In this lecture, Huey Copeland will provide an overview of his work on and approach to modern and contemporary art, with a focus on his forthcoming collection of essays, interviews, and reviews, Touched by the Mother: On Black Men, the Aesthetic Field, and other Feminist Horizons (1966-2016). This volume encompasses a range of unique practices, from the assemblages of Noah Purifoy to the drawings of Steffani Jemison. Just as important, in ‘Touched by the Mother’ — a title borrowed from the work of renowned cultural theorist Hortense Spillers — Copeland articulates how his black queer feminist method draws from various discourses in thinking the intersections of race and gender, history and memory, subjectivity and sexuality, art and culture, an approach that, he argues, productively expands our understanding of both art-historical practice and the aesthetic itself.
[Online] Silsila Fall 2020 Lecture Series, Islam in Africa: Material Histories
Excavation of a civic building dated to the mid-12th to mid-13th centuries CE, Harlaa, Ethiopia, 2019
The abandoned city of Harlaa located 120 km from the Red Sea coast in eastern Ethiopia was occupied between the 7th-15th centuries AD, and has provided significant new information on the role of Ethiopia in the medieval Islamic World. Harlaa was an important gateway for Islam, and an entrepot supplying maritime and land-based trade networks, based on industries such as mining, and jewelry production in dedicated workshops. The wealth of Harlaa appears to have been immense with elaborate stone-built architecture, and material such as glass vessels, glass and semi-precious stone beads, copper and silver coins, Chinese and Middle Eastern ceramics, and shell, imported from India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Iran, Central Asia, and Yemen. Burial, dietary, and epigraphic evidence indicate a cosmopolitan community, Muslim, and non-Muslim, and one that was instrumental in the gradual Islamisation of eastern Ethiopia, and which also seems to have been responsible for the founding of the extant city of Harar. In the absence of historical sources, archaeology is indicating that rather than being peripheral, medieval eastern Ethiopia had an important role within the Islamic world.
Timothy Insoll is Al-Qasimi Professor of African and Islamic Archaeology at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Islamic Archaeology. He was educated at the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge. He has 31 years fieldwork experience in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and prior to his project in Ethiopia completed research in Bahrain, India, Ghana, Mali, and Zanzibar. He is the author or editor of 21 books and special journal issues, as well as many academic papers.Date: Wednesday, November 4thTime: 12:30-2:30pm Location: Online
This event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:30pm ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_CepmydxmQsyP2aHtG5B31A Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.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:
Please join Works in Progress via Zoom on Thursday, November 5 at 6:00 PM EST for our second talk of the semester. Prof. Kathryn A. Smith will present “Responsive Books in Some Fourteenth-Century English Illustrated Manuscripts.”
Richard De Bury is shown with three books, Thomas De Hatfield with a costly vessel, and Thomas De Arundell is pointing to trees, because he contributed four great beams of wood for building work.
This paper is intended as a contribution to the scholarly conversation around the signifying power of fictive books—that is, images of books in medieval books. Professor Smith will examine representations of books in three fourteenth-century English manuscripts. Her aim is to suggest how particular details of their format, form, or color or the script or text written on their pages reveal the responsiveness of their makers to the books’ larger pictorial or codicological contexts, or to the genre of text in which these images of books appear. Some of the fictive books enrich “portraits” of holy or venerable authors or readers; others serve as props in religious narratives, denote authority or identity, or visualize tenets of Christian doctrine, belief, or ideology; still others inflect and complicate images of pedagogy, conversion, or donation. Professor Smith is interested not only in the semantic potency of individual images of books, but also in their meaning in relation to other book-images, and in the work that these fictive books do as key elements within larger chains and webs of signification.
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.
The western Sahel, a region that spans the Atlantic coast of West Africa to the Bend of the Niger River, gave rise to a succession of storied empires and kingdoms from ancient Ghana (ca. 300-1200), Mali (ca. 1230-1600), Songhay (ca. 1464-1591), Bamana Segu (1712-1861) and the Umarian state (1850-90). While the history of these polities is the subject of an extensive literature by historians, the region’s material culture has to date been largely presented as timeless. This exhibition introduces the Sahel’s many-layered past and affords an overview of events that unfolded in what was a global crossroads in terms of the highly distinctive forms of visual expression developed there.
