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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.
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2025 Calendar
January
Wednesday, January 29, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Topics in Time-based Media Art Conservation
Title: AI Art Histories: From Concepts to Conservation
Speaker: Christiane Paul, Whitney Museum of American Art
Over its more than fifty year-long history, AI art has evolved along with technological approaches, from the early symbolic phase to the current statistical one of artificial neural networks. The talk traces the historical trajectory of AI art, connecting the underlying technologies to concepts, aesthetics, and conservation challenges. Expert systems, generative adversarial networks (GANs), generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), and text-to-image models are tied to different creative practices and expressions, which in turn require specific methods of preservation. Recent AI technologies rely on classification, standardization, and optimization, using trillions of existing images harvested by corporations and operating within an echo chamber. Through the lens of artistic practice, the talk explores AI image production and its relationship to data models and materialities.
Christiane Paul is Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor Emerita at The New School. She is the recipient of 2023 MediaArtHistories International Award and the Thoma Foundation 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her books are Digital Art (4th ed., 2023); A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, 2016); Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Intellect, 2011; Chinese edition, 2012); and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Harold Cohen: AARON (2024), Refigured (2023), and Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 - 2018 (2018/19) and is responsible for artport , the museum’s portal to Internet art. Other curatorial work includes Chain Reaction (feralfile.com, 2023), DiMoDA 4.0 Dis/Location (traveling show, 2021-2023), and The Question of Intelligence (Kellen Gallery, The New School, NYC, 2020).
The Conservation Center’s Topics in Time-Based Media Art Conservation lecture series is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation. The series is organized by Christine Frohnert. A video of each lecture is archived and available after the event in the Institute's video archive.
Thursday, January 30, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series on Afro-Asia
Wigs and Spaces of Intimacy:
Korean Migration and the American Street
Speaker: Min Kyung Lee
Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
Following the Korean War, the military government of South Korea supported industries to improve the dire post-war economic situation. Central to this strategy was to identify export goods that optimized local resources and knowledge, and that targeted international markets. Among those exports were wigs, and by the sixties, Seoul became the global center for wig manufacturing, relying on its own female population for hair supplies and cheap labor. These wigs were exported to the US and specifically targeted the growing consumer market of African American women. Moreover, wig stores were run by new Korean immigrants in urban neighborhoods that were in the process of becoming increasingly Black with white flight to the suburbs and red-lining practices. Parallel to the shifting racial and ethnic geographies in American cities, South Korea also faced socio-political change in which the women toiling in wig factories started to protest their working conditions. Their political actions would eventually mark the beginning of the Korean democracy movement. This lecture connects the migration stories of Koreans to those of African Americans, focusing on their shared spatial practices in wig stores during the Cold War period in the US.
Min Kyung Lee is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of the Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College. Her recent monograph, The Tyranny of the Straight Line: Mapping Modern Paris (Yale University Press, 2024) studied the relations between mapping and architecture in 19th-century Paris. Her research in this area brings together histories of orthography and quantification with theories of modern architectural and urban representations. Currently, her work, Mapping Wigs and Plywood centers on histories of post-war Korean migration as well as developing archival methods with and by diasporic communities. She is a co-founder of the Architecture and Migration group of the European Architectural History Network, supported by the New Directions Mellon Foundation Fellowship, and affiliated with research groups at the Courtauld in London and the Kunsthistorische Institut in Florence.
This event is co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
*This event will not be livestreamed or recorded.
