MARC Lecture, 10/4/17

From Frederick Douglass to Leo Tolstoy: Race and the Thought Pictures of the Caucasus

Image: Unknown photographer, c.1853, Sixth-plate daguerreotype ( 31/8 x 2 3/4 in.), Metropolitan Museum of Art

On Friday, October 6th please join us for “From Frederick Douglass to Leo Tolstoy: Race and the Thought Pictures of the Caucasus” with Sarah Lewis (Harvard University). This event is part of the Occasional Series, sponsored by the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

In her forthcoming book Black Sea, Black Atlantic: Frederick Douglass, the Circassian Beauties, and American Racial Formation in the Wake of the Civil War (Harvard University Press) Sarah Lewis explores the Caucasus mountain range in Russia and how the emerging technology of photography was used to develop myths of Caucasian racial identity (and by extension racial purity) in the nineteenth century. The project works at a unique intersection of African American Studies, Art History, and Slavic Studies to explore the enduring power of these Black Sea-related photographs of Circassia. These “thought pictures” about race as Frederick Douglass might have called them underscore the tenuousness, a nervousness even at the heart of the racial project throughout the twentieth century.

Sarah Lewis is an assistant professor of history of art and architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She was guest editor of the “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture, which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. Her scholarship has been published in journals as well as in The New Yorker and Artforum. Lewis also authored the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. A frequent keynote speaker at universities and conferences, her work has been profiled in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal. Her current book project, which lies at the intersection of African American Studies, Art History, and Slavic Studies, is under contract with Harvard University Press. She lives in Cambridge, MA.

Details

Date:

October 6

Time:

3:00 pm – 4:30 pm

Event Categories:

Fall 2017, Occasional Series, Slideshow

Organizer

Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia

Phone:

(212) 992-6575

Email:

jordan.russia.center@nyu.edu

Website:

http://jordanrussiacenter.org

Venue

NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia

19 University Place, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10003 United States+ Google Map

Phone:

212.992.6575

Andrew Weiner Lecture, Tuesday, 10/17 @ 6:30 pm

Room 300, DAH

“And… And… And…”

Aesthetics and Politics in Central Europe circa 1968

One of the most defining features of contemporary art is its pronounced heteronomy –– its dependence on or determination by factors that exist outside of what is conventionally thought to be art’s proper domain. How and why did this come to be the case, and what implications does this shift have for the ways we think about art, aesthetics, and contemporaneity? This paper engages such questions by examining the relatively recent emergence of a hybrid space between art and politics. It links the development of this “aesthetico-political” sphere to the complex cultural politics of 1968 in post-fascist West Germany and Austria, examining the proliferation of new modes of performance that sought to negate or transform the autonomy of art.

Andrew Weiner is Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Criticism in the Department of Art and Art Professions at NYU–Steinhardt. He writes regularly on contemporary art, and is an editor of the journal ARTMargins.

Faculty News, Fall 2017

Professor Miriam Basilio had a productive 2016-17 academic year.  Her publications include “”First Win the War!” Kati Horna, Gendered Images, and Political Discord During the Spanish Civil War,” in Gabriela Rangel, Ed. Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press (New York: Americas Society, 2016), the catalogue for the exhibition co-curated by Michel Otayek and Christina De León; Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War (Surrey, UK and Burlington, NY: Ashgate, 2013; Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016; and in paperback: Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), which was reviewed by Mark McDonald (Print Quarterly, Vol. XXXIII (2016), No. 3, 349-354),  Robert Davidson, caa.reviews, December 29, 2016; Angel Viñas and Juan Andrés Blanco, eds. La Guerra Civil española, una visión bibliografica. (Madrid: Marcial Pons Digital, 2017), p. 324).  Her article, “Evolving Taxonomies at The Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and ‘40s and the Definitions of the “Latin American Collection,”” will appear in The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Latin American Art in the United States, forthcoming from the Pennsylvania State University Press.