This event will be live-streamed on Youtube and Twitter. Guests can pose questions via Twitter.RSVPNYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Civic Signals, The Social Science Research Council, and The Knight Foundation invite you to a discussion on Art and Activism in the series on “The Shift,” featuring Alicia Grullon,Luis Rincón Alba, Ernest A. Bryant III, and moderated by Gianpaolo Baiocchi. This third episode of “The Shift” will to consider how art and activism can inform policies that strengthen and heal communities opening up a space for considering alternative and more just socio-ecological anti-racist futures. It will focus on how the pandemic has shifted, and continues to shift, the ways in which we perceive and enact change. Art and activism have always formed powerful alliances for critiquing the harmful status quo and for finding new ontologies for alternative futures.The conversation will be illustrated live by Rosa Colón Guerra. Alicia Grullon is an Afro-Taino Caribbean descendant on Lenne-Lenape land, Grullón has been featured in a number of group exhibitions including The 8th Floor; The Bronx Museum of the Arts; BRIC House for Arts and Media; School of Visual Arts; El Museo del Barrio; Columbia University; Socrates Sculpture Park; Performa 11; and Old Stone House and Art in Odd Places. She has received grants from the Puffin Foundation; Bronx Council on the Arts; the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York; and Franklin Furnace Archives. Grullón has participated in residencies at the Hemispheric Institute for Politics and Performance at New York University; the Center for Book Arts; the Bronx Museum of Arts Block Gallery; AIM Alum; and the Shandanken Project on Governors island. She has presented at the 2015 Creative Time Summit; The Royal College of Art; and the United States Association for Art Educators. Her work has been reviewed in many prominent journals, including Hyperallergic, ArtNet News, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Grullón is a recipient of BRIC’s inaugural Colene Brown Art Prize for 2019 and awarded the 2020-2022 Walentas Fellowship at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia.Luis Rincón Alba is a Colombian artist and scholar based in New York City since 2010. He has taught at the departments of Art and Public Policy and Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Performance Studies Department at New York University. As an actor, performer, and oral narrator, he has collaborated with different artistic collectives in his home country and also in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Italy. His creative and academic work centers on the performativity of festive and carnival performance. His scholarship traces the aesthetic and political genealogy of carnival practices in contemporary literature, performance art, and music and how this emergence troubles historical understandings of race, gender, and class. His academic research areas include Caribbean studies, critical race theory, contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, experimental ethnography, and the history of Latin American and Caribbean theater and performance art.Ernest A. Bryant III, L.P.I., is an artist and critic from the USA. He has a background in interdisciplinary art. He earned an MFA from Yale University, School of Art, where he focused on critical theory, new media, and printmaking; and earned a second MFA in Art Writing & Criticism from the New York School of Visual arts, where his focus was art and society’s relationship to nature, molestation, conservation, and homelessness. In his work he uses nature, video, image-making, history, positionality, theory and humor to examine the ontological conflicts that arise between different aesthetic and cultural values. Currently, Bryant has been developing a method of augmented drawing that he describes as “a form of drawing that uses line to explore value, labor and its displacement.” Over the years he has taught mural painting, and studio art to teens. He worked for a non-profit Black art organization as an independent exhibition curator. Most recently he taught a class in prison, for Yale Prison Education Initiative, served as a resident critic and teaching fellow at the Yale Norfolk School of Art, and as a guest critic, in Graphic Design, at Pratt Institute. He was in residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, did a self-designed residency in Santiago, Cuba, and was in residency at the Shangyuan Art Scene in Beijing, China, after which he taught in China for 4 years. He has received fellowships for his work from the Jerome Foundation, and the Bush Foundation, and published the book, “Surviving the next four to Eight Years in the United States of America 2017-2025, For Sufferers of a Recrudescent Ideological KRISIS” in 2017.Gianpaolo Baiocchi is a sociologist and activist interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He directs the Urban Democracy Lab at NYU and works closely with organizations such as Right To The City. He has written about and continues to research instances of civic life both in his native Brazil and in the US. As one of the founders of the Participatory Budgeting Project, he has worked with city officials in several US cities, and has presented his work to the World Bank, to the UNDP, HUD, and to both the World and US Social Forums. Rosa Colón Guerra has been self-publishing comics with her friend Carla Rodríguez for over ten years in San Juan, Puerto Rico as Soda Pop Comics. She’s been published in The Nib, The Believer, The Lily and the Eisner winner Puerto Rico Strong Anthology from Lion Forge as well as the Ignatz Winner Be Gay, Do Comics!
[Online] Silsila Fall 2020 Lecture Series, Islam in Africa: Material Histories
The mausoleum of Aḥmad Lobbo, Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir, and Aḥmad II, in Ḥamdallāhi (Copyright Alfa Mamadou Diallo Lélouma)
Contrary to what is commonly believed, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, one of the most famous sources for pre-colonial African history, is a nineteenth-century chronicle. The talk analyses the chronicle in the landscape of nineteenth century Islamic West Africa as a political project in legitimization of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi (1818-1862).
Mauro Nobili is a historian of pre-colonial and early-colonial West Africa. He has conducted research in several collections of Arabic manuscripts from West Africa and published on West African chronicles, Arabic calligraphies, and Islam in Africa. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a National Endowment for Humanities grant.Date: Wednesday, October 28thTime: 12:30-2:30pm Location: Online
This event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:30pm ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Ha2nJQdxRniDGu0AxnOHKg Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.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:
Monday, October 19, 6:30 pm EDT Register Approaching the art world as a complex and mysterious space, this conversation will consider Roslyn Bernstein’s illustrious career as an art critic and professor of art journalism, focusing in particular on her long-form reviews of groundbreaking exhibitions at the Grey. In addition, it will address these crucial questions: How do artists in Europe, the U.S., Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas find space to live and work? How do they create and exhibit art in a politicized world where freedom is often limited? How do smaller museums and other art venues survive the economic pressures and competition in the art market?
Join Roslyn Bernstein (GSAS ’67, ’74), art critic, professor of art journalism, and author of the just-released Engaging Art: Essays and Interviews from Around the Globe, and Lynn Gumpert, director of NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, as they examine these under-the-radar subjects, illuminating the pains and pleasures of contemporary artistic production as well as the challenges faced today by artists, curators, and gallerists around the globe.
Presented by the NYU Alumni Association and Grey Art Gallery.
Accessibility Accommodations Please note this virtual event requires an internet connection and computer, tablet, or smartphone. It is a priority to make our events inclusive and accessible and New York University is pleased to provide accommodations for people with disabilities. Requests for events and services, such as live closed captioning or ASL interpretation, should be submitted to alumni.events@nyu.edu at least 72 hours in advance. This event will be closed captioned and posted on the NYU Alumni website after the event.
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Image: Cover image of Engaging Art: Essays and Interviews from Around the Globe by Roslyn Bernstein, Mosaic mural by Anado McLauchlin, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Photo by Shael Shapiro
Fields of Vision 