Indigenous Land Acknowledgments and Cultural Patrimony Colloquium

Friday, March 6, 2020

6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m.

Einstein Auditorium, 34 Stuyvesant St

RSVP: https://forms.gle/3kKinnjZfex1ZYC88

This panel brings together representatives from activist groups, academia, museums, and other arts organizations to discuss the practice of land acknowledgments in the cultural sector as well as Indigenous cultural patrimony and repatriation. An Indigenous land or territorial acknowledgment is a statement that acknowledges the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their homeland and territory on which an institution is located. It is both a sign of respect as well as a recognition of the ongoing displacement and dispossession of the many Indigenous peoples living across North America today. Although less common in the United States, land acknowledgments have become a widespread practice in the arts and cultural sectors of Canada and Australia. In discussing this practice alongside issues of repatriation and Indigenous cultural patrimony, this panel will explore the ways in which cultural institutions can engage meaningfully and critically in the politics of sovereignty as well as harness their influence to support Indigenous communities and cultures.

By bringing these topics to NYU’s Department of Art and Art Professions, which includes students in fine arts, and visual and performing arts administration, as well as related NYU programs in Museum Studies, Art History, and Anthropology, we hope to engage today and tomorrow’s cultural leaders in the discussion of Indigenous sovereignty and cultural patrimony.

This venue is wheelchair accessible. For access needs and general inquiries, please email mz2464@nyu.edu

Silsila spring 2020 Lecture Series, Maghrib: Arts of the Islamic West “MAGHRIBIS & MANUSCRIPTS IN OTTOMAN CAIRO” Paul Love, Al Akhawayn University

A late-19th century photo by H. Béchard of the “Rue Ibn Tuloum” [i.e., Ibn Tulun] in the Tulun quarter of Cairo, where many Maghribis settled in the Ottoman period. Source: The Griffith Institute (UK)

From the 17^th-20^th centuries, Ibadi Muslims from the Maghrib traveled to Ottoman Cairo to seek financial, spiritual, or intellectual gain. At the center of their community lay a trade agency, school, residence, and library known as the “Buffalo Agency” (Wikālat al-jāmūs), located just around the corner from the famous Ibn Tulun Mosque. Using the Agency’s manuscript library as its material and geographic anchor, this project sketches the lives of Ibadi merchants, students, and scholars to show how Maghribi Ibadis participated in the legal, intellectual, and commercial worlds of Ottoman Cairo.

Paul Love is Assistant Professor of North African, Middle Eastern, and Islamic History at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. His first book, Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2018) used manuscript evidence and tools from the digital humanities to trace the construction and maintenance of an Ibadi tradition in the Maghrib. His research and publications, which have appeared in the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, the Journal of African History, and the Journal of North African Studies, cover a wide range of topics on the history of North Africa and the Sahara, the Arabic manuscript tradition, and colonial knowledge production on Islam in the Maghrib.

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

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/kHP98JfHcgsfPnVe9
_{*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.} 

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

Hallie Franks Lecture

Venus: 33-26-38

Thursday, February 27 at 6:30

Room 301

The physical culture movement in the U.S. emerged in the second half of the 19^th century in part as a response to anxiety about the deteriorating effects of modern life on the body. Encouraged by the conviction that health was legible on the body, the movement looked to the ancient Greeks as models of beauty and vitality. This ancient exceptionalism was visible not in living bodies, however, but in images, and particularly in sculpture. For women, the Venuses de Milo and de Medici were frequently cited as exemplars of the female form, their physical fitness reflected in their aesthetic perfection. In this lecture, Franks interrogates the translation of ancient statues into modern physical culture discourse and the implications of this translation: How does ideal sculpture operate in a context in which the explicit goal is to re-shape the bodies of living women?  

Hallie Franks is Associate Professor of Ancient Studies at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. An art historian of the ancient Mediterranean and West Asia, Dr. Franks is the author of two books: Hunters, Heroes, Kings: The Frieze of Tomb 2 at Vergina, published in 2012 with the American School of Classical Studies Press, and The World Underfoot: Mosaics and Metaphor in the Greek Symposium, published with Oxford University Press in 2018. Her research has received the support of multiple fellowships, including the Mellon Council on Library and Information Resources, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. At Gallatin, she teaches courses on ancient art and material culture, focusing on constructions of power, gender, and cultural memory.

 

Summer in Paris!

Film Screening: West Beirut, 1998 Tuesday, February 25, 6:30 pm Silver Center, Room 300

Against the turmoil of Lebanon’s 1975 Civil War, this largely autobiographical coming-of-age drama, written and directed by Ziad Doueiri, follows an Arab family struggling to survive as their world is blown apart. Lebanon, 105 min., color. In Arabic and French with English subtitles. Introduced by Helga Tawil-Souri, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication (Steinhardt School), NYU.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and Grey Art Gallery.

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

Offered in conjunction with Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s, on view at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, NYC, January 14–April 4, 2020.

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

Silsila spring 2020 Lecture Series, Maghrib: Arts of the Islamic West “PAPER, MATERIALITY AND SCRIPTURAL TRADITIONS OF NORTHWEST AFRICA” Ghislaine Lydon, UCLA

PLEASE NOTE: THIS LECTURE IS ON THURSDAY RATHER THAN WEDNESDAY

Tichitt, Mauritania in 1997

In recent years, the history of Africa’s manuscript cultures has attracted the attention of scholars versed in Arabic and the decipherment of African texts written in the Arabic script. The wealth of materials preserved in private and public libraries has generated new knowledge about the Sufi, legal and intellectual traditions of Muslim societies of the Saharan and Sahelian regions of the continent. In this lecture, I reflect on the historical uses, production and trades in writing paper in the larger region of Northwest Africa, from ancient to more recent times. I examine the function of writing in the longue durée, paying particular attention to the earliest evidence of paper instruments that facilitated trans-Saharan and trans-regional commerce.

