The book and exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration include works made by nonincarcerated artists — both artists who were formerly incarcerated and those concerned with the impact of the United States prison system on marginalized communities. From various sites of the carceral state, these artists devise strategies for visualizing, mapping and making physically present the impact and scale of life under mass surveillance, criminalization and imprisonment for targeted populations, underscoring how prisons and the prison industrial complex have shaped contemporary life. In her talk, Prof. Fleetwood will discuss the works and how they bear witness to artists’ experimentation with, and reimagining of the fundamentals of, living under punitive governance as they push the possibilities of these basic features of daily experience to create new visions of justice and healing. The resulting work is often laborious, time-consuming and immersive, as incarcerated artists manage penal time through their works and experiment with the material constraints that shape art making in prison.
Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. She is also curator of the touring exhibition Marking Time, which debuted at MoMA PS1 in September 2020. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011). She is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name.
Photo credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Ronnie Goodman, San Quentin Arts in Corrections Art Studio, 2008. 37 1/4″ x 25 ¼ inches. Photo: Peter Merts. Courtesy Laurie Brooks/ William James Association
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College/Columbia University Renata Holod, University of Pennsylvania Mohammad Fahim Rahimi, National Museum of Afghanistan Alison Gascoigne, University of Southampton Ahmed Adam, University of Khartoum Christian Greco, Museo Egizio, Turin
Friday, November 5th, 11:00am ET
PLEASE NOTE: The US adopts winter daylight saving time slightly later than other regions. As a result, for this one event the time differences from New York vary slightly. This event begins at 11am New York time (15h London, 16h Lagos/Berlin, 17h Cairo/Beirut, 18h Addis/Istanbul, 20.00 Islamabad, 20.30 Delhi)
Expectations regarding the context and value of excavated material vary across the fields of Islamic archaeology and museology, fields with competing epistemologies and theoretical approaches. Focusing on practices of excavation and display, this panel aims to explore the often-contentious relationships between these fields. The topic is especially relevant to a moment when the colonial and racist legacies of the academy and the museum have come under increased scrutiny. The presentations will explore the implications of archaeological research conducted by museums, the legacies of such projects, and their relevance to contemporary discussions regarding the exhibition of archaeological material from the Islamic lands. A central aim is to explore the potential meaning of context, extending the term to the modern life of objects and to the human relations enabled by it.11.00-11.10 Introduction, Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU & Martina Rugiadi, Metropolitan Museum of Art11.10-11.25 Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College/Columbia University, “The Archaeological Archive”11.25-11.40 Renata Holod, University of Pennsylvania, “Archaeological Excavations and the Art Market, 1900 to 1939/40”11.40-11.55 Mohammad Fahim Rahimi, National Museum of Afghanistan, “The Ghazni Museum Collections: Between Emergency Interventions and New Museum Practices”11.55-12.10 Alison Gascoigne, University of Southampton, “Mshatta – 120 years of Displaying Early Islamic Monumental Architecture”12.10-12.25 Ahmed Adam, University of Khartoum, ” The Role of Museums in Sudan: Past, Present, and Future”12.25-12.40 Christian Greco, Museo Egizio, Turin, “A New Context for an Archaeological Museum”12.40-1.30 Questions and Discussion Paper abstracts and further details.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Olin Whitney Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of Columbia’s Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. She is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine, to the question of race and genomics, to the workings of American militarism during the post 9/11 wars. Dr. Abu El-Haj is the author of two books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002, and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Her third book, to be published by Verso (2022), is a study of contemporary American militarism as it operates in and through the idiom of combat trauma and the obligation of American citizens to care for soldiers sent off to war in their name.
Renata Holod is College of Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities, History of Art Department [Emerita]; and Curator, Near East Section, Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania. She has conducted fieldwork in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and the Pontic steppe of Ukraine. She is the co-author of City in the Desert, 1978; Architecture and Community, 1983; The Mosque and the Modern World, 1997; The City in the Islamic World, 2008; An Island Through Time: Jerba, 2009. She has published numerous articles. Honors include the Middle East Studies Association Award for Mentorship, 2020; Festschrift “Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Honor of Renata Holod” David Roxburgh, ed. [Brill, 2014]; College for Women Class of 1963 Term Chair in the Humanities, 2010 – ongoing; Provost’s Award for Mentorship of Graduate Students, 2010; Islamic Environmental Design Achievement Award, 2004; Clark Professor, Williams College, and Clark Institute, Fall 2002; Fellow, Clark Institute, Fall 1999; Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, Visitor, 1994-95; Chair, Master Jury, Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 1992; Distinguished Landsdowne Lecturer, U. of Victoria, 1992; Kolb Senior Fellow, Penn Museum, 1989 – ongoing; King Fahd Award for Teaching Architecture of Muslim Cultures, 1986.
