Events Archive

For as long as there has been an art market, fakes and forgeries have been sold, infecting the minds of consumers and critics with questions and doubts. Inspired by a recent rash of fake old master drawings that have appeared on the market, curator John Marciari looks in this lecture at some of the techniques used by forgers from the Renaissance to the present, and at some of methods (and coincidences) that have been used to uncover those deceptions. While expressing the need for connoisseurial expertise in navigating the field, he also reflects on the ways in which forgeries disrupt not only the market but also the scholarship on master drawings.

John Marciari is the Charles W. Engelhard Curator, Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints, and Curatorial Chair at the Morgan Library & Museum. His recent publications include the exhibition catalogues Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman and Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice as well as essays, entries, and reviews in a range of exhibition catalogues and scholarly journals. His monograph, Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, will be published in March 2023 to accompany an exhibition of Piranesi’s drawings at the Morgan.

Two masterpieces of chamber music literature will be performed on February 4 at the James B. Duke House. The Debussy Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp will be followed by a performance of the Schubert Quartet No,. 14 in D minor “Death and the Maiden." The program will be played without intermission and will last approximately one hour. Both works will be performed by students from NYU Steinhardt’s Instrumental Performance program.

Program

The Debussy Trio students:
Olivia Putenney, viola
Tiffany Wu, harp
Annie Jung, flute

The Violin Sonata students:
Daniel Apolonio, violin
Brielle Perez, piano

The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University is pleased to present Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión’s third solo exhibition in the United States. Curated by Diana Cao, Tatiana Marcel, and Nicasia Solano, Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos provides an opportunity to examine the aesthetic and material interplay of text, fabric, and found objects in his oeuvre. We hope you will join the curators at 6:30 PM for a tour and discussion of the Spring 2023 Duke House Exhibition.

Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos showcases the artist’s embroideries on various readymade textiles executed between 1990 and 1994, highlighting the latter years of Centurión’s short, but prolific career. The four major works in the exhibition feature embroidered texts, juxtaposing floral images with both political and personal phrases. The accompanying archival display presents smaller textile works including the artist’s signature whimsical animal motifs and two sculptures from his Familia series.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) provided funding and extensive archival and research support. The works on view are on generous loan from the ISLAA collection.

ISLAA

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) advances scholarship and public engagement with art from Latin America through its program of exhibitions, publications, lectures, and partnerships with universities and art institutions. Ariel Aisiks founded ISLAA in 2011 to raise the international visibility of art from Latin America. The pursuit of this goal has led to ISLAA’s involvement in more than 400 lectures and conferences, 30 books, and 20 large-scale exhibitions.

The Institute of Fine Arts at NYU

Since 1932 the Institute of Fine Arts has been dedicated to graduate teaching and advanced research in the history of art, archaeology, and conservation. The Duke House Exhibition Series brings contemporary art to the walls of the Institute’s landmarked James B. Duke House. The work is displayed in the beaux-arts interior of the former residence of the Duke family, juxtaposing the historic with the contemporary and inviting viewers to engage with both the past and the future of the Institute. Since 2019, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is proud to support the Duke House Exhibition Series to showcase the work of Latin American artists.

Description: “Castilla del Oro” was the name that Spanish settlers gave to the Central American territories from the gulf of Urabá in Colombia to the Belén River, in present-day Panamá. Stylistic similarities in the gold-copper casting along the Caribbean coasts of Colombia, Panamá, and Costa Rica, as well as in the West Indies, shed light on the seafaring vocation of Amerindian societies. This re-contextualization of the subject matter allows us to infer that the dissemination of the technical aspects of metallurgy traveled intimately intertwined with iconographic traditions that evidence traces of a pan-regional cultural exchange of cosmological ideas. This research aims at recreating the visual language and symbolism of these gold ornaments as they evolve and disseminate throughout the Isthmo-Colombian Area. Examples from the collection in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art provide a unique opportunity to compare firsthand these enigmatic ornaments from the various cultures that inhabited the region.

Dr. Orlando Hernández Ying has dedicated over 20 years to museums and higher education. In his native Panama, Dr. Hernández was the head curator of the Anthropology Museum (MARTA) and held the position of National Coordinator of Museums where he oversaw 18 museums across the country. His trajectory in the U.S. includes collaborations with MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Art Museum, the Walters Museum, and the Historic New Orleans Collection.

Hernández Ying has taught at NYU, CUNY, Tulane University, and the National University of Panama. His academic training includes an MA in Museum Studies from NYU and a doctoral degree in Art History & Criticism from the Graduate Center City University of New York.

Dr. Hernández Ying is currently a Curatorial Associate at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library and simultaneously, has been conducting stylistic research on the metallurgy of the Ancient Americas. His essay “In the Absence of the Written Word:” Ancient Gold in the Isthmo-Colombian Area, is included in Michelle Rich. Ed. The Arts of the Ancient Americas at the Dallas Museum of Art, hot off the press and available now.

Description: Much of the history of fifteenth and sixteenth century Italian architecture has been narrated in relation to the idea of canon formation. The protagonists of this narrative, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Antonio da Sangallo, Serlio and Palladio, are all seen as having made advances in the direction of establishing the true and correct formation of the classical orders. Later developments in classical architecture only further cemented this tradition. Despite the dominance of this interpretation, it omits the contribution of a number of prominent and important Renaissance and later architects, including but not limited to Giuliano da Sangallo, Baldassare Peruzzi, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, and later Borromini. Professor Brothers' talk will define this alternative tradition, particularly through the figures of Michelangelo and Giuliano, and argue that it constitutes an anti-canonical canon.

Cammy Brothers is an Associate Professor at Northeastern University, where she holds a joint appointment in Architecture and in Art & Design. She joined Northeastern in 2016 from the University of Virginia, where she held the Valmarana Chair and was Director of the Venice Program. She is the author of two monographs, Michelangelo, Drawing and the Invention of Architecture (2008) and Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome (2022). She has a third book project under way, “The Architectural Legacy of Islamic Spain,” which focuses on the cities of Granada and Seville in the aftermath of the reconquest.

Description: Today, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s position as one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century art is assured. In his wildly intuitive way, and while still a teenager, he knew exactly what was in store: “I’m going to be famous and I’m going to die young,” Basquiat was an explosive genius that worked at breakneck speed, as if gripped in a hurricane of creation. During his short life, which was extinguished by a heroin overdose at the age of 27, he produced nearly 2,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures, many of them on a gigantic scale. His themes were suitably grand: royalty, heroism and the streets. His artistic enterprise took in high and low and everything in between, and his ambition for personal legacy knew no bounds – he wanted to be king of the contemporary art world and he achieved this in his lifetime.

In terms of academic art history, he ascended to the highest echelons of painting practiced by Goya, Picasso, and Anselm Kiefer. The Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta of 1983 is one such work. Multi-layered in context and content, its complex meaning speaks across generations. All of Basquiat’s subjects are expressed in his singular and electrifying style – a brilliantly coloured mix of punk, cartoon, classical, linear, linguistic, and symbolic notation. Like the jazz musician Charlie Parker, who was one of Basquiat’s cultural heroes and features in his paintings, the artist’s extraordinary access to the ecstatic and destructive powers of creation extracted a terrible price on his perishable human life, but his body of work is everlasting.

Dr. Irene Cioffi Whitfield is a Jungian Analyst who is a member of The Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists in London, UK and the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association in New York City. Currently living and working in Italy, Irene received her Ph.D from the Institute of Fine Arts specialising in 18th Century Italian painting. Her work focuses on the intersection of art and psychology, especially the dangerous dynamics of the creative process. She has lectured internationally on the life and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Description: In January 1767, the silversmith Luigi Valadier (1726–1785) exhibited—in his workshop on Via del Babuino near the Spanish Steps in Rome—a monumental monstrance “destined for a principal church of Mexico, that is in the Indies of Spain”. The following year, on 17 September 1768, Valadier exhibited in his workshop more objects destined for that same “principal church” in Mexico: candlesticks, chalices and three altar lecterns. These works of art have been considered lost and have remained untraced for more than two hundred and fifty years. This lecture presents, for the first time, the unexpected finding of thirty objects by Valadier in the Cathedral of León in Nicaragua, where they have remained—unrecognized—since the eighteenth century, and will present new information as to how the objects travelled from Europe to Central America.

Xavier F. Salomon is the Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at the Frick Collection, since 2014. He was born in Rome and grew up between Italy and the United Kingdom. He was educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he received his BA in art history, his MA and PhD, with a thesis on ‘The Religious Artistic and Architectural Patronage of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (1571-1621)’. He has worked in a number of museums in the United Kingdom and in the United States, most notably at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London (where he was the Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator) and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (where he was Curator of Southern Baroque in the Department of European Paintings). He has curated a number of exhibitions, on artists such as Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa, Van Dyck, Goya, Murillo, Canova, and Tiepolo. In 2014 he curated the monographic exhibition on Paolo Veronese at the National Gallery in London. He is currently working on a catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Paolo Veronese, on the catalogue of Spanish paintings at the Frick Collection, and on a monograph on the Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera.

Clemente Marconi is the James R. McCredie Professor in the History of Greek Art and Archaeology and University Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts–NYU; he is also Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Milan. A corresponding member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei he is the director of the Institute of Fine Arts–NYU and University of Milan archaeological mission at Selinunte.

Andrew Farinholt Ward is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Emory University, specializing in the art, architecture, and archaeology of ancient Greece. He is also the Field Director for the Institute of Fine Arts–NYU and University of Milan archaeological mission at Selinunte, and the Supervisor of Excavations for the American Excavations Samothrace.

This past summer our mission was able to resume work at the Sicilian archaeological site of Selinunte, with an international team of nearly 60 collaborators. Major discoveries were made in the lab and in the field concerning the history of the Greek settlement and ritual activity in its main urban sanctuary, particularly during the crucial first generations following its foundation. The mission has also embarked on a new collaborative project with the German Archaeological Institute to study Selinunte's Temples A and O, the results of which are already changing the way we understand these temples and the role of the acropolis before their construction.

Please join the IFA in conversation with alumna Nora Burnett Abrams(’15), Mark G. Falcone Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and NYU Steinhardt faculty Amy Whitaker to celebrate their new book The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy, co-published by Rizzoli and MCA Denver in March 2023. Alumnus Matthew Israel, author of A Year in the Art World and formerly Commissions Lead Open Arts at Meta, will introduce the speakers and serve as moderator for a discussion of the potential impact of NFTs in the arts.

The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy explores the history and future possibilities of blockchain and NFTs in the arts, and serves as a foundational text spanning the roots of NFTs in art history, specifically conceptual art practice, and the many intersecting stories of NFTs—knowledge stories, artist stories, democracy stories. The authors take the reader through the key concepts of NFTs and the underlying technology of blockchain, including their origins, their surprising connections to the history of artmaking and art collecting, and their potential to radically reshape the art world. The book invites the reader to engage with this new technology, to understand its connections to the longer arc of art history, and to help shape its future.