Professor Basilio was the keynote speaker at conference “Canons in Dispute: Narrations of Modernity and their Conflicts”- “Evolving Taxonomies at The Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and 40s and the Definitions of the “Latin American Collection,”” at the Universitat de Barcelona.  She was a panelist for “Art and Propaganda” with Hrag Vartanian, Editor in Chief, Hyperallergic magazine and artists Daniel Bejar, and Sue Schaffner, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, organized by Hyperallergic and Smack Mellon in conjunction with the exhibition Of the People; and Elaine L. Johnson (17/12/1928-¿?1979) en el Museum of Modern Art: Recuperando una comisaria y conservadora en los archivos, (Elaine L. Johnson at The Museum of Modern Art: Recuperating a Curator in the Archives), and presented a lecture at the conference, “Itinerarios transatlánticos: la Guerra fría entre campos de acción y nodos críticos,” Saint Louis University, Madrid, Itinerarios transatlánticos: la Guerra fría entre campos de acción y nodos críticos,” organized as part of the research project that I am a member of: “(De ) Centralized Moderniti(es): Art, politics and counterculture in the transatlantic axis during the Cold War” (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Departament d’História de l’Art, Universitat de Barcelona and partners Centro de Estudios, Museo Reina Sofía, Archives de la Critique d’Art, and Winchester Center for Global Futures in Art, Design, and Media).  She also was a panelist with Juan Jose Lahuerta, Prof. Escola Tècnica d’Arquitectura, Barcelona, and Paula Barreiro, Universitat de Barcelona, book presentation of Barreiro Lopez’s, Avant-garde Art and Criticism in Franco’s Spain, MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art).

Courses taught include a graduate seminar in the Program in Museum Studies/Institute of Fine Arts, “Collections and Exhibitions of Latin American Art c. 1900-Present,” co-taught with Professor Edward J. Sullivan; and in the Program in Museum Studies: “Blockbusters and Building Booms.”  Undergraduate courses include “Museums and the Art Market” (lecture) and “Global Biennials” (seminar).

Taken during Professor Basilio’s lecture, “Elaine L. Johnson at The Museum of Modern Art:  Recuperating a Curator in the Archives,” with respondent Fabiola Martínez (Coordinator of the Art History Program, Saint Louis University, Madrid) at the conference “Itinerarios transatlánticos: la Guerra fría entre campos de acción y nodos críticos,” July 8, 2017, Saint Louis University, Madrid

 

Professor Barry Flood has been continuing work on his book on Islam and the Image, and is on leave this fall semester to enable him to pursue research for a collaborative project with Professor Beate Fricke of the University of Bern, entitled Object Histories – Flotsam as Early Globalism. In October 2016, he co-organized a workshop on the same topic with Prof. Fricke at the University of California in Berkeley.

September 2016 saw a return to NYU and to teaching after a very enjoyable and productive year as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In October he delivered a keynote address, “Images Incomplete: Prescriptive Piety as Material Practice in Islamic Art,” to the Historians of Islamic Art Association 5^th biennial symposium at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. The following month, he spoke on “European Moments in the Making of Islam’s ‘Image Problem,” as the Lerner Lecture in Religion and Society for the Religious Studies Program of NYU; a version of the same lecture was delivered to Bocconi University, Milan, in June 2017 as part of a series Art and Politics.

In January, Professor Flood visited India and Pakistan, delivering a series of lectures in Mumbai and Karachi. The following month, he spoke on “Architecture as Archive: Indian and Islamic Connections in Medieval Ethiopian Architecture,” as the Hadassah and Daniel Khalili Memorial Lecture in Islamic Art and Culture at SOAS in London. February brought a lecture in Paris, “From the Champs-Élysées to Cairo: Jacquemart’s Lions and Iconoclasm as Anti-Colonialism,” at the German Forum for Art History. April brought him to the West Coast, where he was Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Visual Arts at Reed College and gave a keynote speech, “Not at Home? Object Lessons from Anomaly,” to the Berkeley/Stanford Symposium, Not At Home at SFMoMA. May saw a conference in Fribourg, Switzerland, on Cultural Interactions in Medieval Georgia, where he spoke on a collaborative project with Professor Irina Koshoridze of the National Museum of Georgia, delivering a paper entitled “Turning Turk? Elite Dress and Islamic Textiles in Medieval Georgia.” In June he spoke on “The Relic as Image: Prophet Aura in an Age of Technological Reproducibility,” in the series Bilderfahrzeuge: Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology, at the Warburg Institute in London before participating in the conference Some Glances of the Islamic World at its Past: History, Heritage, Archeology, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Among Professor Flood’s publications that appeared during the year were “Idol Breaking as Image Making in the ‘Islamic State’,” Religion and Society: Advances in Research (7, 2016), 116-138; “‘God’s Wonder’: Marble as Medium and the Natural Image in Mosques and Modernism,” West 86^th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (23/2), 168-219; “Eclecticism and Regionalism: The Gwalior Qur’an and the Ghurid Legacy to Post-Mongol Art,” in Eloïse Brac de la Perrière & Monique Burési, eds., Le coran de Gwalior. Polysémie d’un manuscript à peintures (Paris, 2016), 153-169; and the foreword to Kathleen James-Chakraborty, ed., India in Art in Ireland (Routledge, 2016), the first exploration of the artistic connections between India and Ireland.