Ghislaine Lydon specializes in the economic and cultural history of Northwest Africa, with a focus on Muslim societies. She is the author of the prize-winning book On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge University Press), and the co-edited volume (with Graziano Krätli) The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History of Muslim Africa (Brill), and various articles and chapters on Islamic legal traditions, African Muslim women and the economic history of northwest Africa.

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

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/T5VjkZ1oST7Q1Q5Z8
_{*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.} 

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

Lecture by Shelley Rice

Please join the Institute of Fine Arts “Works in Progress” speaker series on Wednesday, February 19 at 6:00 PM at the James B. Duke House (1 East 78th Street) for our first talk of the semester. Prof. Shelley Rice will present “Frozen Reflections or Creative Evolutions?: Notes on Women, Imaging and Aging.”

A work in progress, this talk will pose a number of questions about women, art and aging. Rice’s youth was spent in the company of 1970s feminists, American and European, who continually stretched the boundaries of propriety in describing their agile bodies — in pleasure, pain, freedom and oppression. This generation is now considerably older, and the question Rice is putting on the table is whether — and how — her feminist colleagues have chosen to extend these physical explorations into their Golden Years by examining the aging process itself.

A number of artists will be discussed, including Elisabeth Vigée le Brun, Orlan, Cindy Sherman, Hank Willis Thomas, Esther Ferrer and Martha Wilson, who in some cases have chosen to visualize the constraints — of conventional beauty, personality and youth — blocking the development of the feminine image (and image-maker) in modern Western culture. Special attention will be paid to Georgia O’Keeffe. Breaking loose from these limitations with the help of French philosopher Henri Bergson, O’Keeffe and her husband Alfred Stieglitz shaped a radical new vision of the Woman Artist in Time — a 20th-century vision that might be useful for those of us living (and aging) in the contemporary society of Facebook and the selfie.

 

The Works in Progress speaker series was launched in 2013 to create a collegial forum where faculty and advanced doctoral students can present current and ongoing research to facilitate conversations beyond the classroom about methodologies, processes, and the field at large. These casual gatherings consist of one individual presenting their work, followed by a discussion among attendees. This, of course, means that Works in Progress will not ‘work’ without you! Please consider lending your voice to these discussions.

Transforming the TWA Flight Center

Silsila spring 2020 Lecture Series, Maghrib: Arts of the Islamic West “TEXTILES FROM AL-ANDALUS” Corinne Muehlemann, University of Bern and María Judith Feliciano

Fragment with wrestling lions and harpies, probably Almería, early 12th century.
MFA Boston, Ellen Page Hall Fund. 33.371

Was it Made in the City of Baghdad? Allusions of “Baghdad Silks” in al-Andalus

A small Arabic inscription on a silk fragment produced in Al-Andalus (probably in Almeria) before 1109 attempts to delude its reader by saying that it was made in the city of Baghdad. This textile fragment known as the Baghdad silk (now preserved in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts), is woven in a new technique – the lampas weave – that reached al-Andalus at the beginning of the twelfth century. Together with another fragment at the Colegiata de San Isidoro at Leon this lecture will analyze modalities in the transferring of textile knowledge between Baghdad and al-Andalus.

Corinne Muhlemann studied Art History and Islamic studies at the University of Zurich and Bern, with a special qualification in the History of Textile Arts. During her PhD, financed by the Swiss National Research Foundation, she focused on the use of Islamic textiles in the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia during the late 13th and early 14th centuries. In her post-doctoral work at the University of Bern she is concentrating on questions of how pre-Mongol marketplaces and their artisan craftsmen were organized. She studies how knowledge and information concerning (loom) technology, patterns and their notation systems were transferred between Baghdad and al-Andalus

Nasrid tapestry, 13th-14th century. Museu del Disseny de Barcelona 101.157

The Lasting Allure of Fatimid Textiles in the Iberian Peninsula 

Drawing from the long arch of artistic exchange between the Iberian Peninsula and Fatimid Egypt, from the early medieval period to the turn of the fourteenth century, the presentation will underscore the enduring appeal of the Fatimid world as a mirror of sovereignty and refinement in al-Andalus. In particular, it will explore two recent finds:  a small group of textiles from Castilian and Catalan contexts, possibly dating to the twelfth century, which incorporates pseudo-Coptic epigraphy in its decoration, as well as a group dated after the second half of the thirteenth century, which can be directly connected to the nascent royal workshops of the Nasrid Emirate of Granada.

María Judith Feliciano specializes in the visual culture of the late medieval and early modern Iberian world. Her work focuses on the influence of the arts of Islam in the artistic developments of Peninsular and Viceregal societies.

Date: Wednesday, February 19th

Time: 6:30-8:30pm
Location: 4 Washington Square North, 2nd floor

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/4S3FWQojgJKudWgS7
_{*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.} 

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

 

Lecture by Pepe Karmel: Visions of the Modern: Abstraction in the Postcolonial Middle East

Mohamed Melehi (Morocco)
Composition, 1970
Acrylic on wood, 47 1/4 x 39 3/8 in. 
Collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE

Tuesday, February 18, 6:30 pm
Silver Center, Room 300
(enter at 32 Waverly Place, or 31 Washington Place for wheelchair access)

After 1945, abstract art exploded in the Arab world, announcing a new cultural renaissance. In this talk, Pepe Karmel, Associate Professor of Art History, NYU, will link the different varieties of Arab abstraction to their counterparts in the broader Middle East and in Europe—and discuss how these varieties served as vehicles for competing visions of Arab modernity rooted in histories and experiences unique to each nation.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Art History, Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and Grey Art Gallery.

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