Public Programs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Black Visual Culture.

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.

This presentation addresses how 1930s avant-garde artists and radical activists shifted from an aesthetic and political strategy of "creative destruction" to one of "creative conservation" in response to the rise of fascism. This shift had a profound global impact, making the Spanish Civil War one of the earliest cases of a transnational approach to conservation and a pivotal moment in the development of the concept of World Heritage. To explore this, two case studies are explored: the protection of Madrid monuments during the war and the reenactment of that protection in two contemporary installations.

Miguel Caballero holds a PhD from Princeton University. He was Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago before joining Northwestern University as Assistant Professor of Iberian Studies. His first book, The Monument of Tomorrow: Creative Conservation and the Spanish War, is coming up with Penn State University Press in July. The book is a critical analysis of how avant-garde artists, as well as radical liberals, anarchists, and communists shifted from an aesthetic and political strategy of "creative destruction" to one of "creative conservation" in response to the rise of fascism. He is currently transitioning to a second research area in medical humanities, with a particular focus on HIV/AIDS studies.

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-coordinator 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.

In partnership with NYU ArchaeoHub, the Ancient Seminar is delighted to present the second in a series of talks on archaeological projects across the university. The city of Bukhara was once a key node along the fabled “Silk Roads.” Yet, compared to other Central Asian cities of comparable importance, the systematic archaeological investigation of Bukhara lags considerably behind. This is now rapidly changing thanks to excavations conducted since 2020 by the Uzbek-American Expedition to Bukhara, co-directed by Jamal K. Mirzaakhmedov and the presenter in a recently cleared area of ca. 0.8 ha next to the city’s citadel and congregational mosque.

Five extensive seasons of archaeological fieldwork have yielded a veritable treasure trove of new information about Bukhara’s long and complex history. This presentation will introduce new data derived from finds and observations made at a series of fortifications, various kinds of dwellings, workshops, as well as burial contexts – all encountered in the excavation area. They speak to a wide range of historical phenomena and problems, such as the potential existence of a Seleucid military colony in the area of the later city during the 3rd century BCE, the roots and stages of Bukhara’s urban growth as an important node within the Sogdiana trading networks during Late Antiquity (3rd to 8th centuries CE), transcontinental connections during the city’s heyday under the Samanid dynasty during the 10th century, and the health status of the urban populace at the eve of the Mongol invasion (late 12th/early 13th century).

Sören Stark is Professor of Central Asian Archaeology at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He received his PhD in 2005 at the University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) with a dissertation on the history and archaeology of Turk Empire in Central Eurasia between the 6th and 8th centuries CE. His publications include two monographs, an exhibition catalogue, and more than 70 single and co-authored articles and book chapters. He is co-editor of Brill's Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8: Uralic & Central Asian Studies (HO8), and member of the advisory board for the journals Studies in Late Antiquity, Silk Roads Archaeology and Heritage, and O’zbekiston Arxeologiyasi (Archaeology of Uzbekistan).

Stark has more than twenty years of experience in co-directing archaeological fieldwork in Central Asia (Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). Since 2011 he hass co-directed the Uzbek-American Expedition to Bukhara, which is currently conducting multidisciplinary investigations at the Final Bronze Age site of Kimirek-kum 1 in the relict delta of the Zerafshan river (now part of the Kyzyl-kum desert), and in the old city center of Bukhara, exploring contexts dating between the late Achaemenid period and the Mongol invasion. His previous fieldwork in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan focused on Bronze Age petroglyphs, Iron Age kurgans, early medieval fortresses, and pre-Mongol high-mountain settlements.

This talk is part of the 2024-2025 NYU ArchaeoHub Lecture Series. Each year we invite three members of our NYU archaeological community to speak about their current projects. These talks take place across units—one each at ISAW, the IFA, and Arts and Science, in an effort to build connections and create shared conversations around innovations in the field that speak across disciplines, geographies and timescales. We also invite one internationally renowned speaker from beyond our campus, who works in an area not currently represented by our faculty and whose vision encourages further innovation on our campus.

