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Public Programs
With the health and safety of our community in mind, the Institute's buildings will be open this spring only to students, faculty, and staff with classes held for students both remotely and in-person. We look forward to continuing a robust public programming schedule online, welcoming participants from around the globe. We encourage you to explore our virtual programming and archive of past lectures.
IFA Coronavirus Information and ResourcesThe Institute: your destination for the past, present, and future of art.
Connect to the latest thinking about the arts from ancient times to tomorrow’s prospects. Become part of the conversation, keep up with our events calendar (further down this page) and choose from our extensive range of lecture series, special lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and conferences. Enjoy our video archive to catch up with previous events. Some of our lectures are broadcast live.
2021 Calendar
- January
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
- February
- Tuesday, February 9, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Artists at the Institute
Speaker: Patty Chang
LEARN MORE about Patty ChangDescription: Patty Chang discusses her practice starting from performance, moving through video, expanding to research projects such as the acclaimed exhibition titled Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake 2009-2017 at the Queens Museum in New York, up to her current multichannel project Milk Debt on view at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn from March 5 to May 16, 2021. Chang is an artist working in performance, video, writing, and installation. Her early performance work was influenced by 1960s and '70s performance work, as well as identity politics of the 1980s and '90s. More recently, her work has been focused on site-specific, performative, narrative projects that deal with cultural imaginaries, the environment, and the body. Chang received her BA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fri Art Centre d’Art de Freibourg, Switzerland; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Times Museum in Guangzhou, China; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. She has received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Award, a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize, a Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant. She teaches at the University of Southern California. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
- Tuesday, February 16, 2021 at 2:30pm
Title: Jonathan Brown, No solo Velázquez
Speakers: Jordana Mendelson, Director of the King Juan Carlos I Center of NYU; Estrella de Diego, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid; Robert Lubar Messeri, Associate Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Professor Edward Sullivan, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor of the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Professor Reva Wolf, Professor of Art History at the State University of New York at New Paltz; Dr. Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado; Francisco Chaparro, Professor Brown's last Ph.D. student, and the editor and translator of the volume.
Description: This event will celebrate the publication of Jonathan Brown's new collection of essays, No solo Velázquez (Madrid: Cátedra, 2020).
LEARN MORE about "No solo Velázquez"
The event is co-sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts and the King Juan Carlos I Center of NYU. Moderated by Jordana Mendelson (Director of the KJCC), with brief introductions by Estrella de Diego (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Robert Lubar Messeri (NYU/IFA), four speakers will comment on Professor Brown's texts: Professor Edward Sullivan (NYU/IFA), Professor Reva Wolf (SUNY New Paltz), Dr. Miguel Falomir (Director, Museo del Prado), and Francisco Chaparro (Professor Brown's last Ph.D. student, and the editor and translator of the volume).
A Zoom link will be sent to registered guests the morning of the event.
Estrella de Diego is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid (Spain) and an Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts in Madrid. She has held the King Juan Carlos I Chair of Spanish Culture and Civilization (NYU), the 13th Luis Angel Arango Internacional Chair at the Banco de la República (Bogotá) and theIda Cordelia Beam Distinguished Professorship. She is a widely published author in both fiction and non-fiction focusing and prolific curator. She is columnist for El País and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Prado Museum.
Robert Lubar Messeri is Associate Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. He served as Director of NYU/Madrid from 2014-2019, and has been a Trustee of the Fundació Joan Miró since 2014. A specialist in modern French, Spanish and Catalan art, he has published widely on Miró, Picasso and Dalí. He is currently co-editing the Edinburgh Companion on the art and visual culture of the Spanish Civil War.
Edward J Sullivan is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor of the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts of NYU where he also serves as Deputy Director. He is the author of over thirty books and exhibition catalogs on the visual arts of the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America and the Caribbean from the Early Modern period to today. He has curated many exhibitions in Europe, Latin America and the US. His most recent project was an exhibition and book on the Brazilian garden architect Roberto Burle Marx. He is currently writing a book on exhibitions and collecting of Latin American and Latinx art in New York from the twentieth century to the present and a study of the Catalan-Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller in Spain and France. Sullivan was the first PhD student of Jonathan Brown at the Institute.