The year ended with the long-anticipated publication of A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), a two-volume survey of Islamic art, which Professor Flood co-edited with Professor Gülru Necipoğlu, Harvard University. The two-volume set consists of 50 specially commissioned new essays on Islamic art written by 70 authors. The essays range from the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century to the present day and from the Americas to Arabia and South-East Asia. They are intended to facilitate and promote the teaching of Islamic art and architecture in both graduate and undergraduate programs.

 

This past spring marked Professor Dennis Geronimus’ third year as department chair. He is set to return for another three-year term following a (long-awaited!) yearlong research sabbatical in the calendar year 2018. His time away will be devoted to his current book-in-progress, Jacopo da Pontormo: Altered Grace, Human and Divine (Yale University Press). His writing in the summer months of 2018 will be spent in Venice, on a fellowship supported by the Emily Harvey Foundation.

This past summer brought Professor Geronimus back to the Dutch University Institute for the History of Art in Florence, where he organized a conference on Piero di Cosimo in fall 2015, to coincide with the final days of the exhibition Piero di Cosimo, 1462-1522: Pittore fiorentino “eccentrico” fra Rinascimento e Maniera at the Galleria degli Uffizi. The publication of the conference proceedings (Piero di Cosimo: Painter of Faith and Fable), bringing together essays by a host of international scholars, curators, and conservators inspired by the two shows on Piero in Washington (National Gallery of Art) and Florence, is being edited by Professor Geronimus and Dr. Michael Kwakkelstein, Director of the Dutch Institute. This volume, published by Brill, is expected to be out in print in the next few months.

Professor Geronimus lectured widely this past academic year. In February, he delivered a talk titled “Climax/Anticlimax: The Palazzo Vecchio Battle Frescoes by Leonardo and Michelangelo, Revisited,” as part of the Edwin L. Wiesl, Jr. Lectureship in Art History at Fairfield University, CT. In March, he spoke on his latest research on Pontormo at the Renaissance Society of America annual conference in Chicago, while in April he traveled to NYU-Florence to participate in a conference dedicated to the poet and Marchesa of Pescara Vittoria Colonna. There, he delivered a talk titled “‘A More Loving and Constant Heart’: Vittoria Colonna, Alfonso d’Avalos, Michelangelo, and the Complicated History of Pontormo’s Noli me Tangere.” This December, Professor Geronimus has been invited to São Paulo, Brazil, where he will be speaking on the occasion of the book launch of a volume celebrating the restoration of a devotional painting by Piero di Cosimo in the MASP collection, while spring 2018 may have Havana in the stars for a conference on Black Potraiture[s].

Here on the Square, in fall 2016 Professor Geronimus was very excited to teach (for the first time) an advanced seminar devoted entirely to artistic practice in the Renaissance, titled “Inside the Artist’s Kitchen: Materials and Methods, Craft and Commerce in Renaissance Art.” His class was oriented around a number of visits outside the classroom, ranging from a drawings exhibition at the Morgan Library to the Conservation Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and even a chemistry lab that is home to Prof. Pamela H. Smith’s ongoing Making & Knowing project at Columbia University. Last but hardly least, he supervised an Honors Thesis on the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, an experience that, as always, is as fulfilling for the supervisor as the supervisee!

Professor Geronimus at the Medici Villa of Poggio a Caiano, outside of Florence, August 2017

 

 Professor Pepe Karmel gave a number of public lectures during the past academic year, including “Carmen Herrera and the Metaphysical City,” for “Geometric Abstraction in the Americas: Carmen Herrera and Her Art Worlds,” Institute of Fine Arts, New York (October 18, 2016); “Zao Wou-Ki and Contemporary Abstraction: The Kinetic Landscape and the Field of Signs,” for “Asian Abstractions/Global Contexts,” at the Asia Society, New York (November 18, 2016); “Alternative Histories: Abstract Art in the Bechtler Collection,” Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte, NC (February 25, 2017); and “Barbarism, Parody, Invention: Picasso as ‘Vertical Invader,’” for “Picasso and Identity,” 3^rd International Congress, organized by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona (April 27, 2017).  His lecture from a previous Picasso conference was published online:  “La materialité du signe,” online publication in Colloque Picasso Sculptures (Paris: Musée Picasso, 2017. (English summary here)

He published a lengthy essay, “Cubism and the Politics of Form,” in Harry Cooper, ed., The Cubism Seminars: CASVA Seminar Papers 3 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2017), pp. 123-169, and reviewed a new book on modern art and spirituality, Charlene Spretnak’s The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present; Professor Karmel’s review appeared in Material Religion, vol. 12, no. 3 (June 2016), pp. 389-92.  In addition to this, he wrote two essays for New York galleries:  “Robert Morris: Boustrophedons,” in Robert Morris: Boustrophedons (New York: Castelli Gallery, 2017), pp. 3-23; and “The Curve of Binding Energy,” in Chamberlain/De Kooning (New York: Mnuchin Gallery, 2016), pp. 7-19.