February
Monday, February 3, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
The Interconnected Mesoamerican World
Speaker: Claudia Brittenham, PhD
Professor of Art History and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies, The University of Chicago
The Mesoamerican world was always interconnected. For over three millennia, trade, pilgrimage, migration, and warfare have linked together different regions of this linguistically and ethnically diverse territory, corresponding to modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, as well as parts of Honduras and El Salvador. Gorgeously decorated objects brought as gifts or trade goods mediated diplomatic relationships between different places; immigrants made works that recalled their homelands using the materials of their new homes; public art proclaimed affinities with a broader world. Local artists adopted, adapted, and reshaped foreign styles, making works meaningful in new contexts through acts of creative reinterpretation. Yet our models for explaining the ancient Mesoamerican past often emphasize closed cultural units, casting instances of intercultural exchange as exceptional moments rather than a baseline expectation for human experience. How might Mesoamerican history look different if we assumed that interconnection was the norm, rather than the exception? What emerges, I will suggest, is a story in which even apparently simple objects reveal dazzlingly complex histories of exchange, allowing us to imagine a premodern past that has much in common with contemporary migration, diaspora, and creativity.
Claudia Brittenham is Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is also Director of the Center for Latin American Studies. Her research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, with interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, as well as The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico; The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (with Mary Miller); and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (with Stephen Houston and colleagues). Her next book focuses on the interconnectedness of the ancient Mesoamerican world.
Tuesday, February 4, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Robert Goldwater Roundtable on African Art History
“Other Africas” Roundtable
A conversation with Antawan Byrd (Northwestern), Annissa Malvoisin (Brooklyn Museum), Drew Thompson (Bard),
Moderated by Kinaya Hassane and Prita Meier
This roundtable, featuring Antawan Byrd, Annissa Malvoisin, and Drew Thompson, will explore the critical stakes and future directions of Africanist art history in the twenty-first century. The Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, which played an important role in establishing the field in the United States, provides an ideal venue for this discussion. In 1937, Robert Goldwater completed his dissertation at the IFA, later published as Primitivism in Modern Painting, a seminal work that helped introduce African art to American audiences. His influence extended through his Africa-focused museum work in New York City and his teaching and mentorship of Africanist scholars at the IFA.
With Goldwater’s legacy in mind, our roundtable will explore the significance of “Other Africas,” encompassing geographies and worldmaking projects that move beyond established frameworks and methodologies. By doing so, we aim to unsettle the legacies of earlier scholarship and highlight contemporary, pathbreaking directions in Africanist art history.
Moderators
Kinaya Hassane is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts. Her dissertation project explores the intersecting histories of photography, migration, and labor on the western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius, Comoros, Zanzibar and Mombasa. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship-Social Science Research Council, NYU's Provost's Graduate Research Initiatives, and NYU's Migration Network. Prior to matriculating at the IFA, she was a curatorial fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, where she co-curated Imperfect History: Curating the Graphic Arts Collection at Benjamin Franklin's Public Library (2021-2022)
Prita Meier is Associate Professor of Africanist art history at the Institute of Fine Arts. She is the author of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (2016) and The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast (2024).
Roundtable Participants
Antawan I. Byrd is Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University and an Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a co-curator of Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, a major traveling exhibition, currently on view at the Art Institute, that surveys the influence of Pan-Africanist ideas on African and African diasporic art since the 1920s. He is now at work on a book manuscript that investigates the influence of sound technologies on the art and politics of the 1960s in Africa and its diaspora.
Annissa Malvoisin is Associate Curator of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum. A scholar of ancient African history, her research interests lie in a globalized ancient world through the study of material culture and trade and from the perspective of African regions. Her scholarship investigates inter- and transcultural interactions surrounding the Nile Valley by studying the intersectional biographies of objects. Malvoisin has co-curated Africa Fashion (2023) and Sakimatwemtwe: A Century of Reflection on the Arts of Africa (2023) and has an upcoming contribution to Ancient Pasts for Modern Audiences: Public Scholarship and the Mediterranean World (2025).
Drew Thompson is an art historian and curator. His recent exhibitions include Benjamin Wigfall & Communications Village at the Dorsky Museum of Art and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and SIGHTLINES at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. He is the author of the book Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times and is at work on a monograph provisionally titled Coloring Surveillance through Polaroids: The Poetics of Black Solidarity and Sociality. His writings on art and visual culture have appeared in edited volumes published by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Image Centre, and The Studio Museum. Thompson currently is Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center and Bard College.