Amy Whitaker holds a PhD in political economy as well as an MBA from Yale, an MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, and a BA in art and political science from Williams College. A longtime blockchain researcher in the arts, she wrote the NFT primer for the 2022 Art Basel Market Report and is the author of numerous academic and general articles on blockchain. She is the author of four books, including Museum Legs, Art Thinking, and Economics of Visual Art, in addition to The Story of NFTs with Abrams. Whitaker is an associate professor in visual arts administration at NYU Steinhardt. She lectured previously at the Institute as part of the Conservation Center’s Topics in Time-based Media Art Conservation series, supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Nora Burnett Abrams is the Mark G. Falcone Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Among the youngest museum directors in the country, Abrams moved into the director role after nearly a decade as the organization’s lead curator. Her curatorial approach has been instrumental in bringing MCA Denver to where it stands today as a thought-leader in the field and incubator of ambitious and fresh ideas and projects. Her career began as an Exhibitions Assistant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was soon followed by the Graduate Curatorial Assistant role at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. Since arriving in Denver in 2010, Abrams has organized over 40 exhibitions and authored or contributed to over a dozen accompanying publications. She has taught art history at New York University and lectured throughout the country on modern and contemporary art. She holds art history degrees from Stanford University (BA), Columbia University (MA), and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (PhD 2015).

Matthew Israel is a curator, writer, and PhD (IFA, ‘11) art historian. Matthew was most recently Commissions Lead of Open Arts at Meta, where he helped lead Meta’s global art commissioning program and guided how contemporary artists engaged with Meta’s products. From 2019 through 2021, Matthew was Co-Founder and Chief Curator of Artful and from 2011 to 2019, Matthew was the founding Director of The Art Genome Project at Artsy and later was Artsy’s Head Curator. Matthew is the author of three critically-acclaimed books on contemporary art: Kill for Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War (2013); The Big Picture: Contemporary Art in 10 Works by 10 Artists (2017); and A Year in the Art World: An Insider’s View (2020), which will be released in paperback this June.

Presented on the occasion of the Brooklyn Museum’s current exhibition Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon, yi Hou will discuss his work’s engagement with histories both personal and cultural, and the representation of queer, diasporic kinship and identity.

Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, and is presented as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s annual UOVO Prize. yi Hou highlights the depth and multiplicity of queer Asian American subjects by recasting himself and close friends as popular characters and historical figures from both Western and East Asian cultures. Drawing from layered references that range from Hollywood film stills, East Asian art objects, to the media franchise Dragon Ball, yi Hou develops his own iconography of the “Chinese cowboy” that subverts the stereotyped, racializing signifiers of Asian American representation in Western visual history.

This discussion seeks to situate yi Hou’s practice in relation to broader questions about the limits and complexities of identity, as well as the political stakes of representation in a time of heightened racial antagonism and visibility. The artist will be joined in conversation by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Catherine Quan Damman, Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts.

Oscar yi Hou is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He was born and raised in Liverpool, England. Alongside his solo exhibition East of sun, west of moon at the Brooklyn Museum, yi Hou is recipient of the third annual UOVO Prize in 2022. In 2021 he presented A sky-licker relation and A dozen poem-pictures at James Fuentes, New York and JamesFuentes.Online, respectively. His work has also been included in exhibitions at the Royal Academy, UK; Asia Society, New York; T293 Gallery, Rome, Italy; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; and Sprüth Magers Online.

Eugenie Tsai is the John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Prior to joining the Brooklyn Museum, she was the Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and held several positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As an independent curator, Tsai worked on projects for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Berkeley Museum; and the Princeton University Art Museum.

Catherine Quan Damman is the Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she teaches and advises graduate work on feminist and queer approaches to global modern and contemporary art. She is completing her first monograph, Performance: A Deceptive History, with the support of a 2022–2023 ACLS Fellowship, and is a frequent contributor to Artforum and other publications.

Description: During the eighteenth century, an extraordinary artistic tradition arose among the Indigenous equestrian societies of the Great Plains. Characterized by iconographic celebrations of the exploits of warriors, the “Plains Biographic Tradition” included elaborately painted tipis and bison hide robes, and it eventually culminated in the famous ledger art of the nineteenth century. The largest and most diverse corpus of imagery, however, was created as petroglyphs on rock faces across the American West. In this presentation, I share the results of a decade-long effort to document a sprawling landscape of Plains Biographic Tradition rock art created by the Ancestral Comanche during their early eighteenth-century forays into the Taos region of New Mexico. Hundreds of incised panels depicting battle scenes, bison hunts, and horse raids have been recorded, revealing evidence of repeated Comanche efforts not just to archive their military prowess but also to artistically appropriate the rock art of their opponents. Collectively, the images invite us to ask: can images, no less than their human makers, be taken captive?

Severin Fowles is an anthropologist whose scholarship combines archaeological methods with perspectives drawn from Critical Indigenous Studies, Art History, Religious Studies, and Material Culture Studies to reimagine the history of the American West. He has directed excavations at archaeological sites spanning ten thousand years—from the camps of early foragers, to Ancestral Pueblo villages, to a Spanish colonial plaza community, to a 1960s hippie commune—and he has directed major surveys, including a decade-long rock art survey of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument and an ongoing survey of late pre-colonial and early colonial agricultural landscapes, the latter conducted on behalf of Picuris Pueblo in support of their struggle to reclaim land and water. He is the author of An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion (School for Advanced Research, 2013), which critically examined how secular understandings of “religion” have structured archaeological accounts of non-modern Indigenous communities, and he is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology (Oxford, 2017), the widest-ranging consideration of the intellectual history and theoretical commitments of archaeology in the American Southwest.

Our most recent books have converged on exemplary figures based in the San Francisco Bay area, where the international counterculture achieved its most concentrated and resonant expressions. The careers of these artists extend from the earliest origins of that great social experiment into its less conspicuous but powerful persistence into the decades that followed the 1960s. For all the attention that the art of this period has received, neither the region nor the rebellious individuals it fostered have been given their due, with art history the poorer for that oversight.

Thomas Crow is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts.

Robert Slifkin is a Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts.

The sensory influence of a landscape has the capacity to connect or divide us, to inform our movements through space and the manners in which we relate to our surroundings, and to one another. Jordan Casteel sources her subject matter from her own photographs of the people of color who share and shape an environment, directly informing her own accessibility to the collective experience. This lecture will explore the ways in which her various landscapes–from Harlem to the Catskills–have informed her practice.

Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver, CO) received her BA from Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA for Studio Art (2011) and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2014). In 2020, Casteel presented a solo exhibition titled Within Reach at the New Museum, New York, in conjunction with a fully illustrated catalog published by the institution. Other recent museum solo exhibitions include Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, presented at the Denver Art Museum, CO (2019), and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, CA (2019–20). In recent years, Casteel has participated in group and permanent collection exhibitions at institutional venues such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2021 and 2022); Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2022); The Modern, Fort Worth, TX (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2022); Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2021); Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2021); Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AR (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); MoCA Los Angeles, CA (2018); Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2017 and 2016); and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017). Casteel is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2021).

Description: Ancient Greek philosophers sought to understand the phenomenon of color as an index of the visible world, explorations shaped by the ubiquity of material colors used by ancient artists to craft art and architecture in many different materials and media. Such colors demanded regular maintenance and care, acts of engagement far beyond the initial moment of artistic production. Making with material colors also required a complex supply chain involving the labor of many different people, often including enslaved people working in mines and artists’ workshops. Focus on materials and color rather than primarily shape and form in the study of the art of Mediterranean antiquity brings these expanded temporalities of making to the fore, both the labor that precedes making and that which persists after an object’s initial production. In turn, this shifts our attention from the named individual artist who has been at the methodological center for much of art history to the distributed and collective work of making and maintaining art. Reproductive technologies are a component of this collective work in their capacity to expand access to, circulate, and forge memories of images. Reproductions have also often selected for shape and form rather than the material particularity of colors. At other times, however, reproductions have been critical spaces for adding back colors to offer new forms of materialization and to craft new sensorial experiences. Accounting for colors, thus, opens up a series of connected theoretical questions about labor, time, collectivity, and care that inflect how we make sense of the world.

Jennifer Stager is a writer and art historian in the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Seeing Color in Classical Art: Theory, Practice, and Reception from Antiquity to the Present (2022) and, with Leila Easa, Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sappho’s Fragments to Viral Hashtags (2022).

Two masterpieces of chamber music literature will be performed on March 25th, Bacewicz's Fourth String Quartet will be followed by a performance of Schubert's Trout Quintet. The program will be played without intermission and will last approximately one hour. Both works will be performed by students from NYU Steinhardt’s Instrumental Performance program.

Program

Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969)
String Quartet No. 4 (1951)
Jessica Gehring and Jade Schoolcraft, violins Matthew Ryan, viola
Victoria Lin, cello

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Piano Quintet in A Major, D. 667 “Trout” (1819)
Logan Chiang, violin
Isadora Banyai, viola
Zoe Hale, cello
Lindsey Joslin, bass
Malka Bobrove, piano

Barbara H. Berrie is head of the scientific research department and senior conservation scientist at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She provides scientific and technical support to all aspects of conservation and preservation of the National Gallery’s collections. She also studies history of use of artists’ pigments.

Description:

This panel will address the subject of the proliferation of research tools, libraries – both public and private – collections of ephemera associated with modern and contemporary art practice, and other sources of information within the fast-growing field of studies in the history of twentieth and twenty-first century art by Latin American and U.S. based Latinx artists throughout the Americas as well as in other parts of the world.

A distinguished group of researchers in this area will convene to discuss their own work and the institutions they represent. Each expert will share with the audience the widely diverging methods they employ to disseminate vast and diverse forms of knowledge, from the papers of artists, scholars, and collectors, to ephemera, traditional assemblages of books and journals and, of course, the fast-evolving new digital tools employed to understand the ever-expanding modes of information gathering and diffusion.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Josh T Franco is head of collecting at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. In this role, he leads the team that works to identify, investigate, and acquire personal papers, institutional records and other primary sources that tell the stories of American art. In addition to ensuring the preservation of these records at the Smithsonian, Franco advises researchers working in the Archives, making them aware of materials relevant to their pursuits. Franco also oversees the Oral History team at the Archives. From 2015-2017, he was Latino collections specialist at the Archives. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Franco was an Artist-Guide at 101 Spring Street, Judd Foundation, the preserved New York home and studio of artist Donald Judd. He completed his PhD in Art History at Binghamton University in 2016.

Ruth Halvey has held the position as the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Bibliographer for Latin America at the Museum of Modern Art Library since 2019. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University, specializing in contemporary Mexico. She has worked as an editor and translator and has taught at Fordham University and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Ostap Kin is the Archivist at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

Louisa M Raitt is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts. Specializing in art of the Global Iberian Empire from the 16th-18th centuries, Louisa’s specific research interests pertain to artistic expressions of religio-political controversies, the fabrication and trade of export objects, and production and collection as vehicles of self-fashioning. Her dissertation, “The Frontiers of Femininity: Self-Fashioning in Female Portraiture in Viceregal New Spain, 1665-1821,” offers new insight into female religious and secular portraits and their function as vehicles of social mobility. From 2020-2021, Louisa served as the Marica and Jan Vilcek Curatorial Fellow for Colonial Latin American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Upon completion of her fellowship, she was hired in the Thomas J. Watson Library as a Research Associate and Bibliographer for Latinx and Hispanic American art for a year-long collection assessment and expansion project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Lori Salmon is the Head of the Institute of Fine Arts Library at New York University, where she administers the Stephen Chan Library of Fine Arts and the Conservation Center Library through the Division of Libraries.