Meanwhile, Professor Karmel continues to work on his book on abstract art, whose new working title is Atlas: The Archetypes of Abstract Art.  He also has been busy remaking his courses in modern and contemporary art so that they address global art and not just the Euro-American tradition.

 

Professor Dipti Khera has been working on her current projects, a book and an exhibition, that examine the art of place and landscape in early modern South Asia. The Feel of a Place: Art, Affect and Authority in India’s Eighteenth Century, centrally probes how we frame “place” in art and history. Udaipur in Northwestern India was at the center of pioneering material and pictorial experiments in presenting the bhāva, meaning feeling, emotion and mood, of a place. By tracing the circulation of people, objects and ideas about the sensorial, embodied experience of space from place-centric pictures and poetry, this book questions the disciplinary boundaries that divide courtly, pilgrimage, mercantile and Indo-British worlds. Recent publications that introduce parts of this project, include “Jagvilasa: Picturing Worlds of Pleasure and Power in Eighteenth-Century Udaipur Painting,” in A Magic World: New Visions of Indian Painting (In Tribute to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Rajput Painting of 1916) (2016), and “Marginal, Mobile, Multilayered: Painted Invitation Letters as Bazaar Objects in Early Modern India” in Journal18 (2016).

The exhibition, Passion for Place: Udaipur Painters in the City of the Rising Sun (working title), will be held in Summer-Fall 2020 at the Freer and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Asian Art (Smithsonian Institution), Washington, DC, before traveling to three international venues. In March 2017, the Freer|Sackler Gallery conducted a five-day painting conservation workshop that inaugurated the recently established paper conservation studio at the City Palace Museum, Udaipur, the key museum partner for this project. This workshop represented a high point in Prof Khera’s research. She first ventured into the City Palace Museum in 1999 when she was a vagabond Masters student. She is the first scholar who has been able to examine some of the pioneering large-scale Indian paintings in the museum collection outside of their frames. Given the world’s familiarity with Rajasthan as a land saturated with spectacular palaces, she expect the exhibition to attract a large non-scholarly audience who will learn a new history about stereotyped images of Indian kings and oriental excess.

NYU’s Goddard Fellowship (Fall 2016) provided the opportunity to write an article that set in motion a second book project on local histories of traveling cultures. “Arrivals at Distant Lands: Artful Letters and Entangled Mobilities in the Indian Ocean Littoral,” in Intersections: Yearbook for Early Modern Studies (forthcoming in November 2017) presents the flip side of global, circulatory practices by considering religious objects that traveled shorter regional networks of pilgrimage and bazaars. Prof Khera’s 2015-16 Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Fellowship at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, culminated in a two-day workshop in June 2017. She co-organized “Landscapes of the Long 18th Century: Mediating Places, Powers and Pasts in South Asia and Beyond” and the conversations will be continued in a second workshop in New York.

Back at NYU, Prof Khera planned public talks and guest lectures to accompany her Spring 2017 graduate seminar, “From Kama to Kant: Sense and Sensuality in South Asian Art.” Discussions on intercultural histories of aesthetic concepts of taste and sensation and the role of emotions and sociability in medieval and early modern South Asia led her IFA students into a world of unexpected comparisons, connections and imaginations. The group also studied objects and artistic ideas during an exhaustive study session with curators at the Freer|Sackler Gallery of Asian Art, Washington D.C. Since the session was a big success, Prof Khera’s current group of undergraduate and graduate students in the Fall 2017 seminar “Eat, Pray, Love: Painted Worlds in India,” will also study paintings in the collections of the Freer|Sackler. The curators and education department has invited NYU students to write essays that will feature on the blog of the Freer and Sackler and the Department of Art History, the College of Arts and Science, and the Faculty of Arts and Science have jointly sponsored this study day.