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Thursday, February 6, 2025, 6:30-8:00pm
Series: Ancient Seminar
“A large Sarcophagus, magnificently carved.” Chronicling the Ancient and Modern Histories of a Third-century CE Strigilated Sarcophagus
Speaker: Sarah Lepinski, Ph.D., Curator, Department of Greek and Roman Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a large Roman marble sarcophagus as a gift from Dr. and Mrs. Eugene Krauss (MMA 2021.264.2). The sarcophagus belongs to a distinctive type of funerary monument (a large-scale coffin) fashioned in Rome, and its vicinity, in the second half of the 3rd century CE. Carved in the shape of a tub, or lenos, it features rich decoration. S-shaped fluting (strigils) frame a central medallion with a Victory writing on a shield on the front panel and spanning each rounded end, a harnessed lion fells its prey.
Since the turn of the last century, the sarcophagus sat in the gardens of Roslyn House, the Gilded Age estate of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Yates Mortimer Sr. in Old Westbury, Long Island, NY. The Mortimers acquired the sarcophagus and many other ancient, medieval, and Renaissance-period marble sculptures during their frequent summer trips to Rome in the 1890s and early 1900s. These works adorned the house and its extensive estate and were well- celebrated in the local papers. The garden sculpture was passed down through subsequent owners, including the Krauss family, who purchased the property in 1974.
This lecture presents ongoing research into the complex material, social, and collecting histories of the sarcophagus, chronicling stories that involve significant settings and fascinating characters. This work will ultimately inform the restoration and display of sarcophagus in the Greek and Roman Galleries.
Bio: Dr. Sarah Lepinski is Curator in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of art. An experienced archaeologist, she has conducted research projects and excavations in Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, and Israel and has held fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. In addition to roles in research institutions and museums, her professional experience includes teaching in universities and overseeing federal grant programs for cultural heritage at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Her scholarship and publications primarily encompass Hellenistic and Roman decorative media and ancient polychromy. She co-curated Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color (2022) and is the project manager for the renovation and reinstallation of the galleries for the art of ancient Cyprus at The Met.
Friday, February 7, 2025, 6:00pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Tian Mi (Princeton University) will present on Qian Yong (1759-1844) and his role in the
remaking of the Xiping Stone Classics.
The discussion will be moderated by Michele Matteini (New York University)
In-person
RSVP to chinaprojectworkshop@gmail.com
Thursday, February 27, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Series on Afro Asia
Indenture Aesthetics: Family photo-archives and South African Blackness
Speaker: Jordache A. Ellapen, Associate Professor, Department of Black Studies, University of Rochester
A native from South Africa, Jordache A. Ellapen is an anti-disciplinary Black studies scholar with expertise in the visual and performing arts cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Feminist Studies Claire G. Moses award for Most Theoretically Innovative article published in 2021 for “SiyakakaFeminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Art Praxis.” He is the author of Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (Duke University Press, 2025).
This talk, titled Indenture Aesthetics: Family photo-archives and South African Blackness, examines the photographic practices of two South African artists, Lebohang Kganye and Ellapen’s own creative work, which are influenced by family photoarchives. The talk delves into the dynamics of the black and Afro-Indian home-space in the afterlife of colonial-indenture-apartheid. Both artists draw on their mother’s photoarchives playing with gender and sexuality as critical aesthetic commentaries on the making of memory, and its relationship to race, history, migration, diaspora, and space, in post-apartheid South Africa. This talk reads Ellapen’s curatorial and creative work—Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy and The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity—in relation to Kganye’s projects Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story and Ke Lefa Laka: Heir-Story. By juxtaposing the aesthetic practices of an Afro-Indian artist with a black African artist, the talk gestures towards the emergence of an Afro-Indian aesthetic informed by the maternal feminine. This talk situates maternal photoarchives as sites of queer and feminist worldmaking that trouble the very parameters of South African blackness.
