| 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.
2021 Calendar
- September
- Monday, September 13, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Jesper Nielsen, Associate Professor and Head of Studies, Department of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Title: Connecting the Dots: Tracing Teotihuacan's Imperial Presence in Early Classic Mesoamerica
LEARN MORE about Jesper Nielsen's talkIn this talk, Dr. Nielsen will discuss current knowledge of what may have been the largest empire in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history – controlled from the sprawling capital of Teotihuacan in the central Mexican highlands. For the past 20 years, this has formed one of Dr. Nielsen's own research topics, beginning with an examination of the spread of Teotihuacan iconography into the Maya area in the late 4th century. In the past decade Dr. Nielsen has been involved in work on Teotihuacan-style iconography in other parts of Mesoamerica, in particular the present-day states of Queretaro, Michoacan and Guerrero, and what has become increasingly clear is that Teotihuacan presence has left us with traces of an imperial iconography with a standardized repertoire of motifs related to warfare and conquest. The contours of a more complete image of a vast empire thus begin to emerge. At the same time, new findings at Teotihuacan itself adds to our understanding of how the metropolis attracted people from several of the provinces, revealing a highly complex interaction sphere between the centralized imperial power and some of its most distant enclaves.
- Monday, September 20, 2021, at 6:00pm
Title: Crafting Enlightenment: Celebrating a New Book Edited by Lauren Cannady and Jennifer Ferng
Speakers: Lauren Cannady, Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park; Jennifer Ferng, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Sydney; Laura Auricchio, Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Professor of Art History at Fordham University; and Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts
learn more about "Crafting Enlightenment"Description: Please join the Institute in conversation with alumna Lauren Cannady, Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, Jennifer Ferng, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Sydney, and Laura Auricchio, Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Professor of Art History at Fordham University, on Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks, a new book edited by Cannady and Ferng that was recently published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, and contributor of a response essay to Crafting Enlightenment, will introduce the speakers and give brief remarks.
Crafting Enlightenment frames artisans from all corners of the 18th-century world—from Europe, the Ottoman Empire, viceregal Mexico, and colonial America to Mughal India, Qing dynasty China, and colonial Australia—as historical actors who responded to and translated European Enlightenment thinking through their production of architecture, ceramics, furniture and ornamental carving, gardens, clocks, illuminated manuscripts, and metalwork. Contributors to this book revivify the identities of 18th-century artisans and give shape to the networks that artisans formed at local and global levels to assert their diverse expertise and experience. With essays by Lauren Cannady, Dennis Carr, Frédéric Dassas, Jennifer Ferng, Emine Fetvaci, Neil Kamil, Dorothy Ko, Chandra Mukerji, Valérie Nègre, and Sugata Ray and responses by Florina Capistrano-Baker, Kaijun Chen, Thomas Crow, Richard Taws, and Nancy Um.
Lauren Cannady earned her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts in 2014. Prior to teaching in the multidisciplinary University Honors program at the University of Maryland, College Park, she served as Assistant Director of the Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program and, in 2019-2020, was a research fellow at the Huntington Library. She has published on comparative and visual thinking in the space of an early eighteenth-century curiosity cabinet and is writing a book on early modern garden patterns and taxonomies of knowledge in Northern Europe and colonial America.
Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Postgraduate Director at the University of Sydney. Her first area of research examines European architecture and the earth sciences during the long eighteenth century; her second area of research focuses on contemporary humanitarian issues related to asylum seekers and refugees in Oceania and Southeast Asia. Her forthcoming publications include a chapter for Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (University of Delaware Press) and an edited volume of essays Land Air Sea authored with Lauren Jacobi. Based on a collaboration with the National University of Singapore, her joint book Drawing Climate: Visualising Invisible Elements of Architecture with Birkhäuser will be in print this November.
Laura Auricchio, PhD, is Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Professor of Art History at Fordham University. A specialist in France and the United States in the Age of Revolution, her most recent book, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered, won the 2015 American Library in Paris Book Award. She is currently serving on the scientific committee of France in the Americas, a “collaborative bilingual digital library...which is the fruit of the cooperation between the National Library of France and 18 French, Canadian, American, and British cultural institutions and universities."
- Wednesday, September 22, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: IFA Contemporary Asia
Speakers: Professor Dipti Khera, Associate Professor of South Asian Art and Architecture at NYU; Dr. Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Professor Gayatri Gopinath, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU; and Dr. Brinda Kumar, Associate Curator, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Title: Traversing Multiple Realities of Contemporary American and Asian Art: Shahzia Sikander
learn more about "Traversing Multiple Realities of Contemporary American and Asian Art: Shahzia Sikander" watch IFA Contemporary Asia online [opens in new window]In conjunction with the exhibition Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, jointly organized by the Morgan Library & Museum (on view through September 26, 2021) and the RISD Museum (November 12, 2021 - January 30, 2022), IFA Contemporary Asia is excited to present a webinar featuring the internationally celebrated Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander. Having established pioneering conversations since the 1990s between her contemporary art practice and South, West, and Central Asian manuscript traditions, Sikander exploded their storytelling potential within heterogeneous mediums over the past three decades. Sikander's paintings, video animations, mosaics, and sculptures incisively probe gender roles and sexuality, racial and colonial narratives. Her work playfully critiques Orientalist histories of art and America's global wars, poignantly centering the violence of empires, past and present, and displaying near and distant geographies as inextricably linked.
Professor Dipti Khera, Associate Professor of South Asian Art and Architecture at NYU, will introduce the panel. Three scholars will discuss the ideas and questions provoked by Sikander's wide-ranging artistic practice: Dr. Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Professor Gayatri Gopinath, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU; and Dr. Brinda Kumar, Associate Curator, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This discussion seeks to expand the understandings of Sikander's practice in relation to broader narratives about contemporary American and Asian Art; the framing of Asian diasporic artists in curatorial practice and museums; and the history of collecting and colonialism that Sikander has intertwined in interrogating migrations of peoples and objects in the longue durée.