Rana Amar Singh II in Udaipur during a monsoon downpour, ca. 1700. Artists Unknown. 109.2 x 175.2 cm. Freer and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Asian Art, Purchase and partial gift made in 2012 from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection — Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F2012.4.2.

 Professor Dipti Khera studying a large-scale Udaipur painting from the collection of the City Palace Museum, Udaipur, during a painting conservation workshop, March 2017.

 

Professor Carol Krinsky has begun work on a book about 42nd Street, river to river, since it was first developed, i.e. from about 1850 onward.  In the meantime, she has written articles for smarthistory.com, the Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, the revised Grove Dictionary of Art, and caareviews.  Several other essays await publication.

Professor Krinsky has delivered lectures at the Technical Universities of Delft in the Netherlands, Braunschweig, and Darmstadt in Germany; the University of Muenster in Germany; the University of Bern in Switzerland; in New York for international professors brought to the Steinhardt school each summer, for students of the University of Augsburg in Germany, for members of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (museum) in Utica NY and to Vietnamese student visitors to the USA under the auspices of the Asia-Pacific Talent Youth Training program; at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians; and  to members in London of DoCoMoMo (an international organization dedicated to documenting and conserving monuments of the modern movement in architecture). All this has required travel to England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, and there were also trips to the Baltic countries and Umbria.

Professor Krinsky looks forward to another year as Director of Undergraduate Studies.

 

In April 2016, Professor Meredith Martin welcomed her second daughter, Alice; big sister Maisie is 5.

She continued to work on the journal of eighteenth-century art and culture that she co-founded, Journal18 , and co-edited its third issue, “Lifelike” (Spring 2017).  She published an article in The Art Bulletin entitled “History Repeats Itself in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors” (for more on this, see our blogpost of May 3, 2017.

Professor Martin wrote an essay for the catalogue to an upcoming exhibition on the foreign visitor to Versailles, which will open at the château de Versailles in October 2017 before traveling to the Met in 2018.  She is continuing to work on a book she is co-writing, entitled The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Slavery during the Reign of Louis XIV, for which she was awarded an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship (2016-2018). This past summer she traveled with her family to France and Italy to do research for this project.

 

Professor Shelley Rice has given lectures at the Kemper Museum in St. Louis, at MIT, and at the Rubin Museum and the Lehman Loehman Museum in Manhattan, among other venues.  She has written reviews for The Art Newspaper, ARTNews and Africanah.org, and a chapter on Photography in 1900 for Volume 1 of Photography at MOMA, the collections catalog of the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art.  She has co-authored ORLAN EN CAPITALES, a major monograph on this contemporary French feminist artist published by Skira to accompany a retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.  In the fall semester of 2017, Professor Rice will be on sabbatical at NYU Paris, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Grant to continue work she has begun on the visual culture and image networks of the year 1900.

 

Professor Jon Ritter continues to work closely with students in the Urban Design and Architecture Studies Program; the M.A. in Historical and Sustainable Architecture; and the Freshmen Honors program.  During the past year he has published an article on the urbanism of New York City’s triumphal arches in The Classicist, and he presented new work on the Brooklyn Civic Center and Coney Island at the Building Outer Boroughs Conference at Brooklyn College.  He also gave several public lectures about the history of zoning last year, to mark the centennial of the landmark 1916 New York City zoning law, and he has organized numerous lectures and events in our department as president of the New York chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.  Professor Ritter continues to represent full-time contract faculty in the university through the Continuing Faculty Senators Council (C-FSC), where he sits on the University Finance Committee and the Undergraduate Program Committee.

 

Professor Julia Robinson gave several public presentations last fall/winter.  The first was a contribution to a panel titled “A House of Dust: Against the Grain of Technology” devoted to the poem of Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, created with composer James Tenney created at Bell Labs, NJ in 1967-68. As perhaps the first computer-aided poem, Knowles’s “House of Dust” was the subject of an exhibition at CUNY’s James Gallery curated by Paris-based scholars Maud Jacquin and Sébastien Pluot, who also organized the panel. Robinson also collaborated with the Grey Gallery to organize two panels at NYU in the department of Art History, in association with the Grey’s exhibition: A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde 1960s-1980s. The first, “A Moorman-Eye View of New York’s Changing Avant-Gardism,” featured Moorman scholars Saisha Grayson, Sophie Landres, and Joan Rothfuss (Sept. 29, 2016). The second, “Transformations of Performance/Art in the Fluxus Decades and Beyond, moderated by Robinson, featured scholars and curators: Sabine Breitwieser, Branden Joseph, Claire Bishop, and Midori Yoshimoto (Oct. 24).