The Seventh Annual Symposium is presented by the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, the Institute for Latin American Studies, and the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.

This event was advised by Dr. Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Sheppard Professor in the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts; Dr. Lisa Trever, Lisa and Bernard Selz Associate Professor in Pre-Columbian Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University; Dr. Jerónimo Duarte-Riascos, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures; and Dr. Alexander Alberro, Virginia Bloedel Wright Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University.

Keynote lectures by Dr. Adriana Zavala, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, and Associate Professor, History of Art, Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora, Tufts University and Dr. Delia Cosentino, Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, DePaul University. Dr. Adriana Zavala and Dr. Delia Cosentino are the co-authors of the forthcoming publication, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan: Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City (University of Texas Press).

Read more on ifalatinamerica.org

The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti spent most of World War II in a hotel room in Geneva, laboring over figurines no larger than a fingernail. Crafted out of plaster and set on tiny plinths, these works resemble miniature monuments. Yet their incessant production and destruction draw them closer to the vulnerabilities of bodies in wartime. Giacometti’s figurines press the limits of perception, inverting fascist fantasies of boundless national corporeality. They also recast the artist’s early Surrealist abstraction into a precursor of his modernist figuration. In this lecture, Joanna Fiduccia examines Giacometti’s most peculiar sculptures to show how their scale and redundancy transform minimal sculptural material into the means of representing a brittle social body in crisis.

Joanna Fiduccia is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. A specialist of European modern art and the historical avant-garde, she is also the author of essays and reviews on contemporary art. Her current book project, Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism, explores the relationship between artistic crisis, nationalism, and modern belonging through Giacometti's sculpture during the 1930s and 1940s. A second project underway traces the emergence of scale in modernist notions of authenticity, a concept as vital to the formation of global markets as it was to modern philosophical debates on the category of the human.

Two magnificent Pre-Columbian feathered pieces from the Habsburg collection now at the Weltmuseum in Vienna have aroused the curiosity of several researchers and the general public. “Motecuhzoma’s” Headdress and the Canine Shield have been examined from various perspectives and are considered exceptional sources for studying pre-Hispanic Mexican feather art. The uniqueness of their materials and meanings, as well as their aesthetic qualities and perceived value, led to their preservation and care by the Austrian imperial family. Less known is a shield made of feathers, gold, and ocelot hide, which left Mexico before the early sixteenth-century conquest of Tenochtitlan and eventually arrived at the Habsburg court in Vienna. In the mid-nineteenth century, Maximilian of Habsburg (1832–67), as emperor of Mexico, requested its repatriation to install in a new public museum he conceived for the Mexican capital. After entering this museum in 1866, the shield immediately became an essential piece of the country’s patrimonial collection. This presentation will survey the cultural biography of the Cuexio chimalli of Chapultepec—how it was made and used, what it means, how and why it was collected, and how it has been preserved and displayed during its recent history.

Laura Filloy Nadal holds a B.A. in restoration from the National School of Conservation, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in archeology from the Sorbonne in Paris. In 2022, she was designated associate curator of Ancient American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before, she served as senior conservator in the Conservation Laboratory of the National Museum of Anthropology, and as a professor at the National School of Anthropology and History and at the National Conservation School, both part of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, teaching the methodologies for archaeological conservation courses. Among the distinctions she has received are her appointment as a member of the National System of Researchers-Mexico; the Paul Coremans Award for the best conservation work for the restoration of the jade funerary mask of Pakal, ruler of Palenque; and an honorable mention, Alfonso Caso Award in archeology, for her doctoral thesis, which is forthcoming with the Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Moderated by Edward J. Sullivan, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University In 2021, the National Gallery of Art in Washington embarked on a new course after it redefined its mission, vision, and values, which are all deeply grounded in deepening and expanding the museum’s collections and its service to audiences. In this talk, E. Carmen Ramos will discuss how she has navigated her new role and worked to embody the ideas of being an audience centered institution and being of the nation and for all the people.

E. Carmen Ramos is Chief Curatorial and Conservation Officer at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She leads the curatorial and conservation teams as they serve the nation and beyond through collections development, ground-breaking scholarship, art conservation, and scientific research. Ramos previously served as the acting chief curator and curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), where she built one of the largest collections of Latinx art at a museum of U.S. art. She organized award-winning exhibitions including ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now (2020), Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013), and Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography (2017). In addition to her numerous catalogues, her scholarship appears in American Art, and in books including Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture and Identity on the Island.

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.

This series of public programs and events is coordinated by Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and organized by graduate students. Since partnering with ISLAA in 2011, NYU’s Latin American Forum has hosted more than thirty events.

Fascination with Venetian glass has persisted for centuries, spurring production of imitations for the royal courts of Renaissance Europe and luring modern-day tourists via ferry to the island of Murano, the historic glassmaking center of Venice. In this presentation, Rebecca Gridley will focus on two intricate and ornately decorated blown-glass vessels, produced a la façon de Venise (in the style of Venice) in Austria in the late 16th century. Now part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exceptional collection of Renaissance glass, the vessels were bequeathed to the museum in 1891 by Edward C. Moore, a renowned New York silversmith and designer for Tiffany & Co. Rebecca will discuss the original context and manufacture of these objects, their role in Moore’s fascinating collection, and the recent efforts to prepare them for exhibition, touching on the history of glass repair, recent innovations in glass conservation, and the challenges unique to restoring this material.

Rebecca Gridley is an Associate Conservator at Art Conservation Group, a private practice in New York specializing in objects conservation that serves museums, private collectors, galleries, foundations, and auction houses. She previously worked as an Assistant Objects Conservator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was responsible for the treatment of Decorative Arts objects for the renovated British Galleries. Rebecca has a special interest in glass and ceramics; she has published on glass conservation and lectured on ceramics technology, and recently co-edited Recent Advances in Glass and Ceramics Conservation 2022 for the ICOM-CC Glass and Ceramics Working Group. A Professional Associate of American Institute for Conservation, Rebecca has served in various leadership and volunteer positions for AIC since 2015. She holds a BA in Art History from Yale University, and an MS in Conservation and MA in Art History & Archaeology from the Conservation Center of The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

Anthony Aziz (b. 1961, USA) and Sammy Cucher (b. 1958, Peru) have been a collaborative team since 1992, after meeting as graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. They are members of the Fine Arts faculty at Parsons School of Design/The New School and live in Brooklyn.

Their interdisciplinary work is project-based and idea-driven, with outcomes ranging from video and photography to screenprinting, digital animation, sculpture and large-scale jacquard tapestries. The images, objects and installations they produce are meant to reflect on the boundaries of identity at a time when these are becoming increasingly fluid and undefined.

Aziz + Cucher have exhibited their work extensively, including at the 46th Venice Biennale, MASS MoCA, Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, the Biennale de Lyon, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the List Visual Art Center at MIT, the National Gallery of Berlin, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, among others.

An artist monograph marking the 30th anniversary of their artistic collaboration was published by La Fábrica Editions (Madrid) in 2022 and will be available in the U.S. in May, 2023. It includes more than 130 color reproductions of their work as well as insightful essays by independent curator Agustín Perez Rubio and cultural critic Aruna D’Souza, as well as a conversation with pioneering digital artist Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Description: Settled as early as 3100 BCE, the small village of Mochlos grew into an important town in the Middle and Late Bronze Age partly because of its location on an important trade route that connected the Aegean to the Near East and allowed its inhabitants to prosper, and partly because of its function as a center of production that met the needs of the surrounding population and travelers passing through on ships. It also came to play an important role in the religious activities of the region and was a sacred place to those who lived there and to many visitors who came as pilgrims to its shrines.

In the Europe of the reconstruction after the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, the discussion about religious art – or about the possibilities of such art – became a central theme of ideological debates, beyond what is strictly religious and beyond art itself. In defeated countries like Germany and Italy – or, in its own way, also in Spain –, and in victorious countries like France, the Church acted as the transmitter of an idea that connected the totalitarian ideologies apparently repressed at the end of the war with strategies of the material and moral recovery of a devastated society. What was to be a “new” religious art, actually anchored in the most tragic and immediate past, represented a “restoration” in which anti-communism was clothed in a kind of mystical pseudo-spirituality and, at the same time, exhibited with the sentimental means of mass entertainment. An art, in short, as necessary as it was reactionary, characteristic of the beginnings of the Cold War. The religious work of Salvador Dalí in the 1950s, and especially his Christ of Saint John of the Cross, painted in 1951, summons all the elements of this complex equation in an exemplary way. After all, hadn't Dalí spent his American years, the forties and fifties, assaulting – and conquering – the mass media and, in particular, trying to break into Hollywood cinema? This lecture will try to analyze the history, the models, and the purposes of this painting in the context of the ideological crisis marked by the Cold War – crisis that, in the field of art, adopted profoundly revisionist terms.

Juan José Lahuerta is a professor of History of Art and Architecture at the Barcelona School of Architecture, where he was the Director of the Gaudí Chair. He has been a professor at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura, in Venice, holder of the King Juan Carlos Chair of Spanish Culture and Civilization at New York University, Senior Curator of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, and Chief Curator of the National Museum of Art of Catalonia. He has published books on art and architecture, like for example Antoni Gaudí, Architecture, Ideology and Politics (1992); El fenómeno del éxtasis. Dalí ca. 1933 (2004); Le Corbusier. Espagne. Carnets (2001); Le Corbusier e la Spagna (2005); Estudios antiguos (2010); Religious Painting. Picasso and Max Von Moos (2015); Photography or Life: Popular Mies (2015); On Loos, Ornament and Crime (2015); Marginalia. Aby Warburg, Carl Einstein (2015); Antoni Gaudí. Ornament, Fire, and Ashes (2016); Romanesque Picasso (2016, with E. Philippot); Arte en la época del infierno (2021). He is a member of the scientific committee of the Milan based review Casabella, and founder and director of Mudito & Co., an independent editing house based in Barcelona.

Although the term incorporation (and its cognates in many Latinate languages) often functions metaphorically, its ability to denote the integration of any two entities is intimately linked to the centrality of the body, the corpus. This one-day conference presenting work in progress explores a range of practices in which words and images were consumed by being taken into the body, quite literally incorporated.

Common to many cultures, practices of logophagy (the ingestion of words) and iconophagy (the ingestion of images) have often been depicted as anomalous, marginal, or primitive within a post-Enlightenment tradition that has privileged the disincarnated gaze as the culturally sanctioned mode of consumption. By contrast, this pioneering collaboration between NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Fribourg will highlight concepts and practices of consumption through incorporation drawn from a range of traditions, exploring the phenomenon in a comparative transhistorical and transcultural frame.

Support for this event is provided by the Institute of Fine Arts’ Gulnar Bosch Fund.