NYU ArchaeoHub is a University-Wide Initiative that links the university’s archaeological resources, including people, projects, lab equipment, events and educational opportunities. Our research cluster connects over 60 faculty and staff members, Research Associates and doctoral students working at multiple Centers, Institutes and Departments across NYU. Collaboration being a key feature of the hub, we foster cross-pollination and collaboration on field projects on 4 continents and in 20 countries, analyzing the human condition amidst the natural landscape over more than 16,000 years of sociocultural practice.

This lecture discusses the Hellenistic necropoleis of Alexandria in Egypt: the tombs, the finds, the paintings, Greco-Egyptian ideas on death and dying. We will be exploring Macedonian responses to death and dying, as well as the ways Macedonian mortuary habits were transmitted, transposed, developed and “edited”, once the Macedonians found themselves on top of the world, and in lands so different from their own. From Macedon to Asia and Egypt, and from Aigai and Mieza to Shatby, Macedonians had to renegotiate their fundamental beliefs on death and the afterlife, committing themselves to the amalgam we now understand as “Ptolemaic Alexandria".

Dimitris Plantzos is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is the author of Greek Art and Archaeology, 1200–30 BC (2016) and The Art of Painting in Ancient Greece (2018). In 2012, he co-edited The Blackwell Companion to Greek Art with Professor Tyler Jo Smith. He currently serves as Director of the BA Program in Archaeology, History, and Literature in Ancient Greece, offered by the School of Philosophy at Athens University.

The site of Abydos in southern Egypt is one of the richest archaeological landscapes in the world, a place of exquisitely carved temples, cemeteries spanning millennia, and townsites that give us access to the daily life of ancient Egyptians. Much of the long history of this site directly reflected the significance that ancient Egyptians themselves accorded to it because of its connection to Egypt’s earliest kings. It was Abydos that saw the burials of the people who came to rule all of Egypt in its first unification and where kingship was defined through the construction of the earliest monumental buildings in the Nile valley. When later pilgrims came to Abydos to dedicate stelae and take part in the mysteries of the god Osiris, it was this connection with ancestral kingship that they celebrated. The Institute of Fine Arts has been conducting excavations at Abydos for nearly three decades, with a particular focus on the temples built by the kings of the First and Second Dynasties. This lecture will present an overview of the landscape, history, and importance of Abydos overall, detail how IFA excavations have helped us understand this amazing site, and outline plans for future work. Please celebrate with us as we launch a new chapter in the IFA’s exploration of early Egypt.

Laurel Bestock is the Executive Director of Excavations at Abydos and a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. An alumna of the IFA’s PhD program, she has directed excavations both at Abydos and at the Middle Kingdom fortress site of Uronarti, Sudan. Her interests include the contexts and audiences for ancient art and architecture, the development of royal ideology, and the relationship between institutions and individuals in pharaonic Egypt. In addition to her role at the IFA she is an Associate Professor of Archaeology and Egyptology at Brown University.

This Silberberg lecture invites us to look—again and closely— toward a deeper recognition of Black gay intellectual and aesthetic traditions, and the place of the visual (arts and artists) within ‘Black gay habits of mind’ that emerge from the conditions and structures of feeling of the long 1980s. Here, through a meditation on visual art and film discussed in my latest book; and the work of brothers Lyle Ashton Harris (photographer) and Thomas Allen Harris (filmmaker, photographer) we consider two of the salient features of Black gay habits of mind: 1 the impulse to collect, ‘save culture’ and archive; and 2 the commitment to represent dynamic difference, multiplicity, and complexity, which I call an ‘anthological’ practice.

Jafari Sinclaire Allen is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University: where he is the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), and editor-in-chief of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society.

The author of the award-winning There’s a disco ball between us: a theory of Black gay life (2022), and ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba— both published by Duke University Press—and the editor of the GLQ special issue Black/Queer/Diaspora, Dr. Allen has published in numerous journals and anthologies. His scholarship and teaching have opened new lines of inquiry and offered re‐invigorated methods of Black feminist narrative theorizing, and praxis, in Black Studies as well as anthropology and queer studies. Engaged in ethnographic research in Cuba and the Caribbean for more than twenty years, recent research has also taken him to East Africa, Brazil, and Western Europe.