Reva Wolf is Professor of Art History at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she teaches courses on art of the eighteenth century to the present and on art historical methodology. She has published widely on the artists Goya and Warhol, and on methodological questions. Among her recent publications is the co-edited book, Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020). She has held several fellowships, including at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Miguel Falomir (1966) holds a doctorate in art history. Between 1997 and 2015 he was Chief Curator of Italian Renaissance Paintings at the Prado Museum, where he curated, among others, the exhibitions Titian (2003), Tintoretto (2007), The Portrait of the Renaissance (2008), The Furies, political allegory and artistic challenge (2014), Dánae and Venus and Adonis, Titian’s first poesie for Felipe II (2014) and Lorenzo Lotto. Portraits (2018). Since March 2017 is the director of the Prado Museum.
He has been a Fulbright fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (1994-1995) and Andrew Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (2008-2010).
He is the author of several books and dozens of articles on Spanish and Italian Renaissance art and member of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Tiziano in Pieve di Cadore and the editorial boards of several magazines. In 2017 was awarded the Mongan Prize by Harvard-Villa I Tatti University.
Francisco J. R. Chaparro is an art historian based in Madrid, Spain. He was a Fulbright scholar to the US between 2011-2013. In 2019 he completed the PhD program at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where he defended a dissertation on Goya supervised by Jonathan Brown and Robert Slifkin. Francisco has held intern and research positions at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, MoMA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Met, and The Hispanic Society. A graduate of the Certificate in Curatorial Studies offered by NYU and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his most recent academic work includes his participation in the catalogue of an upcoming exhibition on Goya's graphic work at The Met.
- Thursday, February 18, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Duke House Exhibition Symposium
Speakers: Dr. Beverly Adams, The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art; Dr. Lori Cole, Associate Director and Clinical Associate Professor, XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement, New York University; Dr. Tatiana Flores, Professor, Art History & Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University; Dr. Susanna Temkin, Curator, El Museo del Barrio; Moderated by Dr. Edward J. Sullivan, Deputy Director, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. Organized by PhD candidate and co-curator Megan Kincaid.
Title: New Approaches to Fanny Sanín: Women Artists and Geometric Abstraction
LEARN MORE about "New Approaches to Fanny Sanín"Description: The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to present New Approaches to Fanny Sanín: Women Artists and Geometric Abstraction, a panel discussion tracing the contributions of women artists to geometric abstraction. This event is held in conjunction with Fanny Sanín’s New York: The Critical Decade, 1971–1981, a solo exhibition exploring Sanín’s evolving practice during her first years in New York City. On view at The James B. Duke House, Fanny Sanín’s New York was made possible by support from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).
The panel features the presentations and perspectives of leading scholars Dr. Beverly Adams, Dr. Lori Cole, Dr. Tatiana Flores, and Dr. Susanna Temkin. Coinciding with a raft of scholarship that has enlivened the developments and styles engineered by women artists working in this idiom, the panel will contextualize Sanín’s work within this discourse. Moreover, this discussion seeks to reexamine the modernist understanding of geometric abstraction’s supposed “purity” through the critical lenses of gender, race, and nationality.
Dr. Beverly Adams is the Estrellita Brodsky curator of Latin American art at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Before joining MoMA, Adams was Curator of Latin American art at the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin. With Natalia Majluf, Adams most recently organized The Avant-garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s (2019). The catalogue for this exhibition was awarded the Association for Latin American Art Arvey Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award.
Dr. Lori Cole is Clinical Associate Professor and Associate Director of the interdisciplinary master’s program XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement at New York University. She previously taught at Brandeis University, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art and her writing has been published in Artforum, Cabinet, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, and The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. She is the author of Surveying the Avant-Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines (Penn State University Press, 2018).
Dr. Tatiana Flores is Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Director of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers’ Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities. She is the author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013), winner of the 2014 Humanities Book Prize by the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She curated the exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago for the Museum of Latin American Art as part of the Getty Foundation’s PST: LA/LA initiative. A 2017-18 Getty Scholar and member of the Harvard University Traveling Seminar on Afro-Latin American Art, Flores is President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). She is currently co-editing the volume The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History.
