Public Programs @ The Institute
Series: Art in Advance
Inside Marcel Duchamp
Friday, April 24, 2026 at 6:00pm
Speakers: Ann Temkin and Robert Slifkin
Marcel Duchamp, recently opened at The Museum of Modern Art, marks the first retrospective of the artist's work in the United States since 1973. Featuring some 300 artworks, the exhibition offers a sweeping account of Duchamp's multifaceted career across all mediums from 1900 to 1968.
In this next session of the Art in Advance series, Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, joins Robert Slifkin, Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the IFA, for a conversation about this once-in-a-generation exhibition. Together, they will explore Duchamp's six-decade career: his challenges to the very definition of the artwork, and the new era of creative license he ushered in, the reverberations of which are still felt today.
Ann Temkin is the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art. She became Chief Curator in 2008, and during her tenure, she has overseen the transformation of the Museum's collection galleries into dynamic, rotating presentations that tell not one canonical story, but many. Among the many exhibitions that she has curated or co-curated at MoMA are Matisse: The Red Studio (2022), Judd (2020), Picasso Sculpture (2015), Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor (2014), Jasper Johns: Regrets (2014), Abstract Expressionist New York (2010), and Gabriel Orozco (2009). From 1990 to 2003, she was the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where her exhibitions included Barnett Newman (2002), Alice Neel (2001), Constantin Brancusi (1995), andThinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (1994).
Robert Slifkin is the Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of the Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is a scholar of modern and contemporary art and photography, and is the author of The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture Between War and Peace, 1945–1975 (2019) and Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art (2013). His most recent book is Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare's Photographic Work (2022). His writing has appeared in American Art, Artforum, The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Burlington Magazine, October, and Oxford Art Journal, among other publications.
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