Friday, February 28, 5:30-8:00pm
The Machine Gaze: AI in Art Conservation and Analysis
Speakers: J. Cabelle Ahn, Nicholas Eastaugh, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, David G. Stork
The rapid development of artificial intelligence tools is profoundly transforming cultural production and our approaches to preserving humanity’s shared past. Machine learning and computational techniques have already begun to assist conservators, scientists, and scholars in decoding complex datasets, revealing hidden features in artworks, restoring lost elements, and forging new connections between historical art and modern artistic practices. AI has even been used to consider an artwork’s authenticity through image analysis.
Yet, these advances also raise pressing ethical and philosophical questions about the implications of this new machine gaze—AI’s ability to observe, analyze, and interpret. How can we trust that AI processes information and presents conclusions accurately? What safeguards are needed to mitigate biases inherent in training datasets and algorithms? And to what extent should AI be considered a reliable collaborator in art-related decision-making processes?
This roundtable brings together experts in computer science, conservation, and art history to examine the application of AI in cultural heritage conservation and art analysis, exploring both the successes and limitations of these technologies. The discussion will further consider the future of AI in this field, emphasizing the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure these technologies responsibly shape the cultural landscape of tomorrow.
Panelists:
J. Cabelle Ahn is a New York-based art historian, journalist, and non-profit director. She received her PhD in History of Art from Harvard University, where she conducted a data-driven analysis of early exhibition strategies and the corresponding changes in the secondary art market. She holds MA degrees from the Courtauld Institute of Art and Bard Graduate Center and has held fellowships at the Harvard Art Museums, The Morgan Museum and Library, and the Cooper Hewitt, among others. She presently specializes in connecting historical art and its markets to their contemporary counterparts. Her bylines can be found at the Art Newspaper, Artnet News, Master Drawings, Journal18, and in several edited volumes and periodicals. She is currently working on a series of articles that looks at how contemporary artists are rescripting Old Masters through the lens of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. She is currently the President of the Association of Print Scholars, where she has been an officer since 2019.
Nicholas Eastaugh is a leading scientific art expert. He is recognized as a global authority for art forensic analysis that combines scientific precision and cutting-edge technology with art historical scholarship for the analysis, attribution, authentication, and appreciation of artwork. He is currently the CEO of Vasarik Ltd, a new company focused on developing novel approaches using AI and machine learning to solve problems around attribution of art and risk in the art market. Dr. Eastaugh has appeared regularly on programs such as the BBC's Britain's Lost Masterpieces as an expert art scientific advisor. He co-founded the Pigmentum Project and published The Pigment Compendium, which quickly became a standard reference text in the field. Previously, Dr. Eastaugh was the Founder and Chief Scientist of Art Analysis & Research, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He originally trained as a physicist before going on to complete a PhD in scientific analysis and documentary research of historical pigments at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Carol Mancusi-Ungaro served as the Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was the Founding Director of the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at the Harvard Art Museums. As Chief Conservator of The Menil Collection, she founded the Artists Documentation Program (adp.menil.org) in 1990. In 2009 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, marking the Academy’s first recognition of art conservation, and in January 2016 her work was featured in a New Yorker profile entitled “The Custodians.” In 2016 she was awarded the Forbes Prize by the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and in 2021-2022 she was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome. She continues to engage in research and writing about issues pertaining to the conservation of modern art.
David G. Stork is an Adjunct Professor in two departments and two programs at Stanford University and widely considered the founding pioneer of the application of sophisticated computer vision and artificial intelligence to problems in the history and interpretation of fine-art paintings and drawings. He published the earliest technical scholarship in the field, taught its first courses (at Stanford), co-founded its first conference (now called Computer Vision and Analysis of Art), and published its first book, Pixels & paintings: Foundations of computer-assisted connoisseurship (Wiley, 2024). He has lectured at dozens of leading museums worldwide and taught computer methods at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He has published over 220 scholarly works and 64 issued patents and is a Fellow of eight international professional/scholarly organizations and a 2023 Leonardo@Djerassi Fellow. He is completing his tenth book, Principled art authentication: A probabilistic foundation for representing and reasoning under uncertainty.