Mohammad Fahim Rahimi is the Director of the National Museum of Afghanistan. He received his BA from the Archaeology and Anthropology department of Kabul University in 2005 and an MA from the Anthropology Department of the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 through a Fulbright scholarship, focused on Archeology and Heritage Preservation. In 2010, he participated in an international heritage preservation course called First Aid to Cultural Heritage in Times of Conflict at the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in Rome, Italy. In 2011, he was a participant in a curatorial training course on the art and history of Afghanistan and Pakistan at the University of Vienna. In 2007, he joined the National Museum of Afghanistan as a curator and became Chief Curator in 2013. In the National Museum of Afghanistan, he has curated several large-scale exhibitions, including Mes Aynak – Recent Discoveries Along the Silk Route Exhibition, and Buddhist Heritage of Afghanistan Exhibition and 1000 Cities of Bactria. As the current Director of the National Museum of Afghanistan Mr. Rahimi’s responsibilities include overseeing the regional museums of Afghanistan, drafting policy, organizing national and international exhibitions, securing funding, collection enrichment, preservation, and the return of looted artifacts from Afghanistan.
Alison L. Gascoigne holds an Associate Professorship in Archaeology at the University of Southampton, having studied at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests lie mainly in Egypt, with a particular focus on the archaeology of urbanism from late antiquity to the late medieval period. She has co-directed a program of fieldwork at the important site of Tell Tinnis in Lake Manzala, published as The Island City of Tinnis: A Postmortem in 2020. She has also published on the archaeology of Old Cairo/Fustat, Hisn al-Bab (Aswan), and the North Kharga Oasis in Egypt, as well as the sites of Jam and the Bala Hissar (Kabul) in Afghanistan.
Ahmed Hussein Abdelrahman Adam is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, University of Khartoum and Director of the Red Sea and Suakin Project for Archaeological, Cultural, and Environmental Studies. Between 2017 and 2020 he was head of the Directorate for University of Khartoum Museums. He is also coordinator of Sudan in the General Union of Arab Archaeologists. He has held honorary appointments and fellowships at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, the Center of African Studies, the University of Cambridge, and Exeter University. He has published widely in regional and international journals.
Christian Greco is the Director of the Museo Egizio in Turin since 2014. In 2015, he led the complete renovation of the museum’s galleries, transforming it from an antiquities museum into an archaeological museum. Trained mainly in the Netherlands, he is an Egyptologist with vast experience working in museums. He curated exhibition and curatorial projects in the Netherlands (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden; Kunsthal, Rotterdam; Teylers Museum, Haarlem), Japan (Okinawa, Fukushima, Takasaki and Okayama museums), Finland (Vapriikki Museum, Tampere), Spain (La Caixa Foundation) and Scotland (National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh). At the Museo Egizio, he has set up important collaborations with international museums, universities, and research institutes. Greco is also currently teaching courses in the material culture of ancient Egypt and museology at the Università di Torino and Pavia, the Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Archeologici of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, the Scuola IUSS in Pavia and New York University in Abu Dhabi. His fieldwork experience includes being the co-director of the Italian-Dutch archeological mission at Saqqara in Egypt since 2011 and being a member for several years of the Epigraphic Survey of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in Luxor. His published record includes many scholarly essays and writings for the non-specialist public in several languages. He has been a keynote speaker at a number of international conferences on Egyptology and museology.