Dr. Susanna V. Temkin is Curator at El Museo del Barrio, and recently organized the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019. She is currently one of the co-curators of ESTAMOS BIEN: La Trienal, the museum’s first national-scale survey of Latinx art. Prior to El Museo, she served as Assistant Curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin earned her master’s and PhD degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research concentrated on modern art in the Americas, with a focus on Cuba. Temkin has published essays and reviews in the Rutgers Art Review, Burlington Magazine, and Hemispheres; contributed a chapter to the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, Alice Neel: People Come First (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) ; and authored the chronology of Concrete Cuba: Cuba Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s, produced by David Zwirner Books.
Moderated by Dr. Edward J. Sullivan, Deputy Director, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. Organized by PhD candidate and co-curator Megan Kincaid.
- Thursday, February 25, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Ancient Art and Architecture
Speakers: Roland Betancourt (UC-Irvine), Kathryn Howley (IFA), Stuart Tyson Smith (UC-Santa Barbara), Thelma K. Thomas (IFA)
Title: Approaches to Diversity in Antiquity
LEARN MORE about this Ancient Art and Architecture seminar RSVP Required for the Ancient Art and Architecture seminarDescription: In the wake of recent events in which alt-right and neo-Nazi groups have mobilized the ancient past as justification for white supremacy, it is more important than ever to critically examine the popular idea that the ancient world was a homogeneous place. Prof. Roland Betancourt (UC Irvine) and Prof. Stuart Tyson Smith (UCSB) will join the Institute’s Profs. Thelma K. Thomas and Kathryn Howley for a panel discussion on new scholarly approaches to diversity in antiquity, exploring how we might research different types of diversity in the ancient world and the ethical and methodological challenges that accompany such an endeavor.
Roland Betancourt is Professor of Art History and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the Director of the Visual Studies Program. In the 2016-2017 academic year, he was the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is also the author of Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), as well as Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Stuart Tyson Smith is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Director of the UCSB Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research. Since 2000 he has been co-director of the UCSB-Purdue Tombos Excavations in Sudan, which investigate an Egyptian colonial site of the late second-early first millennium BCE at the third cataract of the Nile. He is author of Wretched Kush (Routledge, 2003) and numerous articles on ethnicity, imperialism, and cultural entanglement in the ancient world.
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
- Tuesday, February 9, 2021 at 6:00pm
- March
- Tuesday, March 9, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: George Lau, University of East Anglia, Norwich
Title: An Offering Context at Pashash (A.D. 200-600): Camelid Imagery and the Lordly Commitment in the Ancient Andes
LEARN MORE about George Lau RSVP Required for George Lau'S TALK [opens in new window]Description: For studying early Andean peoples when camelids became increasingly incorporated into social and political life, there is perhaps no better case than the Recuay culture (ca. AD 1 - 700) of ancient Peru. Recent investigations at the site of Pashash (Ancash) uncovered an offering cache including fired clay camelid objects, in the form of pendants, an effigy vessel and small figurines. The items and the context provide important evidence for new engagements, physical and conceptual, with camelids during the Recuay period. In particular, they were among the earliest expressions of lordly ‘commitment’ to camelids as wealth, and their depiction on portable valuables emphasizes their public ceremonial use in feasts and sacrificial offerings. The camelid items indicate that herded camelids became resources for noble identity and authority in northern Peru, and were increasingly seen as crucial for community well-being and social reproduction.
- Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 12:00pm
Speakers: Edward Sullivan, Helen Gould Shepard Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Sarah Kielt Costello, Associate Professor, University of Houston - Clear Lake; Paul R. Davis, Curator of Collections, The Menil Collection; John North Hopkins, Associate Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Laetitia La Follette, President, Archaeological Institute of America, and Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Title: Object Biographies: A Conversation on a New Volume
LEARN MORE about Object Biographies RSVP Required for Object Biographies [opens in new window]Description: Please join the Institute for a conversation about the new book Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art, published in January by the Menil Collection and distributed by Yale University Press. The volume brings together 14 scholars of ancient Mediterranean art, cultural heritage, provenance research and museology to investigate objects lacking a documented archaeological context. At the center of debates on collecting and collections of such objects is the role of the museum, curator, scholar and museum-going publics in responsible stewardship. The editors will discuss the de Menils, their collection and the thrust of the volume. Laetitia La Follette, President of the Archaeological Institute of America and Professor of Ancient Art and Archaeology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will respond on the volume. The conversation will be moderated by Prof. Edward Sullivan, Deputy Director of the Institute, with time for questions from the audience.