Flickering signals of video continually transform, convert, and reconfigure visual culture around the globe, as artists have harnessed video not only as an experimental medium for expression, but as a network for communication and agent of social change. Featuring over 70 media works drawn primarily from MoMA’s collection, the exhibition Signals explores the omnipresence of video in our daily lives and its global reach as a circuit for public participation, propagandistic persuasion, and even political resistance.

This discussion will develop from Signals’s spotlight on video practices from Asia, to question: what is the place of Asian video cultures within the relentlessly networked, seemingly borderless landscape of global media? How has video posed a promise of global access, technological power, and electronic democracy; and how have artists circumvented the medium’s co-optation into a means of state surveillance and control? Ranging from Fujiko Nakaya’s guerilla broadcasts and collective activism in the 1970s, Nam June Paik’s exuberantly international transmissions in 1984’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell, Amar Kanwar’s ode to the political and humanitarian situation in Myanmar, to Tiffany Sia's urgent yet counter-spectacular documentation of the 2019 Hong Kong protests via iPhone, this discussion will situate new media practices from Asia within the contemporary transnational context.

Following a presentation by exhibition curators Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance and Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art; two scholars will discuss the ideas provoked by the exhibition’s exploration of Asian new media: Jeannine Tang, Assistant Professor of Modern/Contemporary Art History & Visual Studies at the New School; and Ryan Lee Wong, independent writer, critic, and curator.

Stuart Comer is The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In addition to Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023, with Michelle Kuo) and helping to reimagine the Museum’s collection galleries, his other recent projects at MoMA include Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? (2021), member: Pope.L, 1978-2001 (2019), Haegue Yang: Handles (2019), and Tania Bruguera: Untitled (Havana, 2000) (2018). He also leads The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio and is currently overseeing the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Asia research group and The Fund for the Twenty-First Century. Prior to joining MoMA. Comer was co-curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2014 Biennial and served as the first Curator of Film at Tate Modern, London.

Dr. Michelle Kuo is The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In addition to Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023, with Stuart Comer), her exhibitions include Refik Anadol: Unsupervised (2022), Amanda Williams: Embodied Sensations (2021), Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman (2020), and New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (2019). Kuo has published and lectured publications More than Real: Art in the Digital Age (2018), Acting Out: The Ab-Ex Effect (2011), and a forthcoming volume on the postwar organization Experiments in Art and Technology. She also serves as a critic at the Yale School of Art and on the advisory board of the Museum Brandhorst, Munich. Prior to joining MoMA, Kuo was the Editor-in-Chief of Artforum International from 2010 to 2017.

Dr. Jeannine Tang is an Assistant Professor of Modern/Contemporary Art History & Visual Studies at The New School. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art, exhibition and curatorial history, histories and theories of colonization and diaspora, and feminist, queer and transgender studies. She participated in the Singapore Art Museum’s Curatorial & Research residency in 2022, where she focused on early cyberfeminist net art collectives and their international networks in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Her writing can be found in Artforum, Art Journal, and many other publications.

Ryan Lee Wong is an independent writer, critic, and curator based in Brooklyn. He authored the novel Which Side Are You On and published essays and criticisms on the intersections of the arts, race, and social movements. His recent writings can be found in LA Times Image, The Margins, Frieze, and Hyperallergic. He also curated the exhibitions Serve the People (2014)  at Interference Archive and Roots (2017) at Chinese American Museum, which focused on the Asian American movements of the 1970s. Currently, Lee Wong is the Administrative Director of Brooklyn Zen Center in Brooklyn.

This event brings together Dr. Mariano López-Seone (New York University), Diana Flatto (University of Pittsburgh), and independent curator Megan N. Liberty for three presentations and a lively panel discussion facilitated by Diana Cao, Tatiana Marcel, and Nicasia Solano, the curators of Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos.

Expanding on the themes of materiality in Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos, Craft and Curation will discuss curatorial practices that have included Centurión, craft practices in Latin America in the 1990s, and craft based curatorial practices in an international contemporary context. Bringing together scholars and curators from a variety of backgrounds, this program will emphasize the versatility of craft, and Centurión’s unique body of work.

Megan N. Liberty is the Art Books section editor at the Brooklyn Rail and co-founder of Book Art Review. In 2023, she curated the traveling exhibition Craft & Conceptual Art: Reshaping the Legacy of Artists' Books. Her writing appears in Hyperallergic, ArtReview, Artforum.com, art-agenda, Art in America, Frieze, NY Review of Books, LA Review of Books, White Review, Art in Print, and elsewhere. She was a 2019-20 AICA/USA and Creative Capital/The Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writing Workshop participant. She has an MA in Art History, with distinction, from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and a BA in English from Dickinson College, PA.

Mariano López Seoane is a writer, researcher and curator based in Buenos Aires and New York. He is currently the director of the Graduate Program on Gender and Sexuality at UNTREF in Argentina. He also teaches Latin American literature, cultural studies and queer studies at the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU. López Seoane has curated exhibitions and coordinated public programs for ISLAA, MALBA, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Buenos Aires International Book Fair and Art Basel Cities. He has written extensively on contemporary Latin American literature and arts, focusing on the cultures of sexual and gender dissidents in the Americas, Latin American instances of queer studies and queer activism, and figurations of drug culture and drug related violence in Latin American narrative, film and visual arts. His publications include the volume of essays Donde está el peligro. Estéticas de la disidencia sexual (2022) and the novel El regalo de Virgo (2017).

Diana Flatto is a PhD candidate in the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh currently based in Buenos Aires with the support of a Fulbright Research Fellowship. Her dissertation examines the role of women in shaping antifascist visual culture between Argentina and Uruguay during the 1930s and 1940s. She was previously Assistant Curator at Americas Society, New York, where she co-curated exhibitions of modern and contemporary art of the Americas including Joaquín Orellana: The Spine of Music and assisted on exhibitions including Feliciano Centurión: Abrigo.

Buck Ellison will discuss Little Brother, his contribution to the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It’s Kept. Comprised of six photographs and a film, Little Brother was made between 2017 and 2022. In this work, Ellison imagines Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater, as he might have appeared on his Wyoming ranch in 2003, the year the firm received its first U.S. contracts to engage in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ellison carefully staged every piece in this project—hiring actors, sourcing props, researching filming locations—and combed through tax filings, transcripts of congressional hearings, military contracting price lists, as well as Prince’s autobiography in order to create this meticulous portrait.

Buck Ellison (b. 1987, San Francisco, lives and works in Los Angeles) received BAs in German Literature and Visual Arts from Columbia University, New York in 2010 and an MFA from the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 2014. His work produces a deep network of inquiry into how whiteness and privilege are sustained and broadcast. Recent exhibitions include Buck Ellison: Little Brother at Luhring Augustine, New York, 2023; the 16th Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art: manifesto of fragility, Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, 2022; Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It's Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art; Made in L.A. 2020: a version, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and The Huntington Libraries and Museum, Pasadena, 2021. Ellison has been profiled in ArtForum, Art Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times and Texte zur Kunst. His work is in the collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art); MOCA Los Angeles; and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

Description: Ziliang Liu, Dartmouth College will present on “Perpetual Flow: Drain Systems in Western Han Rock-Cut Tombs.” The discussion will be moderated by Alain Thote (École pratique des Hautes Études and Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Paris).

Program
10:00-10:30 am: Welcome
10:30 am-12:00 pm: Celebration of the Life and Work of Larissa Bonfante

Formal Remarks: Michael Peachin, Francesco de Angelis, Nancy Th. De Grummond, Blair Fowlkes-Childs, Sophie Crawford-Brown
12:00-1:00 pm: Reception

Edited by Jean-Louis Cohen, Daniella Berman, and Jon Ritter, the publication collects contributions authored by graduates of the Institute, established and emerging scholars, and practitioners to reconstruct the genesis of the Dukes’ home in the context of early 20th century Manhattan, analyzing its design, its construction, its decoration, and its metamorphosis from an elite residence to an educational institution.

Join us on May 8th to celebrate the publication with a presentation by the editors on this collective project and its contribution to the history of New York’s architecture, followed by a conversation with many of the book’s authors!

More about the Book

Featuring new archival research and previously unpublished photographs and architectural plans, this volume fundamentally revises our understanding of the development of modern New York, focusing on elite domestic architecture within the contexts of social history, urban planning, architecture, interior design, and adaptive re-use. Contributions from emerging and established scholars, art historians, and practitioners offer a multi-faceted analysis of major figures such as Horace Trumbauer, Julian Francis Abele, Robert Venturi, and Richard Kelly. Taking the James B. Duke House, now home to NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, as its point of departure, this collection provides fresh perspectives on domestic spaces, urban forms, and social reforms that shaped early-twentieth century New York into the modern city we know today.

Contributions by Daniella Berman, Mosette Broderick, Alisa Chiles, Grace Chuang, Jean-Louis Cohen, Isabelle Gournay, Christie Mitchell, Theodore Prudon, Jon Ritter, and Matthew Worsnick.

The book is available from Brill.

The Editors

Jean-Louis Cohen is the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Trained as an architect and an art historian in Paris, Cohen has curated many exhibitions and published more than forty books.

Daniella Berman is an art historian and curator specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. Trained at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, Berman has contributed to various exhibitions and their publications including Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022).

Jon Ritter is Clinical Professor in the Department of Art History, Urban Design and Architecture at New York University. President of the Society of Architectural Historian’s New York Chapter, Ritter holds a doctorate from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.

This hybrid event celebrates the publication of Conservation of Time-Based Media Art, the first book to take stock of the current practices and conceptual frameworks that define the emerging field of time-based media conservation. The editors Deena Engel and Joanna Phillips are joined by chapter authors to discuss the communal process of putting practice to paper.

The book was written and compiled by a diverse group of time-based media practitioners around the world, including conservators, curators, registrars, and technicians. Designed as a handbook, it offers a comprehensive survey of specialized practices that have developed around the collection, preservation, and display of time-based media art. Divided into 23 chapters with contributions from 36 authors and 85 additional voices, the narrative of this book provides both an overview and detailed guidance on critical topics, including the acquisition, examination, documentation, and installation of time-based media art.

Conservation of Time-Based Media Art serves as a critical resource for conservation students and for a diverse professional audience who engage with time-based media art, including conservation practitioners and other collection caretakers, curators, art historians, collectors, gallerists, artists, scholars, and academics.

There will be presentations and panels by the editors and chapter authors from 3PM to 4:50PM EDT, followed by an in-person reception at the Institute of Fine Arts from 5PM to 7PM EDT.

Learn more about the program & speakers

The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to present its second programming event for the spring Great Hall Exhibition, Estelio. Building upon the themes of migration, femininity, the multiplicity of identity, anticolonialism, and environmentalism as presented in Estelio, the discussion will feature artist Mónica Félix in conversation with Professor Laura Bravo López from the University of Puerto Rico, and film director Mariem Pérez Riera.

Estelio features seven videos by Puerto Rican artist Mónica Félix (b. 1984). Translated into English, estelio is “stellium,” an astrological phenomenon in which three or more planets align under a single zodiac sign. In this exhibition, excerpts of the artist’s rich videography come together for the first time, each individual work a star within a larger constellation. Throughout her oeuvre, Félix explores the entwined histories of femininity, migration, and colonialism—creatively navigating what she calls “los rincones comprometidos de esta vida viajera,” (“the compromised corners of this traveled life”).