Date: Friday, November 5th Time: 11:00am-1:30pm Location: Online This event will take place as a live Webinar at 11:00am ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_P_F0f6TzQ76HhSSABL2tCA 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: http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.html
Artists of ancient coastal Peru have long been lauded for their skill in recreating living forms in fired clay. Among the earliest South American objects to be admitted to the modern realm of art as such were the virtuosic portrait vessels and other lively depictions of flora and fauna that Moche artists created between about 400 and 800 CE. The likenesses of these ceramic works are so compelling that early modern collectors inventoried them according to the species depicted; physicians at the turn of the last century regarded them as diagnostic images equivalent to photography; and archaeologists have argued for the identifications of particular historical individuals among them. When this ancient Indigenous corpus is more broadly considered, however, and when the taxonomies of foreign epistemologies are suspended, it defies expectations of modern objective order.
In this lecture Professor Lisa Trever explores how images of living and not-living beings were formally and symbolically entangled in Moche art, sometimes to “surreal” effect. These object entanglements reveal Indigenous perspectives on substance, being, and the expressive power of plastic imagination.
Swearing of Allegiance (detail), Maktel-i Al-i Resul, Lamiʿi Çelebi, Harvard Art Museums 1985.229
This talk focuses on the rise and fall of a vibrant yet short-lived art market in early modern Baghdad. From the final decade of the sixteenth to the first few years of the seventeenth century, a period of relative peace, there arose a lively art market – as witnessed by over thirty illustrated manuscripts and sundry single-page paintings, most of which show a stylistic coherence. The paintings appear to draw on elements from Ottoman, Safavid, and Indian paintings. This talk will try to contextualize this corpus of works that appeared in the frontier province of Baghdad.
Melis Taner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture and Design at Özyeğin University in Istanbul. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2016. Her first book Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in Its Illustrated Manuscripts, Brill, 2020 focuses on painting in early modern Baghdad. Her research interests include Islamic, particularly Ottoman and Safavid, art and cross-cultural exchanges in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as Medieval Art. Date: Wednesday, October 27th Time: 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_HUsMklRIQQCgM3I6-aEDpQ 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:
Looking for a future path? Love old buildings? Why not make them new again? NYU’s London-based M.A. Program provides an immersion in adaptive reuse and sustainable building practice. Come learn about the program at our fall open house, featuring presentations about our faculty and curriculum, admissions information for 2022-23 and a discussion of career opportunities in the field. Program directors, faculty, and alumni will be there to discuss the program and answer your questions. Applications for 2022-23 are due March 1, 2022.
We are pleased to offer a 50% tuition scholarship to any NYU CAS graduates from December 2021 or May 2022.
On April 8-10, 2022, SUNY New Paltz will host its fourth annual Undergraduate Art History Symposium. Last year, we were thrilled to have 98 wonderful speakers from 64 different collegiate institutions, and we look forward to expanding even further at our upcoming event. Each talk will be ten minutes in length followed by a brief question and answer session. (Please check out our website for last year’s symposium).
To allow as many students to participate as possible while we slowly emerge from the pandemic, the symposium will be a virtual event as it was this past spring. We know that it would be ideal to be together in-person; however, based on the high level of engagement the students experienced previously, we believe that this format will still offer an opportunity for your students to sharpen their research skills, network with faculty and students outside their home institution, as well as gain valuable professional experience.
We welcome papers focusing on any topic or scholarly approach within the field of art history and other closely related disciplines (e.g., film studies, archaeology, etc.). Students may present their past or present work, whether based on a research paper, an independent study, or an honors thesis. Abstracts of 300 words or less may be sent to heuerk@newpaltz.edu until February 4, 2022. We ask that the submission also include the student’s name, major, academic year, institutional affiliation, and email. Students will be notified within two weeks after the submission deadline.
Professor Miriam Basilio Gaztambide learned how to use Zoom, and there was an unexpected benefit: her cat Lyla audited the course. Sometimes Lyla Zoom-bombed the sessions but students were understanding. When not teaching, Professor Basilio was writing and revising her (almost completed) book, Latin American Art at The Museum of Modern Art: The Power of the Canon. Lyla is an encouraging editorial assistant.