Kelly Baum is Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has been working as a curator and scholar for over twenty years. She has organized dozens of exhibitions, among them Carol Bove: setting for A. Pomodoro; Nobody's Property: Art, Space, 2000-2010; Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980; The Facade Commission: Wangechi Mutu; and most recently, with Randy Griffey, Alice Neel: People Come First. Her writing has been widely published in books and periodicals, such as October and Art Journal. She received her PhD from the University of Delaware in 2005, and was a 2018 fellow in the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
Gayatri Gopinath is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic visual art and culture in anthologies and journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, and Social Text, as well as in art publications such as PIX: A Journal of Contemporary Indian Photography, Tribe: Photography and New Media from the Arab World, and ArtReview Asia.
Brinda Kumar is an Associate Curator in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where she has worked on several exhibitions including Nasreen Mohamedi (2016), Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (2016), Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body, 1300-Now (2018), Home Is a Foreign Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context (2019), and Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (2020). Brinda completed her BFA at the College of Art, New Delhi, and her MA at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her PhD dissertation at Cornell University focused on the history of collecting Indian art in America in the twentieth century, and she conducted research through fellowships from Cornell University, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Frick Collection. She is the author of several essays for museum catalogues, and has published articles from her doctoral research on Okakura Kakuzo and Ananda Coomaraswamy.
Pioneering Pakistani American artist, Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting pre-modern and classical Central and South-Asian manuscript painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. By bringing the non-western art-historical visual vernacular into dialogue with contemporary international art practices, Sikander’s multivalent and investigative work examines colonial archives to readdress orientalist narratives in western art history. Interrogating ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through imperial and feminist perspectives Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculpture explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories. Recipient of the MacArthur genius grant and US Medal of Art, Sikander's work has been exhibited and collected internationally and currently her early works from 1988-2003 are on view at the Morgan Library NY and will travel to RISD Museum in fall 2021 and MFA Houston in spring 2022.
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Friday, September 24, 2021, at 6:30pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Description: Yan Weitian, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, University of Kansas will present on Yi Bingshou and the Ye Family: A Case of Artistic Patronage in Qing Guangzhou. The discussion will be moderated by Michael J. Hatch (Miami University). - Tuesday, September 28, 2021, at 6:00pm
Title: Summer Projects Day I: Time-based Media projects
The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of presentations from current conservation students on their summer 2021 work projects.
learn more about Summer Projects DayPresentations will include:
Sasha Arden
Documentation and treatment projects for the Thoma Foundation collection, including digital artworks and traditional mediaJames Hughes
Documentation and conservation of a time-based media sculpture titled Color Panel v1.0 (1999) by John F. Simon, Jr. at the Brooklyn MuseumJosephine Jenks
Forming a preservation strategy for three interactive digital stories from The New York Times in the Cooper Hewitt's collectionFelice Robles
Conservation treatment of a Woodburytype at The Better ImageThere will be a question and answer session following the presentations.
- Wednesday, September 29, 2021, at 6:30pm
Series: The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium
Speakers: Marie Tanner, independent scholar and author, and Edward J. Sullivan, Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art
Title: Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian's Poesie for King Philip II of Spain
learn more about "Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian's Poesie for King Philip II of Spain"Please join the Institute of Fine Arts for a conversation between author Dr. Marie Tanner and Edward J. Sullivan, Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, as they discuss Dr. Tanner's new book, Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian’s Poesie for King Philip II of Spain.
Between 1554 and 1562 Titian, the unequaled Venetian Renaissance painter, worked on his series called the Poesie - six paintings of mythological themes with deeply sensual content. They were commissioned by King Philip II of Spain and are now dispersed in museums in Europe and the United States. These works (currently together in an acclaimed exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) are key monuments of the Italian Renaissance and also served as inspiration for artists of later generations such as Peter Paul Rubens and Diego Velázquez. In her timely study, Marie Tanner offers a nuanced and often surprising reassessment of one of the great picture cycles of Western art.
Dr. Marie Tanner received a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (1976; 1970). She specialized in Renaissance Art and Architecture, studying with Erwin Panofsky, Richard Krautheimer, Ludwig Heydenreich, Colin Eisler and other distinguished Professors. She took a related minor at Columbia University in Italian Literature and Philosophy, studying with Paul Oskar Kristeller, Maristella de Panizza Lorsch and John Charles Nelson.
She is the author of Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian’s Poesie for King Philip II of Spain, London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2018; Jerusalem on the hill: Rome and the vision of Saint Peter's Basilica in the Renaissance, London & Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2010; The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993, “Titian’s Poesie for King Philip II of Spain,” (Ph.D. New York University, 1976). Her articles include “Concordia in Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ;” “Passion Booty in Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ;” Imperial Themes in Piero della Francesca’s True Cross Cycle;” and articles on Giorgione’s Fête Champêtre; Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, and several articles on St. Peter’s Basilica. Her recent talks include The Bull with the Fiery Eye: Titian’s Europa for Philip II and Statecraft (Renaissance Society of America, Boston 2017); Donatello and Lucretius (Renaissance Society of America, New York; 2014); Pope Nicholas V and Jerusalem Imagery in Mid-Quattrocento Rome (Renaissance Society of America, Venice, 2010); Lucretius and Leon Battista Alberti, (Renaissance Society of America, 2021).
She was awarded the Wittenborn Prize for The Last Descendant of Aeneas (1993) and the Kingsley Porter Prize, for “Chance and Coincidence in Titian’s Diana and Actaeon” (l974).
She received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993), and the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, (l978-79). She was the Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. in 1996.
She was Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and at Queens College of the City University of New York. She is currently an independent scholar.
Edward J. Sullivan is Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts where he is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art. His fields of research, teaching and curating concern the Americas, especially the Spanish, Portuguese and French-speaking countries of North and South American and the Caribbean, as well as Latinx art. He is the author of more than thirty monographs on art and visual cultures from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas and beyond, to the Philippines in the Spanish colonial era.