Sarah Kielt Costello is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Humanities Program at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the State University of New York, Binghamton and her M.A. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. Her research areas include Mesopotamian and Cypriot prehistory and museum and heritage studies. She is a co-editor of several volumes, including the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World. Her work has also been published in the journals Cambridge Archaeological Journal and Antiquity. Dr. Costello has excavated in Cyprus, Turkey, Israel, and Greece.
Paul R. Davis, Ph.D., is Curator of Collections at the Menil Collection and oversees the museum’s holdings of art from Africa, Pacific Islands, the Americas, the ancient world, medieval and early modern Europe. His recent exhibition projects include ReCollecting Dogon, (February 3–July 9, 2017), Mapa Wiya: Your Map’s Not Needed, (September 13, 2019–February 2, 2020), as well as new installations of permanent collection galleries for the museum’s reopening in September 2018.
John Hopkins is Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. He is the author of The Genesis of Roman Architecture (Yale, 2016), winner of the Spiro Kostof Award of the Society of Architectural Historians, and co-editor of Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art (Menil/Yale, 2020) and Forgery Beyond Deceit: Fabrication, Value and the Desire for Ancient Rome (Oxford, in press).
Dr. Laetitia La Follette, Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and President of the Archaeological Institute of America, is an expert in Greco-Roman art and architecture and cultural heritage policy. As the AIA’s Vice President for Cultural Heritage (2011-2017), she helped coordinate testimony by archaeologists at the Washington, D.C. hearings of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, U.S. Dept. of State, on new requests for and renewals of Memoranda of Understanding between the U.S. and such countries as Italy, Greece, Peru, Cyprus, Cambodia and China to protect archaeological heritage. Her scholarship in the field of cultural heritage includes a 2013 edited volume on changing attitudes towards cultural and intellectual property, and more recent articles on looted antiquities and restitution in the US since 1970, and the impact of the 1970 UNESCO convention on unprovenanced Etruscan art in American collections.
- Friday, March 12, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: China Project Workshop
Speakers: Marcus Bingenheimer (Department of Religion, Temple University) and moderated by Sebastian Heath (Institute for The Study of the Ancient World, NYU). Title: The Historical Social Network of Chinese Buddhism as a Visualization Tool RSVP required for China Project Workshop [opens in new window] - Thursday, March 18, 2021 at 12:00pm
Speakers: Michele D. Marincola, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Conservation, Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Lucretia Kargère, Conservator, Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gerhard Lutz, Robert P. Bergman Curator of Medieval Art, Cleveland Museum of Art; CT; Cybele Tom, Doctoral Student, Doctoral Student in Art History, University of Chicago; Assistant Conservator of Objects, Art Institute of Chicago Title: Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère, The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture
LEARN MORE about The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture RSVP Required for The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture [opens in new window]Description: This event will celebrate the publication of Michele Marincola's and Lucretia Kargère's new book,The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture (Getty Publications, 2020).
Michele D. Marincola is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Conservation of the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and a Fellow of the International Institute of Conservation. She holds an MA in art history and an advanced certificate in conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU., and prior to joining the University’s faculty as department chair and professor of conservation in 2002, she was Conservator for The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Professor Marincola’s research interests include the conservation and technical art history of sculpture, as well as the history and ethics of art conservation. She is the co-author of The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture (Getty Publications 2020) and editor of a new edition and translation of Johannes Taubert’s Polychrome Sculpture, Meaning, Form, Conservation (Getty Publications, 2015).
Lucretia Kargère is Conservator for Medieval sculptures at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has been the principal conservator for The Met Cloisters since 2002. She came to The Met in 1996, when she was awarded the first of several fellowships for the technical study and treatment of medieval sculpture. Lucretia has published a significant study of French Romanesque sculptures from The Museum collection, and is the co-author of The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture (Getty Publications 2020). She holds a BA from Brown University, and an MA in art history and advanced certificate in conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Gerhard Lutz has been the Robert P. Bergman Curator of Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art since May 2020. Beginning in 2001, he served as a curator at the Dommuseum Hildesheim, Germany; in 2016, he was appointed deputy director. Lutz has curated numerous exhibitions, such as Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He received his MA and PhD at Technische Universität Berlin, after specializing in Saxon and Westphalian crucifixes of the first half of the 13th century. Since then, he has repeatedly explored topics of medieval sculpture and metalwork. Most recently, Lutz co-edited “Christ on the Cross: The Boston Crucifix and the Rise of Monumental Wood Sculpture, 970-1200” (with Shirin Fozi). He is also a co-founder of the Forum Medieval Art.