Moderated by:
Lisa Conte is Assistant Professor of Paper Conservation and Co-Chair of the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
March
Tuesday, March 4, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Huber Colloquium
Speaker: Miguel Callabero-Vazquez
Friday, March 7, 2025
Series: China Project Workshop
Yi-bang Li (Columbia University) will discuss the significance of formats and inscriptions in
Yuan-Dynasty scroll paintings and murals
The discussion will be moderated by Jonathan Hay (The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU)
In-person
RSVP to chinaprojectworkshop@gmail.com
Monday, March 10, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Title: On the Multiple Lives of Bannerstones: Indigenous North America 6,000 BCE to the Present
Speaker: Anna Blume, Professor, State University of New York’s Fashion
Institute of Technology.
Looking at bannerstones, their unique shapes and symmetrically drilled holes, carved from an array of lithics from sandstone to quartz, I wonder what stories they are telling, what stories their makers told when making and carrying and caring for them? Did these bannerstones begin with Indigenous sculptors east of the Mississippi in 6,000 BCE or did they begin four billion years ago when magma from the earth’s core formed into Acasta gneiss? Randomly left in middens or carefully placed in burials as late as 1,000 BCE, bannerstones remained quietly in the ground until they were tilled or dredged or dug out beginning in the 19 th century, placed in private and public collections throughout Eastern North America, some on display, others stored in forgotten boxes, and others perhaps now or one day reburied. When we follow the stones that began before their carving and remain long after, the shifting meaning of bannerstones comes to light for the living and the dead.
Anna Blume is a professor of the history of art at the State University of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. For the past several decades they have written on ancient Indigenous stone carving, architecture, and number systems of the Americas. Currently, they are the director of the Bannerstone Project and co-director of the Ethics and Sustainability curriculum encouraging the development of courses to engage the FIT community of students and professors in research, discussion, and reflection on the imperative to think through and beyond human perspectives of coexistence with other animals, plants, and geologic formations. They are currently teaching a seminar on Animals, Architecture, and Aesthetics.
Tuesday, March 11, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Title: Archeo Hub
Speaker: Sören Stark
Saturday, March 15, 2025, 2:00-3:00pm
Title: Steinhardt Strings
April
Tuesday, April 8, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Title: Aperture / IFA Photo Assembly
Wednesday, April 9, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Pre-Colombian Society of New York
Speaker: Lisa Trever
Thursday, April 10, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Title: Abydos
Series: Ancient Seminar
Friday, April 11, 2025, 6:00pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Lala Zuo (NYU Shanghai) will examine the ink characters used by Yuan-Dynasty carpenters as a
construction coding system.
The discussion will be moderated by Yijun Wang (New York University)
Webinar
RSVP to chinaprojectworkshop@gmail.com
Tuesday, April 15, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Paul Lott Lecture
Speaker: Thelma Golden
Monday, April 21, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Pre-Colombian Society of New York
Speaker: Matthew Robb
Thursday, April 24, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Title: Rose Salane at the IFA, Great Hall Exhibition Opening
Saturday, April 26, 2025, 2:00-3:00pm
Title: Steinhardt Strings
Monday, April 28, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Silberberg Lecture
Speaker: Matthew Rarey
May
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 6:00-8:00pm
Series: Praska Lecture
Speaker: Karen Thomas
Friday, May 9, 2025, 6:00pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Yu-Wen Weng (National Palace Museum) will explore aspects of Islamicate art at the Qing Court
The discussion will be moderated by Qamar Adamjee (Independent Scholar)
Webinar
RSVP to chinaprojectworkshop@gmail.com
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
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