- Monday, September 13, 2021, at 6:00pm
- October
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Friday, October 8, 2021, at 6:30pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Description: This China Project Workshop will be a discussion on the Present and Future of Digital Publishing in Chinese Art and Visual Culture with Stephen H. Whiteman, The Courtauld Institute of Art; Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota; and Vivi Xie, The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. The discussion will be moderated by Michele Matteini (Department of Art History and The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU). - Tuesday, October 12, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Kim Richter, Senior Research Specialist, Getty Research Institute Title: Gobernantes de piedra: A Reinterpretation of Postclassic Huastec Sculptures
learn more about Kim Richter's talk watch Kim Richter's talk online [opens in new window]Description: The year 2021 began with surprising archaeological news—a welcome distraction from the doom and gloom of the pandemic: a spectacular Huastec sculpture had been found in the community of Hidalgo Amajac, in the municipality of Álamo Temapache, Veracruz on New Year’s Day. In their field, local farmers unearthed a stone sculpture of a woman with a towering headdress. The find quickly became a news sensation around the world, according to the INAH Veracruz archaeologist, Dr. María Eugenia Maldonado Vite, who was in charge of investigating and reporting the discovery to the INAH authorities in Mexico City. The official INAH Bulletin’s headline described the sculpture as “La primera escultura femenina prehispánica en su tipo es hallada en la Huasteca veracruzana” (The first female Pre-Hispanic sculpture of its kind is found in the Huasteca veracruzana)—a somewhat more sensational title over what Dr. Maldonado Vite had chosen for her factual report. Alejandra Frausto Guerrero, Mexico’s Secretary of Culture, furthermore hailed the sculpture as proof that women actively participated in governance of the Huasteca. This acceptance of interpreting this Huastec female sculpture as a ruler is a significant reversal of how such works have been interpreted until recently: as the goddess Tlazolteotl. It reflects the impact of recent research on the Huasteca. In this lecture, I assess the reception and interpretation of this monument by placing it in the context of the larger corpus of Huastec sculptures and argue that it indeed should be interpreted as representing the Huastec governing elite class.
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Tuesday, October 19, 2021, at 6:00pm
Title: Summer Projects Day II: Paper, Book, and Time-based Media Projects
The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of presentations from current conservation students on their summer 2021 work projects.
learn more about Summer Projects Day 2Presentations will include:
Erin Fitterer
Documenting four “Soho Eckstein Cycle” films by William Kentridge in the Brooklyn Museum’s collectionEmma Hartman
Conservation treatment of 19th-century printed materials at the American Antiquarian SocietyAlexa Machnik
Challenges and Considerations of Mounting a Large-Scale Digital Print at the Saint Louis Art MuseumShaoyi Qian
The treatment of pop-up and movable books at the University of Michigan LibraryAbigail Slawik
Conservation treatment of Hendrick Doncker’s De Zee-atlas from 1660 at the New York Public LibraryThere will be a brief question and answer session following the presentations.
- Thursday, October 21, 2021 at 12:00pm
Series: Latin American Forum
Speakers: Heloisa Espada, curator at Instituto Moreira Salles, Brazil; Francesca Ferrari, PhD candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts; and Adele Nelson, assistant professor of art history and associate director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
Title: Recasting Concretism: New Looks at Max Bill in Latin America A Panel with Heloisa Espada, Francesca Ferrari, and Adele Nelson
learn more about the Latin American ForumDescription: The Swiss artist Max Bill (1908–1994) has long been understood as a principal source for the theory and practice of Latin American abstract artists in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in Brazil and Argentina. This narrative, which pervades the literature on the history of concretism in the region, consistently casts Bill as a staunch defender of rationalism and even as the harbinger of a certain formal rigidity.
This panel challenges these assumptions, recasting Bill’s role in the shaping of Latin American concretism and reassessing his contributions in light of his Brazilian and Argentine peers’ interpretation of concrete art. It disputes the straightforward conflation of Bill’s approach to form with that of his counterparts in the region and reassesses Bill’s interest in mathematical structures in terms of irregular, non-Euclidean notions of space and the viewer’s sensory activation.
After Francesca Ferrari introduces her research for the exhibition “From Surface to Space”: Max Bill and Concrete Sculpture in Buenos Aires, on view at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), Heloisa Espada will discuss the contradictions between Bill’s positions and the narratives that describe him as a propagator of strict ideas about concrete art in her lecture “Max Bill: Radical for Whom?” Adele Nelson will then present her talk “Max Bill or Bust: Complicating Brazilian Concretism,” which will reveal how form, as conceived by Brazilian thinkers and makers, stood counter to Bill’s thinking and instead signaled an innovative merging of media.
This program is organized in conjunction with “From Surface to Space”: Max Bill and Concrete Sculpture in Buenos Aires, curated by Francesca Ferrari, at ISLAA, a complementary exhibition to max bill global at the Zentrum Paul Klee. The event will be conducted in English on Zoom, and a recording will be made available after it takes place. For information about the related panel International Dialogues in Experimental Design, presented by the Zentrum Paul Klee and ISLAA on October 14, please visit this link.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS: Heloisa Espada is curator at Instituto Moreira Salles, Brazil. She specializes in modern and contemporary Brazilian art, with a special focus on its relationship with photography. Espada is author of Hercules Barsotti (2013) and Monumentalidade e sombra: o centro cívico de Brasília por Marcel Gautherot (2016). She has organized the exhibitions Geraldo de Barros e a fotografia (2014) and Conflitos: fotografia e violência política no Brasil, 1889-1964 (2016), among others. Currently, she is fellow in the Latin American Collection Fellowship Program of the Patricia Phelps Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art in Latin America of MoMA, where she is conducting research about the Ruptura group.
Francesca Ferrari is a PhD candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she is a recipient of the Robert Lehman Fellowship for Studies in the Fine Arts. She holds an MA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in art history and English from the Université de Lausanne. Her research focuses on twentieth-century European and Latin American art. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Animated Geometries: Abstraction and the Body in the Work of Paul Klee, Sophie Taeuber, Joaquín Torres-García, and Alexandra Exter,” explores the convergence of geometric abstraction, the human body, and movement on a transnational scale during the 1920s. She has published in several graduate art history journals as well as in Afterimage and the Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin. Ferrari is the 2020/2021 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.
Adele Nelson is assistant professor of art history and associate director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in postwar and contemporary art of Latin America, with a focus on Brazil, and her writings have appeared in Art Journal, Artelogie, ARTMargins, MODOS, and various museum publications. Her new book, Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil, will appear in January 2022 in the Studies on Latin American Art series from the University of California Press. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright US Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society.
ABOUT THE LATIN AMERICAN FORUM: The Latin American Forum is a platform sustained in partnership with ISLAA that brings artists, scholars, and critics of the arts of the Americas to The Institute of Fine Arts, providing a platform for discussions and debates about diverse issues pertaining to contemporary arts and visual cultures throughout the hemisphere.