About the panelists

Laura Bravo, Ph.D.
Professor
Art History Program
University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus 

Laura Bravo holds a Ph.D in Art History from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). Funded by a grant of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, she has been a researcher at the Tate Britain, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. She has been Chair of the Art History Program at the University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras Campus, where she currently works as a Professor. Bravo has been Coordinator for Faculty Research Initiatives, in the Office of the Dean for Graduate Studies and Research, UPRRP (2018), and Summer Visiting Scholar at PLAS (Program of Latin American Studies) in Princeton University (2018). Bravo has been principal investigator for projects on Puerto Rican contemporary art and migration (2015-2018), and recently, on photography and illness (the human body between the medical and the artistic gaze (2020-2023). 

Laura Bravo is author of Ficciones certificadas: Invención y apariencia en la creación fotográfica (1975-2000), coeditor of Counterstreaming: Measuring the Impact of Cultural Remittances, a special issue of Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College (CUNY, 2016) and Geopolítica de la diferencia: Discusiones sobre género y migración en la cultura visual contemporánea, a special issue of Arte y políticas de identidad journal (Universidad de Murcia, 2018). 

She is coauthor in nearly twenty books on art history and visual culture, being the most recent: The Mediatization of the Artist (Palgrave-McMillan, 2018), Álbum de familia y prácticas artísticas. Relecturas sobre autobiografía, intimidad y archivo (Universidad Internacional Meléndez Pelayo, 2019), and Con la casa a cuestas. Migración y patrimonio cultural en el mundo hispano, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla, 2020). She has been the founder and editor of Visión Doble: Journal of Art History, of the UPR Art History Program. 

She has curated more than fifteen exhibitions and art projects in museums and art galleries in Puerto Rico and in Spain, such as the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and Museo de Las Américas (San Juan); the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art, at the University of Puerto Rico; the Art Gallery at the University of Salamanca, and Las Naves Contemporary Art Space in Valencia (Spain), among many other independent spaces. 

She is coauthor and editor of several long exhibition catalogs, such as Universos paralelos: transvergencias fotográficas entre España y Puerto Rico (Universidad de Salamanca and UPR, 2013), and coauthor in Isla: Regarding Paradise, Center for the Arts Gallery, Towsond University (2018). Her most recent curatorial project and publication, Ida y Vuelta [Arrivals and Departures]: Migration Experiences in Puerto Rican Contemporary Art, has been exhibited in the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art at the UPR, Río Piedras Campus (2017-2018), Taller Puertorriqueño (Philadelphia, 2022-2023), and Hunter East Harlem Gallery, Hunter College (CUNY, 2023).

Mariem Pérez Riera
Director and Producer
Maramara Films

Mariem is the director and producer of the New York Times critic’s pick documentary "Rita Moreno, Just A Girl Who Decided To Go For It” which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival acquiring a theater distribution with Roadside Attractions and later a TV release on PBS American Masters and Netflix. 

Born in Puerto Rico, Mariem, at age nine, performed in the leading role of the movie "The Two Worlds of Angelita". It was after that experience that she decided to become a film director. 

Her latest feature film, starring actor Ismael Cruz Córdova, “San Juan, beyond the walls”, is a historic documentary about the 500 years of the city of San Juan, which became one of the top box office hits for 2022 in the theaters of Puerto Rico. 

With 20 years of experience as director, editor, and producer, she is a Sundance Momentum fellowship member with a trajectory of awarded documentaries such as "De Puerto Rico Para El Mundo", "Diez En La Música", Emmy winner "Croatto, La Huella De Un Emigrante", and “Cuando lo pequeño se hace grande”. 

She is also the co-director and editor of the comedy feature "Maldeamores" (executive produced by Benicio Del Toro) which won several international awards including Best First Feature, Audience Award, Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress. Mariem is the founder of Maramara Films, where she has produced and directed brand content, commercials, the web comedy series "Chamacas" and other documentaries.  

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

We extend special thanks to the artist for lending her works on view. Lillian Beeson, Laura Sofía Hernández González, Barbie Kim, and Kaylee Moua Nok curated the exhibition. Jason Varone designed the website and Professors Catherine Quan Damman and Christine Poggi provided faculty support.

Speakers will introduce new formulations being developed jointly with conservators and scientists (referred to as the “Akron formulations”), which are designed to emulate the performance of the original lining adhesive first used in 1970. The Akron formulations have approximately the same low-temperature setting attributes as the original Beva 371. In addition to presenting work on developing viscous solutions and solvent-free films, we will be discussing other innovations in making the Akron formulation more sustainable. This project is a collaboration between the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and University of Akron’s Polymer Chemistry and Polymer Engineering program. This project is indebted to the cooperation of CPC and CTS, current suppliers of Beva 371 to the US and EU, who we hope to continue working with to disseminate this material to the conservation community. It has been generously supported by the Getty Foundation as part of its Conserving Canvas initiative.

9:15am: Welcome. (Michele Marincola).

9:20am: Introduction, Justification, and Goals. (Chris McGlinchey)

9:50am: Adhesion Principles of Thermoplastic Polymers. (Ali Dhinojwala)

10:40am: BEVA™371 at the 1974 Greenwich Conference on Comparative Lining Techniques: a pivotal moment. (Chris McGlinchey)

11:20am: Discussion: Q and A, lining and balancing the aesthetic and engineering needs of a painting.

12:20pm: Break.

1:30pm: Discussion: Selecting from the palette of lining adhesives and methods based upon considerations inherent to the painting.

2:00pm: Deconstructing and Reconstructing BEVA™371. (Rebecca Ploeger)

2:40pm: Break.

3:00pm: The Akron Formulations of BEVA™371: Screening candidates & exploring new ways to process it. (Dharamdeep Jain)

4:00pm: Group discussion.

Description: A search of “knotted string records” produces a slew of references to “Quipu/Khipu,” the information system used by the lnkas to manage their vast South American empire. Yet the use of knotted strings to keep track of information was widespread throughout not only the Americas but the whole world. While khipus may be the most sophisticated example of knotted string devices, they are/were not alone. After briefly reviewing the various knotted mnemonic devices known to have existed in the Americas, this talk will explore in depth the similarities and differences between lnka khipus and a sophisticated, yet relatively unknown, Costa Rican knotted-string census from 1874.

Jeffrey C. Splitstoser is assistant research professor of anthropology at the George Washington University and vice president of the Boundary End Archaeology Research Center. He has studied ancient Andean textiles for over 20 years, having recently discovered (with Tom Dillehay, Jan Wouters and Anna Claro) the world’s earliest known use of indigo blue in a 6,200-year-old cotton textile from the prehistoric site of Huaca Prieta. Dr. Splitstoser specializes in Wari “khipus,” colored and knotted string devices that Andean peoples used to record information. He co-curated (with Juan Antonio Murro) the exhibition Written in Knots: Undeciphered Records of Andean Life at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. Dr. Splitstoser’s research includes reproducing the khipus and textile structures he encounters: processing, spinning and dyeing the fibers, as well as growing cotton and dye plants. Dr. Splitstoser is an editor of the journals Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing and Ancient America and was the guest editor of volume 49 of The Textile Museum Journal. He was a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks and is currently a research associate of the Institute of Andean Studies and a Cosmos Club Scholar. Dr. Splitstoser received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.

Presentations will include:

Celia Cooper
Conservation at the Weissman Preservation Center

Emily Jenne
Historic bookbinding, 16 mm film inspection, and treatment of works on paper from the Fales Downtown Collection

Lucia Elledge
Treatment of works of art on paper at the Art Institute of Chicago

Devon Lee
Conservation of taxidermy specimens at the Natural History Museum of Denmark

In 2021, the National Gallery of Art in Washington embarked on a new course after it redefined its mission, vision, and values, which are all deeply grounded in deepening and expanding the museum’s collections and its service to audiences. In this talk, E. Carmen Ramos will discuss how she has navigated her new role and worked to embody the ideas of being an audience centered institution and being of the nation and for all the people.

E. Carmen Ramos is Chief Curatorial and Conservation Officer at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She leads the curatorial and conservation teams as they serve the nation and beyond through collections development, ground-breaking scholarship, art conservation, and scientific research. Ramos previously served as the acting chief curator and curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), where she built one of the largest collections of Latinx art at a museum of U.S. art. She organized award-winning exhibitions including ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now (2020), Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013), and Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography (2017). In addition to her numerous catalogues, her scholarship appears in American Art, and in books including Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture and Identity on the Island.

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.

This series of public programs and events is coordinated by Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and organized by graduate students. Since partnering with ISLAA in 2011, NYU’s Latin American Forum has hosted more than thirty events.

Presenters: Dr. Seán Hemingway, John A. and Carole O. Moran Curator in Charge of the Department of Greek and Roman Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Dr. Mario La Rocca, General Director, Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana; Dr. Caterina Greco, Director, Archaeological Museum of Palermo “Antonino Salinas"; Dr. Felice Crescente, Director, Archaeological Park of Selinunte, Cave di Cusa, and Pantelleria; Prof. Clemente Marconi (Institute of Fine Arts–NYU), Director, IFA–NYU and UniMi mission in Selinunte; Prof. Andrew Ward (Emory University), Field Director, IFA–NYU and UniMi mission in Selinunte.

This year marks a major step forward in the work of the mission on the Acropolis of Selinunte of the Institute of Fine Arts–NYU and the University of Milan. A new permit, issued by the director of the Archaeological Park, Dr. Felice Crescente, extends the area of operation of our mission to the entire main urban sanctuary. Covering two hectares, this was one of the largest sacred areas in the Greek Mediterranean during the Archaic and Classical periods, well known for its abundant monumental architecture but still largely unexcavated underneath the levels of the Punic phase, when the site was abandoned within the context of the First Punic War. This extension has already led to remarkable new finds related to the original articulation of the area during the past excavation season, which has also produced remarkable new finds in the area of Temple R.

Another major reason for celebration this year is the new collaborative agreement between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Assessorato dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana, which was announced in May. This agreement provides for long-term loans of ancient masterpieces to the museum and the exchange of three-year loans between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Archaeological Regional Museum “Antonino Salinas” of Palermo. The agreement follows decades of successful collaboration between the museum and the Republic of Italy, and it started with a series of loans from Selinunte currently on view in the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries.

Description: The archaeological site of Tibes, located in southern Puerto Rico, is to date the earliest ceremonial center in the Caribbean. It consists of nine stone structures and includes a variety of archaeological deposits. The information at hand suggests that the site began as a village around AD 500 and it acted as a ceremonial center from AD 900 to 1250, when it was abandoned. Traditionally, this shift has been interpreted by scholars as evidence of the development of social stratification. However, evidence obtained by the current project questions this interpretation and is proposing a new explanation based on evidence of a hurricane of high intensity.