Robinson’s third paper was “Learning From LA” on the history of the first gallery started by Virginia Dwan (legendary dealer of Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Land Art), at the National Gallery, on the occasion of the exhibition devoted to her collection, curated by James Meyer, who also convened the symposium. Robinson presented a paper at Barnard College, Columbia University, at a public seminar titled “Art By Translation: Questioning the Telepathic Impulse,” together with scholars such as David Joselit (CUNY), Emily Apter (NYU), Alex Alberro (Barnard), and Simon Leung (UCLA) also in October. Finally, Robinson contributed a paper on the artist Marcel Duchamp (“Duchamp for the Second Time, Or Danger en faveur de deux fois!”) to a panel at the Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, “Culture Industries,” Pasadena, November 18-20, 2016. The latter is soon to be published as a special issue of the journal Modernism/Modernity titled “Duchamp Cultures” (forthcoming, winter 2017-18).

In the spring of 2017, Robinson contributed an essay titled “Enfants Terribles: Anxiétés Nicois dans la chaleur du moment,” for the publication accompanying the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice, France (MAMAC) exhibition À Propos de Nice 1947-1977 (23 June-22 October, 2017). In spring/summer 2017 Robinson’s essay “Performance, Performativity, Participation: Toward a Genealogy of ‘Applied Art’” appeared in Xavier Douroux and Estelle Zhong Mengual eds., Reclaiming Art, Reshaping Democracy (les presses du réel, 2017).

 

On November 5, 2016, Professor Ann Macy Roth gave an invited talk for the Chicago chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt titled “The Dead at Home: Reception Rooms in Early Egyptian Cemeteries.”  The talk traced the domestic features of in the tombs of early Egyptian kings and officials, from the obvious features of model toilets, bed platforms, and washstands in the earliest tombs to the more subtle expression of reception rooms in the architecture and decoration of the tombs of the Pyramid Age.

She also was invited to take part in a symposium on ancient Egyptian queenship at the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania, sponsored by the Philadelphia chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt.  At the symposium, held on June 10, 2017, she spoke on the queens of the Old and Middle Kingdom, while other people covered the queens of the New Kingdom and the Graeco-Roman period.  Her talk was entitled “Bald Queens with Pointy Shoulders and Other Egyptian Royal Women of the First Twelve Dynasties,” and discussed the roles and conventions of representation of king’s wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters, as well as the rare women who acted as pharaoh in their own right.

In the spring and summer of 2017, Prof. Roth attended two conferences.  During the April annual meetings of the American Research Center in Egypt in Kansas City, she presented a paper titled “Dirty Pictures for a Dangerous Goddess:  New Thoughts about Papyrus Turin 55001.”  In it, she argued that both the (very) dirty pictures and the comical pictures showing animals in human or reversed roles on a very fragmentary papyrus in the Turin Museum were created as a votive gift to calm the rage of the goddess Hathor with sex and humor.  (This talk, in a somewhat expanded form, will be presented on March 8, 2018 for ISAW and the New York chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt.)   She also attended the international conference on Old Kingdom Art and Archaeology in Milan, Italy, from July 3-7, 2017.  On the 7th she presented a talk, “A Possible New Function for ‘Daily Life’ Scenes in Old Kingdom Tombs,” arguing that the scenes represent the passage of time, and thus serve as a counter to timelessness and changelessness, which are an essential characteristic of Nonexistence.  She also chaired a session of the conference, and moderated a question-answer session that included speakers from two panels.  The conference was held in a gloriously ornate room decorated for Napoleon during his occupation of Milan, and it was packed with papers offering new insights and exciting new discoveries about the Pyramid Age–and the food (and wine!) at conference events was wonderful.

The Dead at Home

Hetepheres II:  a bald queen with pointy shoulders

Turin animal musicians

 

Professor Kathryn A. Smith’s article “‘An Honest Bed‘: The Scene of Life and Death in Late Medieval England,” co-authored with Katherine L. French (Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) and Sarah Stanbury (Department of English, College of the Holy Cross), appeared in the journal Fragments:  Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Ancient and Medieval Pasts.  With Adam S. Cohen (Department of Art History, University of Toronto) she co-authored “Jerusalem:  Reflections at a Distance,” a “think-piece” on the recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was published in the Spring 2017 newsletter of the International Center of Medieval Art .  Professor Smith contributed the entry on the Taymouth Hours, the subject of her 2012 book, to The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, published in August 2017.  Lectures delivered include “Fire, Folk, and the Feminine:  English Alabaster Altarpieces of John the Baptist in their Visual, Devotional, and Social Contexts,” in Fracture/Suture, the Art, Art History & Visual Studies Symposium organized by the graduate students of Duke University’s Department of Art History (October 2016); and “Found in Translation:  Images Visionary and Visceral in a Fourteenth-Century Anglo-Norman Bible,” presented in a session in honor of former Medieval Academy of America Executive Director Richard K. Emmerson at the 52^nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (May 2017).

