up for our mailing list.
- April
- The Institute of FIne Arts / Frick Collection Symposium
2022 Symposium on the History of Art
Friday, April 8, 2022, 3:00 p.m.
Saturday, April 9, 2022, 11:00 a.m.
The Symposium will be held via Zoom. Registration for this free program opens in late February. - The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates, or sign up for our mailing list.
- The Institute of FIne Arts / Frick Collection Symposium
- May
- The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates, or sign up for our mailing list.