L. Antonio Curet is a Curator of the National Museum of the American Indian. He was born in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico in 1960 and attended the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras where he obtained his B.A. and M.A. in Chemistry. Curet received his Ph.D. in 1992 from Arizona State University. He was part of the faculty at Gettysburg College (1993-1996) and University of Colorado at Denver (1996-2000). From 2000 to 2013 he was Curator at the Field Museum and Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Chicago, and DePaul University. His research focuses on cultural and social change in the Ancient Caribbean, but he has participated also in archaeological projects in Arizona, Puerto Rico, and Veracruz, Mexico. He has directed several projects including Excavations at La Gallera, Ceiba, Puerto Rico and the Archaeological Project of the Valley of Maunabo. Since 1995 he has been conducting excavations at the Ceremonial Center of Tibes, Ponce, Puerto Rico and in 2013 began co-directing a regional project in the Valley of Añasco in Western Puerto Rico. Curet has published multiple articles in national and international journals, a book on Caribbean paleodemography, and has edited volumes on Cuban Archaeology, the archaeology of Tibes, Puerto Rico, and long-distance interaction in the Caribbean. He is also in the editorial boards of the Journal for Caribbean Archaeology, Revista Arqueológica del Area Intermedia, and Latin American Antiquity, Antípoda(Universidad de los Andes, Colombia) and is the editor of the Caribbean Archaeology and Ethnohistory Book Series of the University of Alabama Press.

Description: Representations of the Appalachia region in literature, art and pop culture have historically shifted between hyperbolic, colorful caricatures to grotesque, sensationalized, black and white photography. This wide spectrum of depictions continually resonates within the North American psyche due to its shared commonality of Appalachia as the cultural “other.” This othering frequently leaves audiences with a kind of relief that this warped representation of backwards, rural poverty is not their own progressive, present-day reality. Countless artists have exploited the region in order to show the impoverished side of rural Appalachia and spin a failed capitalistic way of life into a romanticized, intentional “return to the frontier.” Through analyzing a selection of works within literature, fine art/photography, film and television one can begin to broadly define what many Appalachians feel is lacking from their own narrative within pop culture. Something as simple as the angle of a camera can dramatically affect the way a viewer experiences a photograph and its subject. Furthermore, the chosen narrator of a novel can make the difference for a reader between a compassionate portrayal of a region previously unknown to them, and one that enforces the existing stereotype of Appalachia. This lecture will broach the subject of responsibility in the context of Appalachian cultural representation, as well as how individual artistic motivations and decisions can have negative, far-reaching consequences for the Appalachian region.

Chelsea Brislin earned her MA in Interdisciplinary Humanities from New York University and her PhD in English from the University of Kentucky, where she now serves as the Associate Director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities. Her work looks primarily at 21st century representations of Appalachia through literature, film, and television.

Description: In addition to his sweet and deeply felt religious paintings, the Spanish artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) produced secular scenes of lower-class old women and young boys, subjects more readily associated with 17th-century northern art than Spanish painting. Murillo’s Seville was a thriving port and locus of trade with both other European mercantile centers and the rich Spanish American colonies. Art moved freely: Spain had long looked to Flanders (under Spanish Habsburg rule) for artistic products of all kinds, from tapestries for the elite to paintings at all price points to prints, which were consumed in enormous quantities, not least by artists as practical work material. Furthermore, this bustling center was home to hundreds of foreign merchants, among them three of Murillo’s most important patrons, all with ties to the North. Against this backdrop and with the help of documents that link art collectors, extended family members, and international businessmen, this talk proposes that Murillo drew on the paintings of the Brussels-born Michael Sweerts as a source for his early genre imagery.

Ronni Baer worked in curatorial departments at the Frick Collection, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the High Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art before serving for almost twenty years as Senior Curator of European Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Since 2019, she has held the position of Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum. She has published numerous articles in the fields of 17th-century Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish art and in the history of collecting. Among her exhibitions (and their accompanying catalogues) are Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt’s First Pupil (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; and The Mauritshuis, The Hague, 2000); and, at the MFA: The Poetry of Everyday Life (2002); Rembrandt's Journey (with Cliff Ackley) (2004); El Greco to Velázquez (with IFA alumna Sarah Schroth) (2008); and Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer (with Ian Kennedy) (2016). For her work in furthering knowledge and appreciation of their art and culture, she was knighted by King Juan Carlos of Spain in 2008 and by King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands in 2017. In 2018, she was named the IFA’s Distinguished Alumna and Commencement Speaker. Her exhibition, Art About Art: Contemporary Photographers Look at Old Master Paintings, is currently on view in Princeton.

The air was fidgety in 1960s and 1970s South Korea. While the nation urgently anticipated new breakthroughs from the rapid socioeconomic transformations, Park Chung Hee’s dictatorial grip on the young republic tightened. In response, the new generation of young artists embarked on innovative and often provocative approaches to art making by experimenting with radical artistic concepts and a wide variety of mediums, including but not limited to video, installation, photography, and performance. Featuring approximately eighty works, Only the Young examines the works born out of both individual and collective experimentations, which were bounded not by a single aesthetic, but by their engagement with the dynamic social atmosphere of South Korea and the world beyond.

This discussion seeks to explore Experimental Korean art in the 60s and 70s as a unique moment in Korean history while situating it within the broader discourse of global art history, to question: How has the term “Experimental art” been forged and developed? How do we navigate between the artists’ local distinctiveness, yet avid engagement with concurrent global art movements? How does the exhibition engage with the current sociopolitical climate? The event will begin with a brief presentation and walkthrough by the exhibition curator, Kyung An, Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim, followed by a conversation between her and Sooran Choi, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History in the School of the Arts at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT.

Dr. Kyung An is the Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim. Since joining the museum in 2015, she has organized Sarah Sze: Timelapse (2023) and Only the Young: Experimental in Korea, 1960s-1970s (2023-24), also lending key support for Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World (2017–8) and the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative’s exhibitions, Tales of Our Time (2016–17) and One Hand Clapping (2018). In addition, An contributes to collection growth through her appointment on the International Director’s Council and the Asian Art Circle. She has also published extensively on Korean artists and contributed to May You Live in Interesting Times: Biennale Arte 2019 (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 2019), Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2019) and co-authored Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art? (London and New York: Thames & Hudson).

Dr. Sooran Choi, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, specializes in decolonization within avant-garde discourse, global feminism, and ecocriticism, focusing on contemporary East Asian art. Her current book manuscript, Zombie Avant-Gardes: Subterfuge in Postwar South Korean Art, investigates South Korean renditions of avant-garde art through post-colonial lenses, challenging traditional center-periphery paradigms in the context of post-WWII global artistic exchanges across East Asia, the United States, and Europe. It was awarded the 2018 College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship in Art History. Her other awards include grants from the Academy of Korean Studies and the Mellon Foundation. Her efforts to decolonize avant-garde conceptual frameworks are reflected in recent publications, “Manifestations of a Zombie Avant-garde: South Korean Performance and Conceptual Art in the 1970s" (2020); "Camouflaged Dissent: ‘Happenings’ in South Korea, 1967–1968" (2021); and "Korean Shamanism in Action/Art: The Counter-cultural Spirituality of Women and Gender Fluidity" (2023), among others.

David Smith Sculpture: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1932–1965, published in 2021 by The Estate of David Smith and distributed by Yale University Press, with essays by Brenson and Lyon, and David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor, published in 2022 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, are the most substantial contributions in a generation to the understanding of David Smith’s art. As Jed Perl recently wrote of them in The New York Review of Books, “When Brenson’s more than eight- hundred page book is taken together with the three-volume catalogue raisonné of Smith’s sculpture that appeared in 2021, I think it’s fair to say that we are at long last beginning to grasp the extent of [Smith’s] achievement.”

In a two-part presentation, Lyon and Brenson discuss ways that a catalogue raisonné and a biography illuminate, and sometimes obscure, the significance of David Smith’s sculpture oeuvre and his artistic thought. Lyon illustrates the “work-concept” underlying the reception of Smith and a complementary idea, which Smith called his “work stream.” The dual concepts are fundamental for the catalogue raisonné, which establishes, for the first time, an entirely chronological sequence for Smith’s sculptural oeuvre. Articulated by Smith’s sequences and series, and realized ephemerally in Smith’s fields and installations, Smith’s works and stream radically recast sculpture as a relational medium in an “expanded field,” securing his lasting critical and historical significance.

Responding to the Smith biography, Alexander Potts, the eminent authority on sculpture’s history and theory, praised Brenson for being “rightly committed to evaluating Smith’s art on its own terms” rather than explaining Smith's work in terms of his life. The phrase “art on its own terms” is a provocative one, particularly perhaps in 2023, and not one usually associated with biography. Reflecting on art and artists’ biographies, however, Brenson argues that the multiple perspectives a biography requires have something essential to say about the ways in which art reveals itself as its own distinctive reality.

Michael Brenson received a Ph.D. in art history from Johns Hopkins University and was an art critic for The New York Times from 1982 to 1991. He is a Getty Scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, and Clark Fellow, and the recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction grant. For nearly two decades, he was a member of the sculpture faculty in Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, and he is the artistic director if the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation. His books include Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America (2001) and Acts of Engagement: Writings on Art, Criticism and Institutions, 1993–2002 (2004).

Christopher Lyon was the catalogue raisonné project director for The Estate of David Smith and is the editor of the catalogue, for which he wrote on the critical reception of Smith’s sculpture. He is an independent scholar, critic, and book producer with long experience in museum and trade art book publishing. In 2013 he originated and for several years wrote the “Artful Volumes” column in Bookforum. Lyon is the author of Nancy Spero: The Work (2010) and a co-author and the editor of The Art and Spirit of Paris (2003).

The recent fieldwork at Tell Edfu has focused on two excavations areas, one dating to the later Old Kingdom (Zone 2) and the other to the early New Kingdom (Zone 1). Zone 2 consists of open courtyards and the two large, official buildings (the southern and the northern) that can now be linked based on the associated finds excavated in the courtyards, to a royal domain which would be the first example attested archaeologically. It is closely linked to royal expeditions into the Eastern Desert for the extraction of raw materials, in particular copper ore. The associated clay sealings and ceramics date this activity to the end of the 5th Dynasty and the reign of Djedkare - Isesi. Excavations in Zone 1 comprise several buildings of an elite town quarter dating to the early New Kingdom. A large urban villa measuring more than 500 square meters has been discovered here which includes a small shrine in the corner of the main columned hall that was dedicated to the worship of the ancestors. Several cult objects have been found in and around the shrine, which had been left there when the building was abandoned. This discovery is a unique opportunity to investigate private religious practices through the various cult objects that were found in situ as well as their archaeological context and the architectural elements of the shrine. It also sheds new light on the provenance and function of similar objects that can be seen in many museum collections and for which the archaeological context is frequently missing.

Nadine Moeller is currently Professor of Egyptology at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale. After receiving her D.Phil., she held the Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford (2004-2007). Before coming to Yale, she was Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at the Oriental Institute (now called Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures) and the Department of NELC at the University of Chicago (2007-2020).