Join us for the 2025 Annual Paul Lott Lecture, which features the work of esteemed art historians, who are among the most respected curators and museum professionals in the industry. We are honored to welcome Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, to be in conversation with Erich Kessel Jr., Assistant Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts.

Thelma Golden is the Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the world’s leading institution devoted to visual arts by artists of African descent. She began her career in 1987 as a fellow at the Studio Museum, then joined the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988. Golden returned to the Studio Museum in 2000 as the Deputy Director for exhibitions and programs and was named the Director and Chief Curator in 2005. Golden serves on the board of directors for the Barack Obama Foundation, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2010, she was appointed to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House by President Barack Obama. She holds a B.A. in Art History and African American Studies from Smith College.

Erich Kessel Jr. researches and teaches theoretical and historical approaches to the relationship between antiblackness and the visual, with a focus on art and media since the 1970s. His work engages questions of slavery; political economy; aesthetics; art historical method; gender and sexuality; psychoanalysis and libidinal economy; and mediation. Assembling tools from a range of disciplines, his current writing explores how the racial violence of representation has shaped the concept, production and social function of the image. Kessel completed a PhD in History of Art and African-American Studies with a certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. In addition to receiving a fellowship from the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fund, his work has been previously supported by the Whitney Independent Study Program’s Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellowship and the Mellon Mays Fellowship Program. He received a BA in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1976, staff members of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco received notice of a bequest from Harald J. Wagner, a San Francisco-based architect and art collector. The collection included around seventy fragments of ancient Mexican mural painting, plausibly identifiable as coming from Teotihuacan. Staff at the de Young worked for several years with their counterparts at Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia to establish an agreement and framework for how the legal status of the murals should be resolved. In 1986, the Museums voluntarily returned roughly two-thirds of the murals to Mexico. This is now a well-rehearsed case study in the history of cultural patrimony, usefully summarized in the 1988 publication Feathered Serpent and Flowering Trees. Aside from speculation that the murals may have moved through Panama on their way to European and American dealers and collectors, little in the way of new data about the looting itself has emerged.

But in the nearly 50 years since, more Teotihuacan murals have appeared in private and public collections in the United States and Europe. Nearly all of them can be more or less definitively associated with the Techinantitla compound area. Additionally, more evidence surrounding the collection histories of the fragments known in 1988 has come to light. Many of the details and much of the documentation come from hazy recollections, scraps of archival ephemera, suggestive allusions, and fixed dates gleaned from institutional correspondence and publications. What emerges from these fragments is the existence of a network of dealers and collectors who knew about and participated in the large-scale looting activity going on in the northeast section of Teotihuacan in the early to mid-1960s. Wagner played an important and pivotal role in this network, but he was not a single actor. This singular episode in the history of looting and collecting pre-Columbian art in the 20th century should not be understood as a single-minded pursuit by an eccentric collector, but the product of a systematic effort involving several different dealers.

Matthew H. Robb is the Mesoamerican Specialist at the Library of Congress. Before joining the Library, he was Chief Curator at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and held curatorial appointments at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2017, he curated the travelling exhibition Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire and edited its award-winning catalogue. He recently completed “The Weight of a Patina of Time”, an exhibition and publication of works by contemporary artist Gala Porras-Kim, and was a member of the team led by Victoria Lyall and Tere Romo that curated 2022’s “Malinche: Traitor, Survivor, Icon”. A consultant to the Getty Research Institute’s Pre-Hispanic Art Provenance Initiative, he has written several articles on the collecting of pre-Hispanic objects in the 19th and 20th centuries. His exhibitions and research have been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Research Institute, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He holds a PhD from Yale University, an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an AB from Princeton University.