Since partnering with ISLAA in 2011, NYU’s Latin American Forum has hosted more than thirty events.
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Friday, October 22, 2021, at 10:00am
Series: Time-Based Media Lecture
Title: Copyright and Contracts in Contemporary Art
learn more about Zoë Miller's talk Watch Zoe Miller's talk online [opens in new window]Description: What kind of legal implications arise when collecting contemporary art? This presentation considers the many facets of authorship and ownership, and how they shape processes of acquisition and conservation of contemporary artworks, particularly time-based media works. The legal instruments specific to the care and preservation of these works will be discussed. Overall, the presentation reflects on how we might develop a greater understanding of the unique legal relationship between the artist and the collector, one that expands beyond a simple transaction.
Zoë Miller is an interdisciplinary researcher based in London. She holds a BA, LLB, and MA in Museum Studies from the University of Queensland, Australia, and is a PhD candidate based at Tate and Maastricht University as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA).
- Tuesday, October 26, 2021, at 6:30pm
Series: Walter W.S. Cook Lecture
Speaker: Lisa Conte, Head of Conservation, 9/11 Memorial & Museum Title: Malleable Memories and an Evolving History: Preserving the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s Collection
learn more about Preserving the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s Collection" Watch Lisa Conte's talk online [opens in new window]Description: A distinguishing feature of many objects in the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s collection is that they preserve truths about the lives of the people they intersected with. They also provide an entry point for understanding the grief, discontinuity, and eventual hope that ensued after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Objects vary widely in medium and inherent condition and include evidence of the atrocity, memorial and tribute items, artworks, and historical records, documenting a day that changed the world. Some represent the culmination of a rapid-response collecting initiative that began within days of the event. In New York City, this enterprise preserved examples of the community response and objects recovered from the Ground Zero disaster site. These efforts were made even though there was no way of knowing, at that point, exactly what role these artifacts would play in the remembrance of this history.
Preserving artifacts in the collection is complicated. Often there are no ideal aesthetics to strive for. To the contrary, physical wear, dust, and visible evidence of trauma can add, rather than detract, from an object’s historical and emotional resonance. Determining what aspects of an object are significant, and what, if anything, warrants intervention, requires careful study, as any alteration can directly shape a still evolving history. Engaging with stakeholders outside the museum realm who are fluent with the details of this fateful event and those it claimed or scarred is essential. But even then, the process is imperfect. Memories of traumatic events can be fallible. And our interpretation of things can change.
Highlighting illustrative examples, this talk will consider how the Museum’s preservation strategies attempt to maintain the authenticity and humanity of objects that illustrate a very complex history, from the lives of those killed to the way people came together in inspiring ways as they faced a collective traumatic experience. It will also consider how working with a collection born of an act of contemporary terrorism can affect us as museum professionals.
Lisa Conte is the Head of Conservation at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. She specializes in the conservation of modern and contemporary works on paper, and has previously held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Scott Gerson Conservation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received her BA in English and Studio Art from William Smith College and an MA in Art History and an Advanced Certificate in Conservation from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Her current research interests include the ethical considerations related to the preservation of spontaneous memorials.
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Thursday, October 28, 2021, at 6:30pm
Series: Ancient Art and Archaeology Title: Daedalus, Knossos and the Beginnings of Greek Sculpture
Speaker: Antonis Kotsonas, Associate Professor of Mediterranean History and Archaeology, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
learn more about Antonis Kotsonas's talkDescription: Ancient tradition associated early Greek sculpture with the legendary master craftsman Daedalus, who was based at Knossos, Crete. This tradition inspired scholars of the early 20th century to believe that the beginnings of Greek monumental sculpture should be sought in Crete. The idea drew support from the then recent discovery of a 7th century BCE temple with rich sculptural decoration at the central Cretan site of Prinias, which is still considered widely as the earliest Greek temple with architectural sculpture. The travels of Daedalus and his pupils were taken to have disseminated the art across the Aegean and the Mediterranean. This interpretative model grew unpopular over time, but current discussions of Greek sculpture still highlight the early evidence from Crete. Both dated and current approaches to early Greek sculpture, however, typically overlook a set of important, yet little-known monuments from Knossos. Bringing together old but previously overlooked finds and new discoveries from the site, my lecture reveals an exceptionally rich tradition of early Greek sculpture. It also investigates the interaction of the Knossian workshop with sculptural traditions from elsewhere in Crete, the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean, and revisits the significance of the Knossian and other Cretan evidence for the beginnings of Greek sculpture.
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Friday, October 8, 2021, at 6:30pm
- November
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Wednesday, November 3, 2021, at 3:00pm
Series: Time-Based Media Lecture
Title: Video Sculpture in Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality at MoMA: Collaboration, Conservation, and Care
learn more about Video SculptureDescription: The exhibition Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality features a selection of groundbreaking video sculptures made between 1976-85, presented together for the first time in thirty years. Positioned by the artist between “reality and mirage,” the conservation and care of these multilayered works pose a compelling set of concerns, activating questions that typically pertain to disparate classifications of art: unique sculptural objects, variable media, and conceptual propositions. In this virtual roundtable, Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance at MoMA will be joined by conservators Amy Brost, Lia Kramer, and Andy Wolf to discuss how the Museum prepared two sculptures from its collection for display and collaboratively developed a plan to care for loaned works during the exhibition, in close consultation with the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation. Jochen Saueracker, the Foundation’s archive director, will speak about the Foundation’s recent conservation initiatives, including the realization of new iterations. Through an examination of the varied strategies explored by the Museum and the Foundation, and how they intersect, overlap, and inform one another, we can gain a deeper understanding of the rigorous and poetic concepts at the heart of Kubota’s artistic practice.
What kind of legal implications arise when collecting contemporary art? This presentation considers the many facets of authorship and ownership, and how they shape processes of acquisition and conservation of contemporary artworks, particularly time-based media works. The legal instruments specific to the care and preservation of these works will be discussed. Overall, the presentation reflects on how we might develop a greater understanding of the unique legal relationship between the artist and the collector, one that expands beyond a simple transaction.
Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance, The Museum of Modern Art Erica Papernik-Shimizu is a founding member of the Department of Media and Performance, where she plays an active role in shaping best practices for the stewardship of the Museum’s time-based media collection. She has organized and contributed to numerous exhibitions, collection presentations, and projects, including the MoMA PS1 presentation of the touring exhibition Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting (organized by Sabine Breitwieser, 2017), Tony Oursler: Imponderable (co-organized with Stuart Comer, 2016), and Images of an Infinite Film (2013-14). She holds an M.A. in History of Art from University College London and a B.A. in History of Art from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Amy Brost, Assistant Media Conservator, The David Booth Conservation Department, The Museum of Modern Art Amy Brost works with the Media and Performance collection as well as with the Museum's digital repository for art. She earned an M.A. in Art History and an M.S. in Conservation from New York University, a B.S. in Art and a B.A. in Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an A.S. in Chemistry from New York City College of Technology. During her conservation training she worked with time-based media collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has been an adjunct instructor in NYU's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation graduate program and has taught in several workshops on the care of media art.
Lia Kramer, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Media Conservation, The David Booth Conservation Department, The Museum of Modern Art Lia Kramer holds an M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology, an M.S. in Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting from Georgia State University. She has previously worked on time-based media conservation projects for institutions including Tate, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Lia has been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Media Conservation at MoMA since November 2019 and will complete the final year of her fellowship at the Brooklyn Museum.
Andy Wolf, David Booth Fellow in Objects Conservation, The David Booth Conservation Department, The Museum of Modern Art Andy Wolf earned his M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology and M.S. in the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, specializing in objects, from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2020. He has completed conservation internships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Excavation of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods in Samothrace, Greece.
Jochen Saueracker, Artist, Curator, and Director of Archive, Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation Jochen Saueracker studied physics at the Ruhr Universität Bochum and visual arts and sculpture at the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf with Prof. Guenther Uecker. He lives and works in Duesseldorf, Germany. In 1983 he met Shigeko Kubota and Nam June Paik and became a friend and collaborator for the following decades. He was responsible for the realization of many large-scale artworks and was responsible for the planning and the installation of many museum exhibitions and biennial participations around the world. Since the late 1990s he has been consulting for museums and private collections to find solutions for the restoration and conservation of video-based artworks. In 2015 he became a founding member of the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation.
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Thursday, November 4, 2021, at 6:00pm
Title: Celebrating a New Book by Matthew Hayes: The Renaissance Restored
Description: Join Institute alumnus Matthew Hayes in conversation with colleagues Davide Gasparotto, Dorothy Mahon, and Dianne Modestini to present his new book, The Renaissance Restored: Paintings Conservation and the Birth of Modern Art History in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
learn more about Matthew Hayes' bookMichele Marincola will introduce the event. The Renaissance Restoredchronicles paintings restoration in nineteenth-century Europe, exploring connections between conservation practice and art history writing. Its first chapters consider the material histories of works by Giotto and Titian in relation to pioneering texts that defined the earlier golden age, those by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt among them. Later chapters recount the integration of paintings conservation into museums: at the National Gallery in London under the direction of Charles Eastlake and in Berlin under Wilhelm Bode. The book proposes an updated model for conservation history that is object focused yet enriched by a wider cultural context. It incorporates period texts, unpublished archival materials, and historical photographs to probe how paintings looked and were changed as scholars composed the foundational texts of art history.
We are delighted to offer a discount for this new publication - please use code: GPRR21 for 20% off at shop.getty.edu. For orders made outside the U.S. and Canada, please use code: G2021 for 20% off at yalebooks.co.uk. Discount expires 31 December 2021.
Matthew Hayes (MA/CC 2003, PhD 2017) is a paintings conservator in New York, where he directs the Pietro Edwards Society for Art Conservation. He previously worked at the collective Atelier Gerhard Walde and the Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein, both in Vienna, Austria. His research interests include the history of conservation and technical studies of works of art. Past publications have considered the philosophical implications of the transfer of paintings, Alois Riegl’s conservation theory, and the painting technique of Titian and of Botticelli.
Davide Gasparotto is Senior Curator of Paintings, and Chair, Curatorial Affairs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. A native of Bassano del Grappa, Italy, he studied the History of Art and Classical Archaeology at the University of Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore. He was the Director of the Fondazione Piero della Francesca in Sansepolcro from 1996 to 1998. Afterword he spent 12 years as a curator at the National Gallery of Parma and the Soprintendenza ai Beni Artistici e Storici di Parma e Piacenza. From 2012 to 2014 he was Director of the Galleria Estense in Modena. In December 2014 he was appointed as Senior Curator of Paintings at the Getty Museum. He was also a Francis A. Yates Fellow at the Warburg Institute, London (1999), Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (2007), and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011-2012). Davide’s research interests include painting, sculpture and the decorative arts of the Renaissance, the rediscovery of classical antiquity between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, and the history of collecting.
Dorothy Mahon is Conservator in the Department of Paintings Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she conserves paintings spanning the collection, with particular emphasis on the technical examination and restoration of European paintings of the 15th to the 19th centuries, and North American paintings of the 17th to the 19th centuries. She received her Master's degree in the History of Art and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Conservation from The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Dianne Modestini graduated from Barnard College in 1968 with a BA in Art History and obtained an MA in Conservation from the State University of New York in 1973. She received a Doctor of Humanities honorary degree from Fairfield University in 2017. She has been on the board of the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence since 1996. From 1974-1987 she was a member of the Department of Paintings Conservation of the Metropolitan Museum. In 1983 she became the consultant for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, where she met her husband, Mario Modestini, and left the museum a few years later. Since 1988 she has taught at the Conservation Center of the IFA, NYU where she founded the Kress Program in Paintings Conservation. She is presently head of that program and Clinical Professor Emerita. She has trained almost sixty students over the past 22 years. Her publications include a study of the work of John Kensett; “John Brealey and the Cleaning of Paintings”; papers on works from the Kress Collection; and some publications and numerous lectures on The Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, for which she also created a website for the painting, “Salvator Mundi Rediscovered” where scholars could access information about the painting. In 2018 she published Masterpieces, and the Italian edition, Capolavori, a book based on a fragmentary memoir by her late husband, the distinguished restorer, Mario Modestini. She is working on a paper on the relationship between the Naples version of the Salvator Mundi and the original and hopes to propose an attribution.