Her main research interests include settlement archaeology and urbanism in ancient Egypt, household archaeology and climate change in antiquity. She is author of The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge 2016), and co-editor together with Karen Radner (LMU Munich) and Dan Potts (NYU/ISAW) of the Oxford History of the Ancient Near East (Oxford 2020-), a five-volume project to replace the ‘Cambridge Ancient History.’

In Egypt she has been directing the ongoing excavations at Tell Edfu together with Gregory Marouard since 2010, and she has also participated in numerous excavations and fieldwork projects at other sites in Egypt such as Abu Rawash, Memphis, Dendara, Theban West Bank, Valley of the Kings, and Elephantine.

Presentations will include:

Alexa Kline
The Acton Catalog Project at Villa La Pietra

Devon Lee
Conservation treatment of two crèche figures at NYU’s Villa La Pietra

Halina Piasecki
Sun, sea, and stratigraphy: conservation at the archaeological park of Selinunte

Maria Olivia Davalos Stanton
Stone cleaning and construction analysis of a monumental Confederate sculpture

John Szwed's new biography of Harry Smith fills an enormous gap in our understanding of artistic life in New York and San Francisco from the end of WW2 through the 1970s, accompanied by the Whitney's visual and spatial sampling of his extraordinary legacy as an experimental filmmaker, painter, collector, dedicated Native American anthropologist from his teenage years, mystic, and deep scholar of multiple esoteric fields. As Smith lived without a fixed home address or visible means of support, much of his work and the documentary records of his extraordinary mind have been lost along the way, making the riveting detail of Szwed's synthesis all the more remarkable. Crow will explore with Szwed the extraordinary but perpetually overlooked contributions of the elusive Smith, the ultimate bohemian, mage of the Chelsea Hotel, and mentor to Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, just to begin the list of his devotees. Andy Warhol followed his films; the young Bob Dylan found a folk repertoire via Smith's discerning ear; Monte Python exploited Smith's animation to frame their comedy. But Smith himself is the real story.

John Szwed is the author of 19 books, including the just-published Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, also Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz, and biographies of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Alan Lomax. He was awarded a Grammy for his life of Jelly Roll Morton. Before his 26 years at Yale, he chaired the department of Folklore and Folk Life at Penn and was professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia.

Thomas Crow is the author of The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, which devotes a chapter to Harry Smith, along with The Hidden Mod in Modern Art and The Artist in the Counterculture, published this year. While director of the Getty Research Institute, he initiated the Harry Smith research project in 2000.

As part of the Institute of Fine Arts’ ongoing tradition of inviting contemporary artists to speak about their practices in the Duke House Lecture Hall, this year’s Artists at the InstituteLecture Series invites four artists who explore the body as a site of confrontation. The body is continuously subjected to political, social, and aesthetic judgments both within and outside of the art historical canon. Whether it be through the ongoing battle with reproductive rights or the modification of the body in digital and social media, this phenomenon proves to be omnipresent. Contemporary artists are constantly grappling with conceptions of corporeality, and each artist brings a diverse approach to what this means to them. This year’s series is committed to uplifting the voices of women working in representational practices across a range of media, styles, and backgrounds. Through feminist, cross-cultural, and art historical methods, these artists challenge the contours of corporeal form, transcending the limitations and restrictions that have bound the female body to the canonical canvas, and imagining how such liberation might transform aesthetics.

In our first lecture of the Visions of Corporeality series, Brooklyn-based painter and sculptor Naudline Pierre will explore the role of imagination in her work. With her otherworldly bodies at the forefront of her talk, Naudline will explore how fantasy has aided in creating the figures of her own mythology. These jewel-toned, oftentimes winged, and larger-than-life bodies exist in a world of spirituality that reclaims iconography rooted in exclusionary Western practices. This lecture will commence our year-long conversation surrounding visions of corporeality.

Naudline Pierre (b. 1989, Leominster, MA), lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Pierre’s work situates personal mythology and transcendent intimacy alongside canonical narratives of devotion. Her works continue the art-historical tradition of portraying encounters between the earthly and the otherworldly, extending this lineage of image-making by injecting the conventions of her discipline with ephemerality and ambiguity. Referencing the Renaissance format of the altar triptych, or incorporating flattened space and forced perspective, she reconfigures formal systems from the past to generate new possible futures grounded in the here and now.

While the accomplishments of biological science are nothing short of remarkable, risks and dangers of human arrogance emerge. Since the Enlightenment, scientists have achieved results through means-ends problem solving -- instrumental rationalism -- that pursues goals without necessarily engaging ethical responsibilities. Such problem solving also encourages a habit of mind that is prone to identify objects of study in a manner that defines and disenchants them. The now-debunked science of eugenics, for example, revealed the dangers of such thinking when scientists defined groups of people as other, with Nazi Germany bringing this to a genocidal extreme. At the time, German medicine ranked as the most advanced in the world.

Still using the same sorts of reasoning and labeling today, scientists genetically modify plants and animals for food; they engineer living tissue toward the development of new medical therapies; and they develop environment-altering biotech-proposals to potentially tackle climate change, among other activities. In turn, bioethicists grapple with the ethical dimensions of such projects. By contrast, many artists critique scientific methodology itself for its instrumental rationalism and its habit of mind. They often emphasize the ethical value of not understanding, and the importance of caring for invented life-forms. They invite us to imagine what is at stake in this era of new and rapidly developing biotechnology, and alternative futures. The lecture will discuss the different critiques and conceptual strategies in works by a range of artists, among them Jake and Dinos Chapman, Eduardo Kac, Verena Kaminiarz, Kate MacDowell, and the Tissue Culture and Arts Project (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr).

Andrew Weinstein (BA, Brown University; MA, University of Pennsylvania; PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU) is a professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, and a curator of exhibitions of contemporary art, most recently Baneful Medicine at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. His academic writing focuses chiefly on the ethical mandates and challenges of Holocaust representation in contemporary art.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor, op. 108 (1886-1888)
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Un poco presto e con sentimento
IV. Presto agitato

June Kim, violin
Juan Vasquez, piano

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Horn Trio in E-Flat Major (1865)
I. Andante
II. Scherzo (Allegro)
III. Adagio mesto
IV. Allegro con brio

Priscilla Tam, violin
Engelberth Mejia-Gonzalez, french horn
Christopher Zandieh, piano

Description: The faceneck vessel is a prolific, yet enigmatic ceramic form popular among the Wari civilization, a powerful polity with widespread cultural influence during the Middle Horizon of Andean prehistory. Sometimes described as effigies, other times lumped in with all other narrow-necked jars, the classification of these objects fluctuates between the ritual and the utilitarian. Are they representational images or decorative dinnerware? At the heart of this conundrum is the issue that Andean pottery operates in ways that are unfamiliar to Western traditions, and many ancient Andean vessel types have no counterpart outside of the Americas. An important distinction of the faceneck is that it also has a body, imbuing the vessel with an acute sense of personhood. Drawing on theories of Andean perspectivism, an ontological viewpoint that considers the significance of feasting rituals and ancestor veneration within an animate world, this presentation will address the potential for faceneck vessels to have participated as social agents in complex rituals involving valuable offerings and communion with the dead.

Andrea Vázquez de Arthur is an assistant professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, specializing in the ancient, modern, and contemporary visual arts of Latin America. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a PhD in art history from Columbia University. Prior to joining the faculty at FIT, Dr. Vázquez de Arthur was the Leigh and Mary Carter Director’s Research Fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she curated the exhibition, “Fashioning Identity: Mola Textiles of Panamá”. Her research focuses on the diverse archaeological cultures of the ancient Andes, primarily from the Middle Horizon and the Late Intermediate Period. Through studies of comparative analysis, her work investigates systems of visual language, Indigenous ontologies, and gender representation in the visual culture of various societies including the Moche, Wari, Lambayeque, and Chimú.

Please join the Institute of Fine Arts in conversation with alumna Rosa Lowinger (’82), art and architectural conservator; Angel Ayón, architect and preservationist; and Pamela Hatchfield, Head of Objects Conservation Emerita at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as they discuss Rosa's new book, Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair. Michele D. Marincola, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Conservation of the Conservation Center and Chair of the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, will introduce the speakers and serve as moderator for the discussion.

Inspired by and structured similarly to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, this first memoir by a working art conservator is organized by chapters based on the materials Lowinger handles in her thriving private practice – Marble, Limestone, Bronze, Ceramics, Concrete, Silver, Wood, Mosaic, Paint, Aluminum, Terrazzo, Steel, Glass and Plastics. Lowinger offers insider accounts of conservation that form the backbone of her immigrant family’s story of healing that beautifully juxtaposes repair of the material with repair of the personal. Through Lowinger’s relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx.

Dwell Time is an immigrant’s story seen through an entirely new lens, that which connects the material to the personal and helps us see what is possible when one opens one’s heart to another person’s wounds.

Rosa Lowinger holds a 1982 M.A. and certificate in conservation from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. A Cuban-born American art and architectural conservator, she is the author of Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House Publishing, 2023), a book about conservation written for a general audience that blends the precepts of conservation with a personal story. Rosa was the founder and serves as current conservator at RLA Conservation, LLC, a firm with offices in Los Angeles and Miami. A Fellow of AIC, APT, and the American Academy in Rome, she is the author also of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005) and Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (Wolfsonian Museum).

With over 25 years of historic building experience, Angel Ayón has developed a mission to not only preserve significant historic architecture, but improve it—with more sustainable and resilient approaches, as well as contemporary technologies. He currently leads AYON Studio, a practice centered around this mission

Both an Architect and Preservationist, Angel has practiced in his native Havana, Cuba, Washington, D.C., and New York City. His expertise ranges from building envelope evaluation and repair to full-scale rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of commercial and residential properties, as well as cultural and educational institutions, including work on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY; The Colonial Theater in Boston, and Eleven80 in Newark, NJ.

Angel co-authored the award-winning book Reglazing Modernism - Intervention Strategies for 20th Century Icons and serves his community through Save Harlem Now!, the Historic Districts Council, The Municipal Art Society of New York, the Preservation League of NY State, and the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation. He has a professional degree in Architecture and an M.S. in Conservation and Rehabilitation of the Built Heritage from Havana’s Higher Polytechnic Institute, as well as a Post-Graduate Certificate in Conservation of Historic Buildings and Archaeological Sites from Columbia University in New York.

Pamela Hatchfield is the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU's fall 2023 Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor in Conservation and Technical Studies and the Head of Objects Conservation Emerita at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She also serves as the Project Coordinator for Held in Trust, a collaboration between the National Endowment for Humanities and the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation to chart the future of preservation and conservation in the United States. Pam serves as a consultant to the Acton Collection, NYU, Florence. Her archaeological field experience includes sites in Egypt and Sudan.

She holds degrees from Vassar College and the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with post graduate work at Harvard University.

Pam’s many interests include the treatment of dry archaeological wood, Asian lacquer, Egyptian polychromy, stone, outdoor sculpture, and exhibition materials. She has taught, lectured, and published extensively on these and other subjects. A founding contributor to CAMEO (Conservation and Art Materials Database), she also authored the seminal book: Pollutants in the Museum Environment.