In 1976, Kenyan workers and peasants came together to build an amphitheater and stage a play that soon attracted huge audiences from across the country and beyond. Written by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, the play “Ngaahika Ndeenda” (“I Will Marry When I Want”) became a powerful means by which the community confronted the enduring legacies of colonialism after Kenyan independence. A world-famous initiative in African decolonization, the Kamĩrĩĩthũ theater takes a prominent place in literature and performance studies, yet its architectural and environmental dimensions have been neglected.

To reconstruct how the people of Kamĩrĩĩthũ creatively reimagined, reclaimed, and rebuilt their environments in the wake of colonialism, this lecture draws from a collaboratively produced archive (www.kamiriithuafterlives.net) grounded in five years of research with Kenyan theatre performers, activists, and literary scholar Dr. Makau Kitata. This research, including oral histories, community workshops, theatre reenactments, digital three-dimensional reconstruction, and walking ethnography, foregrounds the voices and experiences of Kamĩrĩĩthũ’s original actors and maps its legacies of art and activism in a rapidly changing Kenya. Methodologically refocusing architectural history on historical redress, the lecture traces the architectural horizon of planetary justice in the era of African decolonization.

Kenny Cupers is Professor of Architectural History and Urban Studies at the University of Basel. Trained as an architect, urbanist, and historian, his research and teaching focus on the relationship between built environments and changing societies in African and European contexts. His book publications include The Earth that Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (2024), What is Critical Urbanism: Urban Research as Pedagogy (2022), Architecture and Neoliberalism from the 1960s to the Present (2019), La banlieue, un projet social: Ambitions d’une politique urbaine, 1945-1975 (2018), Spaces of Uncertainty: Berlin Revisited (2018), The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (2014), and Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (2013).

Since its deployment in the context of Europeans’ and Africans’ disagreements over the value of objects and lives in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century West Africa, the discourse of “fetishism” has played a critical role in delimiting the material and conceptual contours of “African” art history. But, in response to a dearth of scholarship regarding Africans’ opinions on the material culture of the eighteenth-century Atlantic, this talk asks how Africans’ responses to Europeans’ accusations of fetishism re-map the concept’s entanglements with art history’s early development in eighteenth-century Europe. My sources are the testimonies of José Francisco Pereira and José Francisco Pedroso, two enslaved men born in present-day Benin, who appeared on trial before the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon in the summer of 1731. The pair was accused of feitiçaria (translated here as “fetishism” or “sorcery”) stemming from their manufacture of African-associated apotropaic objects and amulets for physical protection. And they objected to or explained away the accusation by re-classifying the objects using terms like “Mandinga” and “Relic Pouch.” I suggest the accused did not deploy these names as a kind of corrective to Europeans’ mislabeling, but rather to interrogate Inquisitors’ conceptions of their objects’ genealogies and valuations. If we are to understand, in Delinda Collier’s words, art history’s early formation as a “pidgin language in the theater of conquest,” what might Pereira and Pedroso have been saying to their European interrogators by defining their objects in this way? And given that these debates over objects took place in the Portuguese Inquisition, how might these terms impact our historical framing of not only African art history’s institutional origins, but its concomitant racializing mechanisms?

Matthew Francis Rarey is Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at Oberlin College. He teaches and researches the art history of the Black Atlantic world, with a focus on connections between West Africa, Brazil, and Portugal from the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries. Rarey’s writing on these topics has appeared in African Arts, The Art Bulletin, and Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World, among other venues. His first book, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023), garnered multiple prizes, including a 2024 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and the 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association: one of art history’s highest scholarly distinctions. A lifelong Midwesterner and fifth-generation Ohio resident, Matt is a proud product of the U.S. public education system from elementary through graduate school.

Description: One of the joys and terrors of practical work in conservation is the fact that there is rarely a single correct treatment for any given artwork, both in the overall approach and in the granular moment-to-moment decisions made along the way. Each choice made may take into account any number of factors and possible paths, informed by art history, conservation history and ethics, condition issues, and the limits of one’s skills. In addition, these choices are affected by the conservator’s own biases — whether known or unrecognized — which unavoidably inform the final outcome and appearance of the work of art. This lecture will explore the conservation treatment of a selection of Old Master paintings restored by the author, the options that were discarded and pursued, the thinking behind her decisions, and whether true objectivity can ever be fully achieved.