During the 2016-17 academic year Professor Smith offered two new courses, both developed with team-teaching stipends from NYU’s Center for the Humanities.  In the Fall 2016 semester she and medievalist Andrew Romig of the Gallatin School co-taught a graduate seminar on “The Art of the Psalms in Medieval European Culture.”  In Spring 2017, she taught with medievalist Martha Rust of the Department of English an interdisciplinary undergraduate course on “The World of King Arthur:  Texts, Images, Ideas, 6^th – 21^st Century,” which originated in the Medieval and Renaissance Center.  Professor Smith and her co-instructors are extremely grateful to the Center for the Humanities for its support, which made it possible to bring an outstanding roster of guest speakers to both courses, including medievalists and early modernists from the University of Delaware, the University of Toronto, Columbia University, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), Dartmouth College, SUNY Stony Brook, Princeton University, and Yale University.  Students in Professor Smith’s Spring 2017 “Art and Architecture in the Age of Giotto” course were treated to a special lecture on trecento manuscript illumination and illuminators by Nancy Turner, Conservator of Manuscripts in the Department of Paper at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Professor Smith continues to serve as Series Editor of Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages (Brepols), as a co-editor of the journal Studies in Iconography, as an Area Editor for Oxford Bibliographies Online for Medieval Studies, and on the editorial board of the journal Manuscript Studies.  While on sabbatical in Fall 2017, Professor Smith will continue her work on several projects to do with English illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth through fifteenth century.

 

Professor Edward Sullivan was appointed Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts in September 2017, and continues his position as Provostial Fellow for the Arts.

He published several articles, including “Crossing Borders, Breaking Boundaries: An Artist in a Cross-Cultural Context,” in Jim Amaral. Known Works (Bogota: Amaral Editores, 2016), 10-18; “Jesús María Lazkano: Meditations on Light, Air and Space” in Jesús María Lazkano (San Sebastián, Spain: Editorial Nerea, 2016), 19-27; “The Power of Words: Writings on Art and Society by Julio Le Parc,” for the exhibition catalogue Julio Le Parc: Form into Action (Miami: Perez Art Museum Miami, 2016), 163-68; “Carmen Herrera: South to North,” for exhibition catalogue Carmen Herrera Lines of Sight (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press, 2016), 69-81; and “Portuguese Art History: A View from North America and Observations on the Portuguese Baroque,” Journal of Art Historiography (June 2017).  A further essay, “Francisco Toledo: the 1970s – Creativity and Consolidation” is forthcoming in Francisco Toledo, the catalogue raisonné of the work of the artist (Madrid and Mexico City: Turner Publicaciones, 2017).

Professor Sullivan also published several exhibition and book reviews, including exhibition reviews of Catalina Chervin. Cecilia de Torres Ltd. New York in Art Nexus, no. 104 (March-May 2017), 94-95; Painting the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Mexique (Grand Palais, Paris), The Burlington Magazine (March 2017), 247-248; and Hélio Oiticica (Art Institute of Chicago), The Burlington Magazine (February 2017), 170-72; a review of the book, Josefa de Óbidos e a Invenção do Barroco Português (Lisbon: Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, 2015), appeared in The Burlington Magazine (September 2016), 746-47.

Public lectures delivered include the following:  “Frida Kahlo as Subject and Object in Contemporary Art,” Tucson Botanical Garden, February 3, 2017; “Esteban Lisa: El Gabinete Abstracto,” Cuenca, Spain, Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, June 2, 2017; “Philippine Modern Art: A Historical Perspective” College Art Association, NY, February 16, 2017; “Making the Americas Modern: Images of Nationhood in the Caribbean and Central America, 1920-1950” Darwin Cordoba Lecture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, February 26, 2017; and “Lygia Pape: Past & Present,” conference paper at Pape Conference, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 4, 2017.

Professor Sullivan taught his popular lecture, “Art in Spain from El Greco to Goya,” in the spring 2017 semester.