Cybele Tom is a doctoral student of Art History at the University of Chicago, focusing on European medieval art, and Assistant Conservator of Objects at the Art Institute of Chicago, where one of her many projects was the conservation and examination of polychrome sculpture for the Deering Family Galleries of Medieval and Renaissance Art, Arms, and Armor. She received an MA in art history and an advanced certificate in conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU in 2013. She serves as Book Review Editor for the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation (JAIC).
We are delighted to offer a discount for this new publication - please use code: GPMM21 for 20% off for "The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture" as well as Michele Marincola's previous publication, "Polychrome Sculpture" through April 30, 2021: shop.getty.edu, or code G2014 through yalebooks.co.uk.
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Monday, March 22, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: IFA Contemporary Asia
Speakers: Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, the Whitney Museum of American Art; Ambika Trasi, Curatorial Assistant, the Whitney Museum of American Art; moderated by Professor Gayatri Gopinath, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, NYU.
LEARN MORE about IFA Contremporary Asia RSVP Required for IFA Contemporary Asia [opens in new window]Description: IFA Contemporary Asia is pleased to present the annual Curators in Conversation public program with Christopher Y. Lew and Ambika Trasi. Presented on the occasion of the Whitney's current exhibition Salman Toor: How Will I Know, Lew and Trasi will address the curation of contemporary South Asian diaspora art and the exhibition's engagement with queer, diasporic, and transnational identity.
Christopher Y. Lew is the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lew oversees the emerging artist program at the Museum and was co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Working with Ambika Trasi, he is co-curator of Salman Toor: How Will I Know. Lew has also organized Pope.L: Choir (2019), Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape(2018), and mounted the first US solo exhibitions for Sophia Al-Maria, Rachel Rose, and Jared Madere. He also organized Lucy Dodd's large-scale installation that was part of the exhibition Open Plan (2016). Prior to joining the Whitney, he was Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1 and organized numerous exhibitions there. Lew has contributed to several publications including Art AsiaPacific, Art Journal, Bomb, Huffington Post, and Mousse.
Ambika Trasi is an artist and arts organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her research-based practice considers the coloniality of power within images and sites. Recent curatorial projects include Salman Toor: How Will I Know, co-curated with Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, Christopher Y. Lew at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and A Space for Monsters at Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, featuring works by Maryam Hoseini, Kaveri Raina, and Anjuli Rathod. Previously, Trasi was the managing director and curatorial assistant at Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW), where she worked on projects such as Lee Mingwei: Sonic Blossom, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015); THINKING CURRENTS, Seattle Art Fair (2015); and four iterations of ACAW's signature performance program, FIELD MEETING, hosted at Asia Society (2014 & 2016), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015), the 56th Venice Biennale (a collateral event, 2015), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2016). As a board member of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective from 2015-2019, Trasi was an exhibition manager for shows held at Queens Museum (2016) and Abrons Art Center (2017).
Gayatri Gopinath is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies. She is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005) and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (2018).
Organizing committee: Eana Kim, Titi Deng, Kristie Lui, Kolleen Ku, and Cindy Qian.
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Tuesday, March 23, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Silberberg Lecture
Speaker: Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, Professor of American Studies and Art History, Rutgers University
Title: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
LEARN MORE about Nicole R. Fleetwood RSVP Required for Nicole R. Fleetwood's talk [opens in new window]Description: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration examines the impact of the carceral state on contemporary art and culture. Focusing on art made in US prisons and in collaboration with artists and activists across the nation, Dr. Fleetwood explores various aesthetic practices and media of incarcerated artists who use penal space, penal matter, and penal time to produce art about carcerality. Her presentation will discuss the archive of the visual culture of US prisons that she has amassed over the past decade. It will also consider the strategies and techniques that imprisoned artists employ to create visual documents about their captivity. Working with the meager supplies and under state punishment, imprisoned artists find ways to resist the brutality and isolation of prisons, as they cultivate radical modes of belonging and abolitionist visions.
Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in Criticism and a recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Frank Jewett Mather Award, both for the College Art Association. She is also curator of the exhibition Marking Time, currently on view at MoMA PS1. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011).
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Wednesday, March 24, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Vera Tiesler, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mérida
Title: Heads, Skulls, and Sacred Scaffolds: New Insights on Late Maya Ritual Practices at Chichén Itzá (and Beyond)
LEARN MORE about Late Maya Ritual Practices RSVP Required for Late Maya Ritual Practices [opens in new window]Description: Although violence has been abundantly recorded in Maya iconography, only the last two decades of scholarship have seen methodological and interpretive strides towards a more nuanced study of ancient sacrificial practices involving humans. Recent revisions of the human mortuary record of Chichén Itzá has allowed the reconstruction of distinct sacrificial sequences. In this talk, Vera Tiesler, Research Professor and Coordinator of Bioarchaeology Laboratory, will review different choreographies of ritual slaughter by way of decapitation and/or heart extraction. Each procedure provides cues regarding the ceremonial devices and reifies ancient Maya concepts of the human body as a cosmic model and conduit. The talk will finalize with a number of thoughts regarding the shifts that led to the massification of ritualized violence and body display past the Maya collapse, as showcased at Chichén Itzá. Yucatán, and four other late Maya urban centers.
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
- Tuesday, March 9, 2021 at 6:00pm
- April
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Monday, April 12, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
Speaker: Andrew Finegold, University of Illinois at Chicago
Title: Metonymy in Mesoamerican Art
LEARN MORE about Andrew Finegold's talk RSVP Required for Andrew Finegold's talk [opens in new window]Description: In ancient Mesoamerica, images often directly responded to the forms, materials, or functions of their supports, or otherwise implicated their physical and social situatedness. In pointing to their contexts, such images can be understood as indexical according to the system of signs developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, but the close relationship between an image and its material conditions can also be classified as metonymical. Metonymy refers to expressions of contiguity or association; it is an additive form of expression, arising from adjacency in the same way that meaning is created grammatically through the combination of sequential terms in a phrase. In the elaboration of existing grounds with imagery deemed appropriate to them—and especially in the construction of teixiptlameh as embodiments of numinous forces—Mesoamerican artists regularly pursued an additive, associative practice of image making. This talk will argue that metonymy was more than a particularly favored representational trope in Mesoamerica, and that its consistent deployment can be directly linked to the ontology of images within an indigenous worldview.
- Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 6:00pm
Series: Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor in Conservation and Technical Studies Lecture
Speaker: Lynda Zycherman
Title: Fraternal Sextuplets: Technical Examination of Picasso's Glass(es) of Absinthe
LEARN MORE about the Praska lecture RSVP Required for the Praska lecture [opens in new window]Description: Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe (1914) is a series of six uniquely painted bronze sculptures. This presentation compares the different versions to discover similarities and differences in the edition. Close visual and instrumental examination revealed information about Picasso’s sculpting method, collage techniques, technical information about the bronze casting, and damages and restorations. The six castings have a consistent and unique metal composition when compared to published alloy analyses of the foundries active in Paris at the time.
We have confirmed Picasso’s use of found materials in conjunction with artist-made materials, revealed the hitherto hidden assembly technique of the three elements of the composition, and identified the paint medium and some of the pigments. These findings will be germane to scholars invested in the Glass of Absinthe series as well as those studying Picasso’s use of polychrome technique.
Lynda Zycherman has served as Conservator of Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art since 1984. Previously, she was an Associate Conservator at the Freer Technical Laboratory, Smithsonian Institution and worked in the laboratories of the Metropolitan Museum and the Corning Museum of Glass. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history from City College of the City of New York, CUNY, and her M.A. in Art History together with the Certificate in Art Conservation from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts.
Over the past 36 years at MoMA, Lynda has researched a wide variety of topics including Minimalist sculpture, sculpture utilizing electric lights, Fluxus, and Pop sculpture. Her current interest is the technical examination of sculpture by Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi.
The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.
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Monday, April 12, 2021 at 6:00pm
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The events calendar is subject to change. Please check this webpage for updates.