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Monday, November 8, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium
Speakers: Margaret E. Connors McQuade, Deputy Director and Curator of Decorative Arts of The Hispanic Society Museum & Library and Edward J. Sullivan, Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art
Title: Búcaros de las Indias: the European Craze for Burnished Pottery of the Americas
learn more about the European Craze for Burnished Pottery of the AmericasBúcaros de las Indias describes the burnished pottery traditions of Mexico, Panama, and Chile that were among the most highly prized ceramic wares of some of the great Europe noble collections during the 17th and 18th centuries. While similar Portuguese búcaros were also collected at this time, búcaros de las Indias were especially coveted for their exotic forms as well as their aromatic, evaporative, gastronomic, and medicinal qualities. Búcaros appear in Spanish and viceregal 17th and 18th century paintings and are described by many contemporary writers. The Florentine scholar and scientist Lorenzo Magalotti (1637-1712) was perhaps the greatest admirer of the búcaros tradition, having spent years observing European collections and forming a collection of his own. His account, therefore, provides wonderful insight into the craze for the ceramic wares. This lecture will look at the production and circulation of the diverse wares and offer new insights through close analysis of the Hispanic Society collections as well as examples found in other museum collections and archaeological excavations.
Margaret E. Connors McQuade is the Deputy Director and Curator of Decorative Arts of The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, where she has worked since 1993. In 2005, she received her Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center at CUNY. In addition to a series of small-scale exhibitions at the Hispanic Society, Margaret curated the exhibitions, Talavera Poblana: Four Centuries of a Mexican Ceramic Tradition (Americas Society 1999), and Alcora en New York: La colección de cerámica de Alcora (Museo de Bellas Artes de Castellón de la Plana, and Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia, 2005). She also has contributed to a number of exhibition catalogues, including, Visions of the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society of America. As Deputy Director, she is charged with overseeing capital projects at the Hispanic Society.
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Tuesday, November 9, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Nawa Sugiyama, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside
Title: The Power and Agency of Corporal Animal Forms: Ritualized Animals from Copan, Honduras
learn more about Nawa Sugiyama Watch Nawa Sugiyama's talk online [opens in new window]Description: Throughout Mesoamerica, corporal animal forms (a term encompassing live animals, animal-derived by-products, and artifacts made from animal bodies) were ascribed with proprietary agency. They were important mediators of power, were integral to the social identity of their users, and encapsulated contemporary sociopolitical circumstances. A zooarchaeological and isotopic investigation of three ritual deposits at the Classic Maya center of Copan, Honduras (AD 426-82) demonstrates the processes by which corporal animal forms were prominent actors in the ritual arena through a formal process of commingling and translating animal body parts, in some cases materializing prominent actors of world-creation (Starry Deer-Crocodile), and in others reifying regal power ascribed to felids to the 16th and final ruler of Copan through extravagant ritual sacrifice.
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Wednesday, November 10, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: Archaeological Excavations at Samothrace
Title: Current Research Initiatives in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace
learn more about Bonna D. Wescoat's talkDescription: In this lecture, Bonna D. Wescoat will present the team's current research initiatives centered on the interaction of landscape, architecture, materiality and human movement, which, aided by the use of 3D modeling, are reshaping our understanding of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace.
Bonna D. Wescoat is Director of Excavations in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace, a project jointly sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts of NYU and Emory University. Wescoat, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History at Emory University, currently serves as the Interim Director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum.
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Friday, November 12, 2021, at 6:30pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Description: Hui-wen Lu, Graduate Institute of Art History, National Taiwan University, will present on Reliving History and Shaping Memory: Tang Remains and Song Scholars in the Old Capital Chang’an. The discussion will be moderated by Jonathan Hay (The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU).
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Monday, November 15, 2021, at 6:00pm
Title: Summer Projects Day III: Objects and Paintings Conservation Projects
The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to our final evening of presentations from current conservation students on their summer 2021 work projects.
learn more about the summer projctsRSVP required for summer projects [opens in new window]Presentations will include:
Adrienne Gendron
Objects Conservation at the Alaska State MuseumAmeya Grant In the Field: The Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, Turkey
Isabelle Lobley
Locked and Loaded: Firearms Conservation at the Buffalo Bill Center of the WestKayla Metelenis
Close looking: conservation treatment and teaching at the Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumLaura Richter
Conserving the Garnsey Murals at the St. Louis Art MuseumRuth Waddington
A Summer with the Kress Collection: Conserving a 13th Century Sienese DossalThere will be a brief question and answer session following the final presentation.
- Tuesday, November 16, 2021, at 6:30pm
Series: The Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium
Speakers: Florina H. Capistrano-Baker, consulting curator and special projects consultant, the Ayala Museum (Philippines), and Edward J. Sullivan, Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art
Title: Transpacific Engagements: Transcultural Entanglements and Philippine Visual Culture
learn more about Florina H. Capistrano-Baker's talkRSVP required for Florina H. Capistrano-Baker talk [opens in new window]Description: This talk will attempt to illuminate the Philippines’ transcultural artistic heritage formed by centuries of maritime engagements with diverse cultures in Asia, the Americas, and Europe. The arrival of Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth century extended early trade networks in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, stretching these ancient routes across the Pacific to Latin America, thence to Europe. With Manila as the fulcrum of this early global exchange popularly known as the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade (1565-1815), local societies exchanged raw materials, finished products, art works, concepts, and language in multi-directional circulations of culture that mutated in myriad ways.
Florina H. Capistrano-Baker will argue that defining Philippine art and identity is not simply a matter of peeling away cultural layers, for the essence of Filipino-ness is imbricated in the intertwined layers of external stimuli as Asian, European, and American empires successively and/or simultaneously attempted to draw the archipelago into their rival spheres, creating cultural entanglements that have become intrinsic to Philippine visual culture. Specifically, she will discuss recently available archaeological gold objects that demonstrate close links to Hindu-Buddhist South and Southeast Asian neighbors before Spanish colonization and conversion to Christianity; and examine how these pre-colonial traditions gave way to Hispano-Filipino iterations of intersecting Indigenous concepts and newly introduced European ideas.