 

 

Lecture: A Romp Through NYU’s Architecture, Built and Unbuilt

Left to right: Architects Richard Foster and Philip Johnson, donor Elmer Holmes Bobst, and NYU President James M. Hester in front of Bobst Library, 1972. Courtesy New York University Archives, Photograph CollectionEnter a caption

Tuesday, September 26, 6:30 pm
Silver Center, Room 300 (enter at 32 Waverly Place)

From Beaux-Arts to Brutalism, NYU has it all. Carol Krinsky, Professor of Art History, NYU, will survey the wide range of buildings created or adapted for use by generations of students. From the original Gothic Revival building of 1831 to classicism, Arts-and-Crafts, and Art Deco to late modernism—including Philip Johnson’s Bobst Library and proposed campus master plan—she will illuminate NYU’s panorama of architectural forms.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Art History and Grey Art Gallery.

Free of charge, no reservations, capacity limited. All programs are subject to change. Photo ID required for entrance to NYU buildings.

Offered in conjunction with the exhibition Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson, on view at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, NYC, September 7–December 9, 2017. For more information on the exhibition, please visitgreyartgallery.nyu.edu.

FUTURE EVENTS:
For a roster of the Grey’s upcoming public programs, visit our website.

Join the conversation!
@NYUGrey
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The gallery is accessible to people with disabilities.
For best access, please call 212/998-6780 before visiting.

Apparatus of Power a Decolonizing Vision Speaker Series artist talk with Shahzia Sikander September 25, Monday 6 to 8 pm

Shahzia Sikander, visual artist
This talk will explore Sikander’s pioneering practice that takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as its point of departure and challenges the strict formal tropes of the genre by experimenting with scale and various forms of new media. Informed by South Asian, American, Feminist and Muslim perspectives, Sikander has developed a unique, critically charged approach to this time-honored medium –– employing its continuous capacity for reinvention to interrogate ideas of language, trade and empire, and migration.
Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor
Shahzia Sikander has been the subject of major international exhibitions around the world, including, amongst others, MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2016-17); Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Hong Kong (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); The San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego (2004); the Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris/Altria Branch (2000); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1999); Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1998); and has participated in more than 400 group shows and international art forums. She has received numerous grants, fellowships and awards, including the Asia Society Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art (2015), the U.S. Department of State National Medal of Arts Award (2012); and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, MacArthur Fellowship (2006). Sikander lives and works in New York.
This event is free & open to the public. Venue is accessible.
For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgs@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Co-Sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Art & Art Professions; Department of Art History; Institute of Fine Arts; Program in Asian/Pacific/American Studies; and Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies; and by South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC).
Image courtesy MAXXI Museum Rome.

Meet Our Fall ’17 Art History Writing Tutors!

Although the Arts and Science College Learning Center has offered subject-specific assistance in the past and continues to do so in biology, chemistry, math, languages and the like, in recent years our own Department has taken the lead in providing art history-specific tutoring to its undergraduates. The program kicked off in October 2008 and, according to our students’ feedback, has proven to be a great success.

A tutor is available in the Department of Art History on Mondays through Fridays from 12.30 to 2pm. Students may see them on a walk-in basis.

Cindy Qi is a first year MA student at the Institute of Fine Arts specializing in global Contemporary Art, with an interest in the contemporary art scene in China. Prior to starting her studies at the Institute, Cindy completed her BA degree in Art History at NYU. In addition to being a published art writer, Cindy has contributed to major artist catalogues and art columns. Cindy will be available on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Kolleen Ku is a first-year MA student at the Institute at Fine Arts specializing in global modernism and contemporary art. Prior to studying at the Institute, she received her BA in Art History and English from Columbia University. Her research interests include transcultural artistic exchanges, the historiography of modernism, and twentieth-century movements in Eastern Europe and East Asia. Kolleen will be available on Thursdays and Fridays. 

Tuesday, September 19, 6:30 P.M. | The Perception of Spanish Art in America: A History of Changes

About the Lecture

For centuries, Spanish art was considered only marginal in the international context -a limited deviation from classical excellence. In the 19th century, however, its peculiarity turned positive: in the post-Romantic era, when freedom from the norm and the artist’s commitment to his time became paramount values, Velázquez, Goya and El Greco emerged as true heroes. That change in appreciation had special connotations during The Gilded Age in America, immersed as it was in the construction of a distinctive cultural identity. In the 20th century, artists such as Picasso and Miró, who were central to the history of avant-garde art, became an unavoidable aesthetic and ethical reference for American artists, collectors and museum directors.

Free and open to the public. Picture ID required at the door.

Alumni Lecture, November 8

British Modernism: Not What They Thought