Symposium: Ovid and Art featuring Dennis Geronimus, Louise Rice and Pepe Karmel

Wally Reinhardt
Ovid Crowned with Immortality, 1990
Prismacolor colored pencil and gouache on prepared Arches paper, 11 x 15 in.
New York University Art Collection. Gift of the artist, 2018.2.21

Symposium: Ovid and Art
Thursday, April 4, 2019
Hemmerdinger Hall, Room 102
Silver Center for Arts and Science
32 Waverly Place, or 31 Washington Place
New York, NY 10003
(Enter at 31 Washington Place for wheelchair access)

1:00pm  WELCOME
Matthew Santirocco, NYU

1:15pm  Ovid and the Triumph of Art
Katharina Volk, Columbia University

2:00pm  Fear and Wonder: Natura naturans, from Ovid to Leonardo
Dennis Geronimus, NYU

2:45pm  BREAK

3:00pm  Ovid and the Metamorphosis of Poetry into Painting
Louise Rice, NYU

3:45pm  Modern Metamorphoses from Pablo Picasso to Wangechi Mutu
Pepe Karmel, NYU

4:30pm  Dennis Geronimus and Wally Reinhardt in conversation

5:00pm  BREAK

5:30pm  KEYNOTE SESSION
The Metamorphosis in the Garden
Alessandro Barchiesi, NYU

Rapture and Deceit: Ovidian Viewpoints in Roman Art
Bettina Bergmann, Mount Holyoke College

7:30pm  RECEPTION

Presented by The NYU Center for Ancient Studies, in conjunction with the Grey Art Gallery and the Department of Art History. Cosponsored by the NYU College of Arts and Science.

This event is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required. To RSVP, please visit this weblink: https://goo.gl/forms/VqSyeb0UHYjDEB3K3   For more information, contact the NYU Center for Ancient Studies at 212/992-7978 or at ancient.studies@nyu.edu

Offered in conjunction with Metamorphoses: Ovid According to Wally Reinhardt, on view at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, NYC, January 9–April 6, 2019. Also on view:Fritz Ascher: Expressionist.

For information on the exhibition, please visit greyartgallery.nyu.edu

Urban Design Summer in London!

Silsila spring 2019 Lecture Series, Replication “TRANSMITTING POTENTIAL. MAKERS AND MARBLES IN GHAZNI, AFGHANISTAN” Martina Rugiadi, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Dado panel with interlaced trefoils formerly in the Rawza Museum of Islamic Art ©IsIAO archives.

Appearing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the marble carvings of Ghazni, Afghanistan, display novel, seemingly repetitive and geometrically traced designs (interlaced trefoils, star and polygons, etc.). Through close observation of the marbles’ manufacture, this talk will suggest that the reproduction of these motifs was not achieved with templates, but rather via an accumulated knowledge present across masons, marbles, and tastes. Replication in the practices of craftsmen
enabled transmission of designs and activated innovations in the artistic languages, while raising questions about the interplay between patrons, architects, and craftsmen.

Martina Rugiadi is Associate Curator in the Islamic Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she co-curated the exhibition and catalogue Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs in 2016. As an archaeologist, she has worked on ceramics and architecture in Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria, and is currently planning a project in Turkmenistan. Her publications deal mostly with the material culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries; she has recently published on daguerreotypes and the emergence of Islamic art.

Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at:

http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.html

Date: Wednesday, April 3rd
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
Location: 4 Washington Square North, 2nd floor

RSVP here: https://goo.gl/forms/Asxo5OEQk4oUTzCA2
_{*Since space is limited, it is essential to RSVP. If for any reason you have rsvp’d and cannot attend, please use the RSVP form to let us know.} 

Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts Faculty in The Art Bulletin

Art History at NYU is well-represented in the most recent issue of The Art Bulletin (vol. 101, no. 2, March 2019).  In it you’ll find articles by Prita Meier, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, and Associate faculty in the Institute of Fine Arts, and Christine Poggi, Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director and Professor of Fine Arts, Institute of Fine Arts.

 

— Prita Meier, “The Surface of Things:  A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast” (pp. 48-69)

 

— Christine Poggi, “Stage at the Edge of the Sea: Picasso’s Scenographic Imagination” (pp. 90-118)

 

The Art Bulletin, the journal of record for American art historians, is published by the College Art Association of America, the flagship American scholarly society in the discipline.

Be sure to check it out!

 

Print copies of The Art Bulletin shipped last week. Click here to explore the digital version.