Pam is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, the International Institute for Conservation, and the American Academy in Rome. She served as President of AIC and in numerous other leadership positions. Awards include the Rome Prize and the AIC Robert L. Feller Lifetime Achievement Award.

As part of the Institute of Fine Arts’ ongoing tradition of inviting contemporary artists to speak about their practices in the Duke House Lecture Hall, this year’s Artists at the Institute Lecture Series invites four artists who explore the body as a site of confrontation. The body is continuously subjected to political, social, and aesthetic judgments both within and outside of the art historical canon. Whether it be through the ongoing battle with reproductive rights or the modification of the body in digital and social media, this phenomena proves to be omnipresent. Contemporary artists are constantly grappling with conceptions of corporeality, and each artist brings a diverse approach to what this means to them. This year’s series is committed to uplifting the voices of women working in representational practices across a range of media, styles, and backgrounds. Through feminist, cross-cultural, and art historical methods, these artists challenge the contours of corporeal form, transcending the limitations and restrictions that have bound the female body to the canonical canvas, and imagining how such liberation might transform aesthetics.

For our second installment of Artists at the Institute, Visions of Corporeality, lecture series we are excited to welcome Misha Japanwala. Misha Japanwala (b. 1995, London, England and raised in Karachi, Pakistan) is a Pakistani artist and fashion designer, whose work is rooted in the rejection and deconstruction of shame attached to one’s body, and discussion of themes such as bodily autonomy, gender based violence, moral policing, sexuality and censorship.

In our second installment of this series, Misha will touch upon what it means to be a Pakistani woman familiar with the historical objectification, commodification and control exerted on marginalized bodies by societies and systems enveloped in patriarchy. Misha’s work aims to create a new historical record and documentation of people — one that is on our own terms, and rooted in honesty, resistance and hope. Through molding the body to create casts that are worn as sculptural garments, Misha’s artistic practice blurs the lines between fashion and fine art, clothing and nudity, and asks viewers to see the body exactly as it is. Her practice is an insistence for bodies to occupy physical space, emphasizing the notion that our bodies shouldn’t need to prove anything other than being allowed to simply exist.

In Looking at Picasso Pepe Karmel approaches Picasso’s work through the lens of art rather than biography, showing how he invented countless new visual languages and transformed the traditional themes of Western art. After tracing Picasso’s evolution from the Rose and Blue Periods to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Karmel surveys the development of Cubism, beginning with crystalline facets and ending with overlapping planes glowing with color and texture. Turning to Picasso’s surrealist work, he demonstrates how the artist’s abstract constellations and interlaced figures of the early 1920s led to his so-called “monsters” as well as to sensual reveries like Girl Before a Mirror. Another chapter explores Picasso’s creation of multiple classical styles, from his 1919 drawings of ballet dancers, inspired by Pompeian frescoes, to the Greek tragedy of the 1935 Minotauromachy, evoking Rembrandt. A final chapter follows Picasso from Guernica, his 1937 vision of terror and destruction, to the abstract sign language of The Kitchen (1948), to his disturbing late work.

Pepe Karmel is a Professor in the Department of Art History, New York University. He is the author of Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (2003), Abstract Art: A Global History (2020), and Looking at Picasso (fall 2023). He has written widely on modern and contemporary art for museum catalogues, as well as for the New York Times, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. He has also curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Robert Morris: Felt Works (Grey Art Gallery, New York, 1989), Jackson Pollock (MoMA, New York, 1998), and Dialogues with Picasso (Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020).

A Whitmanian Glance at 19th-Century American Photographs Description: A wet frog; a strap-on roller skate; snowfall on the Boston Common; a drygoods salesman selling cotton fabric. The real story of 19th-century American photography remains largely unwritten. Perhaps it will never be. Drawn from a distinguished private collection of American photographs, this presentation by Jeff L. Rosenheim will trace the first seventy years of the medium’s evolution. It offers a sneak peak of The Met’s spring 2025 exhibition—A New Art: The William L. Schaeffer Collection of Early American Photographs—and will feature major works by acknowledged early masters such as Josiah Johnson Hawes, George Barnard, Carleton Watkins, and Alice Austen alongside equally stunning photographs made by obscure and unknown practitioners. Made in small towns and cities from coast to coast, daguerreotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, stereographs, and cyanotypes record the changing shape of the American scene. By focusing on exceptional, yet still unseen works of art, the talk will explore the nation’s shifting sense of self, driven by the immediate success of photography as a cultural, commercial, artistic, and indeed psychological preoccupation.

All the photographs in the presentation were amassed over the last fifty years by William L. Schaeffer, and are now promised gifts to The Met by Jennifer and Philip (Flip) Maritz.

Jeff L. Rosenheim joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1988 and has been the Joyce F. Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs since 2012. He is the steward of the Walker Evans Archive which The Met acquired in 1994, and the author of numerous books and essays on Evans. Rosenheim is also the custodian of the Diane Arbus Archive, acquired by The Met in 2007. As of December 2021, he is now the caretaker of the James Van Der Zee Archive, a landmark collaboration between The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Met. Rosenheim has lectured extensively in the U.S., Western Europe, and South America and curated shows featuring a wide range of artists including Evans, Arbus, Carleton Watkins, Thomas Eakins, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, Irving Penn, Bernd & Hilla Becher, and Richard Avedon.

Now in his 36th year at The Met, Rosenheim has overseen the acquisition by purchase and gift of thousands of photographs and curated many traveling exhibitions including Photography and the American Civil War (2013), diane arbus: in the beginning (2016), and Irving Penn: Centennial (2017). His recent exhibitions include: African American Portraits: Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s (2018); William Eggleston: Los Alamos (2018); Photography’s Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection (2020); Cruel Radiance: Photography, 1940s-1960s (2022); and Bernd & Hilla Becher (2022-23), the artist’s first retrospective. Rosenheim’s most recent exhibition, Richard Avedon: MURALS, closed in October 2023 and featured three of the largest photographs ever produced, including one of the era’s most iconic works of art: Andy Warhol and Members of The Factory, New York City, 1969.

The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of presentations from current conservation students on their summer 2023 work projects. Presentations will include:

Caroline Carlsmith
Conserving and Re-Installing Robert Rauschenberg’s Soundings (1968) at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Adrian Hernandez
A Summer of Surveys: Examinations at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and National September 11 Memorial & Museum

Halina Piasecki
Objects Conservation at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum

Kyle Norris
Redefining the Icon: Treatment of an 18th-century Ethiopian Painting at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Amalia Donastorg
The cleaning of ceiling murals by John Alden Twachtman at The Frick Collection

Two masterpieces of chamber music literature will be performed on December 2nd, String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat major, Op. 74 and String Quartet No. 9 in C Major, Op. 59 No. 3 “Razumovsky" by Ludvig van Beethoven. The program will last approximately one hour, including one five-minute pause. Both works will be performed by students from NYU Steinhardt’s String Studies program.

Program

Ludvig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat major, Op. 74 (1809)
I. Poco adagio – Allegro
II. Adagio ma non troppo
III. Presto
IV. Allegretto con variazioni

Priscilla Tam and Eva Astrachan, violins
Olympia Nelson, viola
Jessica Li, cello

Ludvig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
String Quartet No. 9 in C Major, Op. 59 (1808)
No. 3 “Razumovsky”
I. Introduzione: Andante con moto – Allegro Vivace
II. Andante con moto quasi allegretto
III. Menuetto: Grazioso
IV. Allegro molto

Logan Chiang and Jillian Johnson, violins
Harmony Chiang, viola
Victoria Lin, cello

Join us to hear Roland R. R. Smith speak 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 speciality in antiquity, and the excavated remains of the city’s statues, sarcophagi, and architectural reliefs are abundant and of spectacular quality.

The team’s eight-week research season last summer produced exciting results. The project on the Civil Basilica and Diocletian’s Edict of Maximum Prices was completed. Excellent progress was made in the Place of Palms and the conservation of its 170m-long pool. Excavation in the Tetrapylon Street with its unusual seventh-century Dark Age Complex was completed and publication work begun. A new project on housing and urban living was pursued with geophysical survey and excavation at the House of Kybele and the North Temenos House. There were important finds, and several marble statues were newly conserved and restored with their portrait heads.

Roland Smith is an expert in Greek and Roman art, with a special interest in the visual and urban culture of the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. He taught at the IFA from 1986 to 1995 and has been director of the NYU Aphrodisias project since 1991. He retired from his position as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford University in 2022, and now devotes more time to Aphrodisias publications.

What is it we find so fascinating about fakes? Why is the idea of the authentic so important in art, and how do we identify it? How does conservation or restoration serve to enhance or obfuscate authenticity?

Join Pamela Hatchfield to explore some of the enigmas presented by the deep investigation of objects from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. These investigations tell a story about the assumptions we make in our search for the authentic, when objects seem too good to be true, and the limitations of our understanding of a maker’s intent, materials, techniques, and collaborators. We will explore Greek ceramics, Roman terracotta, and Italian marble sculpture as we look into our fascination with fakes and forgeries, and how conservators, curators, and scientists join forces to determine authenticity, identify the original in works of art, and determine how best to present the stories and histories embedded within them.

Pamela Hatchfield is the fall 2023 Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor in Conservation and Technical Studies at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She is also Head of Objects Conservation Emerita at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Additionally, she serves as Project Coordinator for Held in Trust, a collaboration between the National Endowment for Humanities and the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation to chart the future of preservation and conservation in the United States. Pam serves as a consultant to the Acton Collection, NYU, Florence. Her archaeological field experience includes sites in Egypt and Sudan. She holds degrees from Vassar College and the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with post graduate work at Harvard University.

Pam is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, the International Institute for Conservation, and the American Academy in Rome. She served as President of AIC and in numerous other leadership positions. Awards include the Rome Prize, the AIC Robert L. Feller Lifetime Achievement Award, and the FAIC/Kress Conservation Publication Fellowship.

For Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), drawing served as a center of gravity—the activity she described as her "greatest pleasure and the most difficult." Although now widely recognized for her wire sculptures, Asawa drew daily. Her exploratory approach to materials, line, surface, and space yielded an impressive range of drawings that speaks to her playful curiosity and technical dexterity as well as her interest in the aesthetic possibilities of the everyday.

This lecture will highlight drawing as the through line in Asawa's art and life. Reflecting on the survey of Asawa’s drawings currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Conaty will trace the artist’s personal history through her practice on and with paper. She will emphasize how the artist’s inquisitive approach to artmaking guided many of the curatorial decisions and thematic considerations put forth in the show in an effort to honor Asawa’s belief that "art is not a series of techniques, but an approach to learning, to questioning, and to sharing."

Kim Conaty is the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In addition to overseeing the management and growth of the Whitney’s collection of drawings and prints, she has organized several exhibitions there, including Ruth Asawa Through Line (2023); Edward Hopper’s New York (2022); Nothing Is So Humble: Prints from Everyday Objects (2020), and Mary Corse: A Survey in Light (2018). Prior to the Whitney, Conaty was Curator at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and Assistant Curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and Clark Fellowship, Conaty holds a PhD in the History of Art from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and a Masters degree from Williams College.

This program is made possible with generous funding from the Paul Lott Lectureship.