Karen Thomas is a paintings conservator in private practice, specializing in the treatment of Old Master and nineteenth-century paintings. A 2004 graduate of the Conservation Center at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, she was assistant and associate paintings conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2004-2012, where she was privileged to work on such artworks as Filipino Lippi’s Madonna and Child, the triptych of The Penitence of Saint Jerome by Joachim Patinir, and the Portrait of Mary Edwards by Willian Hogarth from the Frick Collection. In 2013, Karen opened Thomas Art Conservation in New York City, providing conservation expertise to private collectors, galleries, and small institutions. Karen is co-author of the retouching chapter of The Conservation of Easel Paintings (Routledge: 2012, 2022), and author of the technical notes for German Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1350-1600 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), among other publications. Prior to entering the field of art conservation, she worked for a decade as a graphic designer. Karen holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MA and Advanced Certificate in Conservation from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.

On the occasion of the Spring 2025 exhibition, Rose Salane: Periphery in Red, Yellow, Blue, the Great Hall Exhibition Program is pleased to present the panel discussion, “Navigating Affected Objects,” featuring Rose Salane, Lisa Conte, and Vyjayanthi Rao.

Building on Salane's new body of work—on view April 24 to September 26, 2025 at the Institute of Fine Arts—the three speakers will address the instability and ephemerality of objects impacted by urban development, climate change, and war, as well as attempts at preservation. Drawing on their expertise in the differing yet interconnected fields of contemporary art, conservation, and anthropology, the panelists will consider themes of loss in archives, memorials, and relics. How are “unstable” objects imbued with affect and temporality, and how are they reactivated in new exhibition contexts?

The event will feature presentations by IFA artist-in-residence Rose Salane, whose artistic practice and exhibition anchors the panel; Lisa Conte, Assistant Professor of Paper Conservation and Co-Chair at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and Vyjayanthi Rao, an anthropologist, writer, artist and curator, currently teaching at the Yale School of Architecture.

This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Valeria NapoleoneXX.

We extend special thanks to the artist, Rose Salane; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA; Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins; and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Hala Hachem, Wei Huang, Kaleha Kegode, Angelina Medina, Marisa Sanquini, and Christina Shen curated the exhibition. Thanks also to Joan Kee, Catherine Quan Damman, Jason Dubs, Sarah Higby, Nadia Rivers, Adam Ryder, Lisa Barro, Matthew Hayes, and Lisa Conte, as well as many other IFA faculty and staff for their support; Jason Varone created the website with design by Darnell Henderson.

Paintings of a certain age bear physical evidence of the ways in which cultural heritage is continuously in flux. Materials change as they age. The way a painting looks can be altered to accord with the shifting tastes of its owners, or because repairs were required. Artworks change hands, and with them location and function. They can also contain alterations that occurred during their making, either from decisions by their maker or wider transformations taking place within a culture.

Ellen Hanspach-Bernal is a 2006 graduate of the art conservation program at the University of Fine Arts, Dresden. From 2006 to 2009, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in painting conservation at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. She has worked for the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Conservation Center for the Museums of the City of Erfurt in Thuringia, Germany. Hanspach-Bernal has been the Paintings Conservator at the Detroit Institute of Arts since 2015, where her work focuses on preserving, researching, and treating paintings from antiquity to the present. She also supervises and teaches postgraduate fellows, preparing a new generation of conservators for work in a museum environment. She has published most recently on a Roman-period funerary portrait, on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and on Max Ernst’s Surrealist painting techniques.

Thanks to generous support from the TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund, Titian’s Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (ca. 1570) underwent long-awaited conservation in 2019. Examination of this newly-cleaned work has not only revealed the complex and nuanced ways in which Titian executed this painting, but also prompted intriguing questions of how its many lives intersect with its current place in the galleries of the Detroit Institute of Art.