TABLE OF CONTENTS ARTICLES Taste and Trade: The Drinking Portraits of Alexis Grimou (1678–1733) Melissa Percival From Museum to Menagerie: Théodore Géricault and the Leonine Subject Katie Hornstein The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast Prita Meier Tragoedie and the Program of Klimt’s Secession Period Fabian Meinel Stage at the Edge of the Sea: Picasso’s Scenographic Imagination Christine Poggi REVIEWS: TRACES OF VIOLENCE, SIGNS OF CHANGE Amanda Wunder, Baroque Seville: Sacred Art in a Century of Crisis Vicente Lleó Cañal Z. S. Strother, Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art Steven Nelson David M. Lubin, Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War Austin Porter Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Seizing Jerusalem: The Architectures of Unilateral Unification Wendy Pullan

Silsila spring 2019 Lecture Series, Replication “MIRACLES OF MEDIATION. STILL-LIFE, LITURGICAL VESSELS, AND PROCESSIONS AT CORDOBA” Beate Fricke, University of Bern

Córdoba, Mezquita. Side view upon altar panel by Pedro de Córdoba, oil painting on panel, 1475. Commissioned for Diego Sánchez de Castro’ chapel, 271 x 156 cm.

A late medieval panel painting of an Annunciation scene in a converted mosque is infused with artistic reflections about how to stage a divine moment and present it to the viewer. Played with are the relationships between constructed painterly narrative and performed liturgical drama, between imagination and experience, between inspiration and conception. This lecture will explore how such connections are expressed in the painting through the shifting relationships between caused miracle (incarnation/semination), mediated miracle (communion), and saintly interlocutors.

Beate Fricke is Professor and Chair of European Medieval Art at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern. Previously, she was professor for Medieval Art at the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conquest and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art (2015). Currently she is working on her second book Beautiful Genesis: Creation and Procreation in Late Medieval Art (under contract with Penn State University Press).

Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at:

http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.html

Date: Wednesday, March 27th
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
Location: 4 Washington Square North, 2nd floor

RSVP here: https://goo.gl/forms/s0dVYsb0M1WSfSGr2

_{*Since space is limited, it is essential to RSVP. If for any reason you have rsvp’d and cannot attend, please use the RSVP form to let us know.} 

Stephen Pinson, Rosenblum Lecture on 4/11

Okwui Enwezor: An Appreciation

Okwui Enwezor: An Appreciation

By Shelley Rice

Early in the morning of March 15 – the Ides of March – we lost a friend and colleague of huge stature and import. The extraordinary curator, writer and educator Okwui Enwezor died of cancer in Munich, where he had been Director of the Haus der Kunst from 2011 to 2018.

Okwui was the Varnedoe Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts in 2012, and a Global Distinguished Professor downtown in the Department of Art History in 2013. Nigerian by birth, he came to the United States for college, and this multicultural perspective became his signature, the foundation of his mission as a “change agent.” Sprawling, global, thought-provoking and controversial exhibitions like Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002, Intense Proximity in Paris, the 2015 Venice Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid at ICP in New York, and most recently Postwar and El Anatsui in Munich (to name only a few) broke open the insularity of the Western art world by introducing works of artists from Africa, Asia, South America, the Middle East and elsewhere. A culture warrior, Enwezor’s exhibitions and writings immersed us in a world without a center, where a cacophony of voices could speak – in harmony and dissonance — from anywhere within what he called the “postcolonial constellation.” As artist John Akomfrah has said, “Okwui was this enormously prophetic figure, wise beyond his years, whose insights – vision, if you will – literally shaped the universe many of us now inhabit.”

NYU students had the good fortune to experience Enwezor’s panoramic vision up front and personal, and all of them speak of the enormous impact his classes had on their concept not only of Art History but also of global culture and understanding. Several of our collective students in the Global Issues in Contemporary Photography seminar expressed their sorrow after his death, and their appreciation for the time spent with him. Allison Young (our Course Assistant) called him a “gift,” and Catherine McKinley saw this class as a “privilege.” The last conversation I had with Okwui, a long international call, was a few months ago; for an hour we discussed his recent essay for the Whitney Museum’s Warhol exhibition catalog, the artist’s significance, and eventually his Shadows series – about which we disagreed, vehemently. Enwezor called me his “sparring partner,” and one of our favorite things to do was to argue – with great gusto and evident delight — in class, inviting the students to join in. Okwui’s expansive mind, and his joy in using it to the fullest, were inspirational for our students, who saw our spirited disagreements as empowering. In the classroom, as in his exhibitions and writings, Enwezor gave us the gift of the Big Picture – and in return he left his students with the mandate to move it forward. Now working all over the world, they have shouldered this responsibility with pleasure and pride, and with gratitude to NYU.

Last fall, before the illness became too overwhelming, Okwui began exploring the possibility of coming back to NYU to teach on a more permanent basis – a testament to the connection and respect he felt for us too, until the end.

CAS Major Declaration Day!

Declare your Art History or URDS major in the department on Wednesday, March 13 and get a pin, eat a cupcake, and take a selfie!

#nyucas #thisismajor #ideclarecas #declarationday

 

The American Imperium and the City Beautiful in the Philippines, 1898-1916

Professor Kathryn A. Smith to lecture at the University of Groningen

The lecture is sponsored by the Center for Historical Studies and the Graduate School and the Research School for Medieval Studies, University of Groningen.