Florina H. Capistrano-Baker received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She was formerly museum director of the Ayala Museum (Philippines) where she is currently consulting curator and special projects consultant. Since 2000, her research has focused on Philippine specificities within a metanarrative of global exchange between the 10th-13th and 16th-19th centuries. Her book Philippine Ancestral Gold (NUS Press and Ayala Foundation, 2011) documents previously unpublished material suggesting early trade with neighbors in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In 2015 she co-curated the exhibition “Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms” at the Asia Society Museum and wrote the exhibition catalogue of the same title (Asia Society, 2015). She is co-editor with Meha Priyadarshini of the volume Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires, 1565-1898 recently published by Ayala Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (2020).
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Wednesday, November 17, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor In Conservation Lecture
Title: Pictures at an Exhibition: The Perception of Color in the Museum Environment
Speaker: Steven Weintraub
learn more about Steven Weintraub's talk RSVP required for Steven Weintraub's talk [opens in new window]When we listen to different performances of a musical score, we hear the same notes, but our experience of the music varies with each rendition. Although there is no single “correct” way to perform the score, there are many ways to diminish the quality of the experience. Similarly, as we view pictures at an exhibition, the conditions of the exhibition will have a major impact on our experience of the works of art on display. Steven Weintraub will highlight key factors that influence the appearance of colors and explore options to improve the visitor’s experience of “pictures at an exhibition."
Steven Weintraub is the founder and Principal of Art Preservation Services (APS), established in 1988. He specializes in the preservation of museum collections. In addition to environmental consultation work for museums, he has done pioneering research in the areas of museum lighting and museum microclimates. The primary focus of his research on perception of color is to provide a scientific basis for establishing a balance between the need to minimize light-induced damage on artworks without sacrificing the qualitative experience of viewing art in a museum setting. Weintraub holds a B.A from Colgate University, and an M.A. in Art History and a Certificate in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
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Tuesday, November 23, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: Artists at the Institute
Speaker: Sarah Oppenheimer
Title: FE_20211123 Radiant Points
learn more about Sarah Oppenheimer's talk RSVP required for Sarah Oppenheimers talk [opens in new window]Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator. Transforming a museum visitor into an agent of spatial change, Oppenheimer creates a field of action within the time-based system of a living building.
Recent solo projects include Sensitive Machine (Welling Museum 2021), N-01 (Kunstmuseum Thun 2020), S-337473 (Mass MoCA 2019), S-337473 (Wexner Center for the Arts 2017), S-281913 (Pérez Art Museum Miami 2016), S-399390 (MUDAM Luxembourg 2016) and 33-D (Kunsthaus Baselland 2014).Her work has been exhibited at such venues as ZKM, the Baltimore Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Art Unlimited at Art Basel, the Mattress Factory; the Drawing Center; and the Sculpture Center. Oppenheimer is currently a senior critic at the Yale University School of Art.
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Tuesday, November 30, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Latin American Forum
Title: José Antonio Fernández-Muro and Sarah Grilo Reconsidered: Argentine Abstraction in the United States
A Panel with Karen Grimson, Megan Kincaid, Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolívar, and Delia Solomons
Moderated by Edward J. Sullivan
learn more about "Argentine Abstraction in the United States" RSVP required for "Argentine Abstraction in the United States" [opens in new window]Description: During their lifetimes, Argentine artists Sarah Grilo (1919–2007) and José Antonio Fernández-Muro (1920–2014) made significant contributions to global abstraction. Forming part of a generation of artists working in Buenos Aires following the emergence of concrete art in the 1940s, this married couple offered distinct stylistic contributions that helped expand the genre. Their work was shown internationally, and they served as emissaries of the Argentine avant-garde at notable exhibitions and biennials. At the height of their prominence in Argentina, Grilo and Fernández-Muro relocated to New York in 1962, where they continued to push abstraction beyond its previous boundaries.
This panel will present new scholarship on the activity of Grilo and Fernández-Muro in New York, considering both their individual artistic developments and their role in relation to Latin American art’s reception in the United States during the 1960s. Grappling with existing interpretations of their careers that celebrate their time in New York as a breakthrough moment, this panel will examine their achievements through alternate methodological and historical approaches that displace the center-periphery narrative, while also considering questions of race, nationality, and gender.
In her presentation, Megan Kincaid will introduce her research for the exhibition José Antonio Fernández-Muro: Geometry in Transfer at ISLAA, locating the New York years within Grilo’s and Fernández-Muro’s sweeping careers. Delia Solomons will then contextualize how their work circulated within the surge of survey exhibitions dedicated to Latin American art in the United States amid inter-American Cold War frictions between 1959 and 1968. In his lecture, Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolivar will trace the evolution of the circle as a geometric and figurative device across Fernández-Muro’s New York paintings. Karen Grimson will then present on Grilo’s work from 1962 to 1970, explicating how her use of language, initiated during her New York residency, functioned as a proclamation of discursive agency. The presentations will be followed by a discussion moderated by Edward J. Sullivan.
The program is organized in conjunction with José Antonio Fernández-Muro: Geometry in Transfer, curated by Megan Kincaid, at ISLAA. The event will be conducted in English on Zoom, and a recording will be made available after it takes place.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Karen Grimson is an art historian specializing in Latin American abstraction. She holds a degree in art history from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and an MA from the Courtauld Institute, London. Between 2011 and 2020, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, developing acquisitions and exhibitions of art from Latin America. Her writings on the work of Sarah Grilo have been published by ISLAA and Galerie Lelong, Paris. She also contributed articles to the publications Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern, Being Modern, and MoMA Highlights, as well as the online portals MoMA Magazine and post: notes on art in a global context.
Megan Kincaid is an art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art. She is currently an adjunct instructor at New York University and a PhD candidate at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She holds a BA in art history from Columbia University, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. Kincaid co-curated the exhibitions Cauleen Smith, H-E-L-L-O: To Do All At Once (2021) and Fanny Sanín’s New York: The Critical Decade, 1971–1981 (2020–21), both at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and assisted with the curation of Charles White: A Retrospective (2018–19) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of Modern Art and New York University, among others, have published her writing. Most recently, she organized an exhibition of early drawings by Susan Te Kahurangi King and published an essay on new sculptures by Daniel Lind-Ramos.
Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolívar is a PhD candidate at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He focuses on modern Latin American art and artistic exchanges between Europe and Latin America. Born in Bogotá, Juan Gabriel received his BA in history at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. In 2013, he was granted an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship to study at the master’s program in comparative history at Charles University in Prague and social sciences at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. At the Institute, he has organized numerous events with IFA Latin America and has been part of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Lapis: The Journal of the Institute of Fine Arts.
Delia Solomons is assistant professor of art history at Drexel University. She specializes in modern and contemporary art of the Americas, focusing on intersections between exhibitions, politics, and visual culture in the 1960s. Her research has appeared in Art Bulletin, MoMA’s post: notes on art in a global context, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States. Her book xCold War in the White Cube: U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art (1959–68) will be published by Penn State University Press in 2023. Her most recent research is devoted to Marisol’s sculpture.
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
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Wednesday, November 3, 2021, at 3:00pm
- December
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Wednesday, December 1, 2021, at 3:00pm
Series: Time-Based Media Lecture
Title: Perspectives from a Private Collection: How the Thoma Foundation Collects and Conserves Digital, Video and Media Art
learn more about How the Thoma Foundation Collects and Conserves Digital, Video and Media Art RSVP required for How the Thoma Foundation Collects and Conserves Digital, Video and Media Art [opens in new window]Description: The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, founded in 2014, confronts conservation and display challenges by actively performing solutions on its growing collection of 336 artworks by 176 artists in Digital, Video and Media Art. This talk brings together the Foundation’s collection care team and founder to share insights on how they collaborate with each other, artists, and other experts. Collector Carl Thoma discusses why certain artworks draw his attention, and how he is supporting programs that serve to strengthen the sustainability and appreciation of art and technology. Curator Jason Foumberg reviews the Foundation’s thematic approach to exhibitions, and the direction of its acquisition program. Collections Manager Kate Weinstein explores technical, preparatory and conservation issues across the Foundation’s spectrum of vintage and emerging technologies. Thomafoundation.org
Carl D. Thoma is an art collector, philanthropist, and managing partner and founder of Thoma Bravo, LLC. An early player in the field of venture capital beginning with Golder, Thoma in 1980, Carl has applied his eye for entrepreneurial talent to collecting Modern and Contemporary paintings, and most recently in the fields of Digital Art and Light & Space.
In his chosen profession, Carl has been acknowledged in The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Fortune for his investment leadership. He has chaired the National Venture Capital Association and the Illinois Venture Capital Association, and served on the boards of Illinois Institute of Technology and Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council. He is currently on the Boards of the McKnight Center for the Performing Arts, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and SITE Santa Fe; is a member of the Blanton National Leadership Board; and is a commissioner for the National Portrait Gallery. Carl Thoma earned his bachelor’s degree from Oklahoma State University and his MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
Kate Weinstein is the Collections Manager & Registrar at the Thoma Foundation, and is based in Chicago, IL. Kate oversees the collection care for the Foundation’s five collection areas, including the Digital & Media Art collection. Along with this, Kate oversees the Foundation’s policies and procedures for conservation, storage, shipping, loans, and acquisitions. She received her MA in Modern Art History, Theory + Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2012) where she wrote her thesis on animated GIFs.
Jason Foumberg is the Thoma Foundation Curator of Digital & Media Art. Since 2014, he has curated annual exhibitions at the Foundation’s public spaces in Santa Fe and Chicago, as well as touring exhibits of digital art with U.S. museum partners. Jason advises on the Foundation’s art collection and grant programs. He is based in Chicago, Illinois.
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Monday, December 6, 2021, at 6:00pm
Series: Archaeological Excavations at Aphrodisias
Title: New Discoveries at Aphrodisias in 2021
learn more about New Discoveries at Aphrodisias in 2021 RSVP required for "New Discoveries at Aphrodisias in 2021" [opens in new window]Description: Join us to hear from Roland R. R. Smith about the most recent work carried out by NYU-IFA at Aphrodisias in southwest Turkey, in collaboration with Oxford University. Aphrodisias is one of the most important sites of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean, with superbly preserved public buildings and monuments. Marble-carving was a noted Aphrodisian specialty in antiquity, and the excavated remains of the city’s statues, sarcophagi, and architectural reliefs are both abundant and of spectacular quality.
In spite of COVID and terrible fires across Turkey, the team was able to carry out a rewarding nine-week research season at Aphrodisias last summer that produced a lot of exciting results. The headline achievements were in the Civil Basilica and Tetrapylon Street, and much other good work was done for the Sebasteion, the Place of Palms, and our marble sarcophagi. There were important new finds – most dramatic, a new late antique philosopher bust.
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Tuesday, December 7, 2021, at 6:30pm
Series: Ancient Art and Archaeology
Title: Sign and Sense in Mid-Republican Rome
Speaker: Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Associate Professor of Classics, Princeton University
learn more about "Sign and Sense in Mid-Republican Rome" RSVP required for "Sign and Sense in Mid-Republican Rome" [opens in new window]Description: This lecture will preview a manuscript in progress on the semiotics of the Roman Middle Republic. Inspired in conception and execution by Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij's The Semiotics of Russian Culture, the manuscript scrutinizes those sign systems through which Romans and becoming-Romans of the Middle Republic communicated with each other and with the wider social and naturecultural world. For this lecture, I will focus on two sign systems: (1) divine figural representations (2) human names. Although each of these sign systems privileges particular media for their routing of communications, what I will emphasize through several case studies is the multi- and intermediality of mid-republican Roman culture.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where he is associated with the Department of African American Studies and affiliated with the Programs in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015) and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (PUP 2020); and he has co-edited Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (CUP 2017). Current projects include a study of 338 BCE and the origins of Roman imperialism (co-authored with Denis Feeney and under contract with HUP), A People’s History of Rome (under contract with PUP), a volume on new approaches to the Middle Roman Republic (co-edited with Seth Bernard and Lisa Mignone), and a manifesto on race and racism in the disciplinary identity of Classics (co-authored with Sasha-Mae Eccleston). He has written for the public-facing Classics journal Eidolon and published pieces for The Guardian, Matter, Vox, the NYT, Fabulist, and diaphanes.
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Wednesday, December 1, 2021, at 3:00pm
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates. Many of our recent lectures are available to watch online in our events archive. If you wish to receive information on our upcoming events in your inbox, please subscribe to our mailing list.