The last twenty months have been a time of profound uncertainty and worry yet also of renewed connections and newfound creativity. Professor Dennis Geronimus has found sustaining inspiration in working with his students and colleagues – as well as great solace in his own research. The highlight of the year in terms of the latter was the chance to work as guest curator and lead author for Grey Matters, an exhibition marking the rediscovery ofthe Labors of Adam and Eve canvas by Jacopo da Pontormo (the subject of Professor Geronimus’s current book project)at the Nicholas Hall Gallery, New York, in January 25–March 31, 2021 (reviewed by Marco Grassi,“Grey Eminence,” The New Criterion. Professor Geronimus’s accompanying essay is available in an interactive digital format. The show’s opening was accompanied by a live stream, titled “Into the Light,” with artist Christian Nyampeta and IFA conservator Shan Kuang. This past year also saw the publication of Professor Geronimus’s essay “Into the Wild: Living Landscape and Wonderment in Renaissance Art,” published in Guy Hedreen, eds., At the Limits of theMaterial World: Art, Nature, and Science in Ancient Literature and its Renaissance Reception, NIKI Studies in Netherlandish-Italian Art History 13 (Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers, 2021). His public online talks this past spring included “Restless Bodies: Pontormo as Draftsman,” an invited lecture for Harvard University, and “Hidden in Plain Sight: Black Africansin Renaissance Visual Culture,” part of NYU’s annual Scholars Lecture Series.
In the virtual classroom, Professor Geronimus contributed a pair of new courses. In spring 2021, he taught Raphael at 500, a Special Topics offering occasioned by the quincentenary of the painter’s death. Last semester he led a seminar titled Absence and Agency: Black Africans in Renaissance Visual Culture, which featured a number of invaluable visits with a variety of scholars, ranging from Alisa LaGamma and Denise Murrell of the Met Museum to our very own Meredith Martin and Leila Amineddoleh, who spoke on the timely subject of cultural heritage and art law. Professor Geronimus also had the pleasure of supervising an honors thesis by Marie Layla Normand (“Reflections on the Changing Social Status of Black Africans in Italian Renaissance Art”); an MA thesis at the IFA by Chloe Rudolph (“From Chalk to Oil: A Study of Select Sacra Conversazione by Vittore Carpaccio, from Drawing to Painting”); and a DURF project by Mari Otsu (“Sketching the Fin-de-Siècle Self: Embodied Identity in the Self-Portraiture of Albrecht Dürer and Egon Schiele”), which was granted support by CAS.
This past year marked Professor Geronimus’s twentieth year of teaching, all spent at NYU, and his sixth as department chair. While it was certainly his most challenging, it was also potentially the most rewarding. For two years running, Professor Geronimus served as a member of our department’s curricular committee, tasked with evaluating and substantially reshaping the art history major and minor. The fruits of the committee’s labors – leading to ambitious structural and curricular changes to our entire program going forward – were announced to students and alumni this fall. Professor Geronimus also continues to serve as a “Proud to be First” Faculty Connect Advocate for a first-generation CAS student; a member of the Grey Art Gallery Advisory Committee; a member of the Advisory Committee for MARC (Medieval and Renaissance Center, NYU); the faculty supervisor for the Department of Art History’s writing tutoring program; and, for the third year, as NYU’s Faculty Athletics Representative to the NCAA. He also weathered the pandemic to compete in his own right. In the last year, tournaments big and small have taken him on tennis adventures from the Northeast to Georgia (twice!) and New Mexico, for which he has earned a top national ranking in singles.
Professor Geronimus’s proudest achievement, however, was his promotion to Full Professor. He is very much looking forward to what comes next!
Grey Matters installation
In September 2020 Professor Finbarr Barry Flood was a discussant for the panel “AfricAsian Materialities” in the online conference AfricAsia: Overlooked Histories of Exchange, at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and in October he was a discussant for the panel “Historicizing Relic Practices in Islamic Pieties and Societies,” at the Middle East Studies Association conference (online). In March 2021, he gave theGeorge Levitine Lecture at the MidAtlantic Symposium organized by the University of Maryland and CASVA, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. on the theme of “Modernity, Iconoclasm and Anticolonialism – Other Statue Histories” (online). In summer 2021 he spent two months at the University of Bern, Switzerland, as part of the ERC-funded project Global Horizons, directed by Professor Beate Fricke, finishing a book on early globalisms that he is co-authoring with Professor Fricke.
This past year, Professor John North Hopkins was elected Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where he worked on a book manuscript, Unbinding Rome, a critical study of how objects and spaces have been understood as Roman, as well as the imperializing role that such putatively “Roman” objects play in the maintenance of restrictive sociocultural frameworks. He also finalized an edited volume, titled Forgery Beyond Deceit: Value, Fabrication, and the Desire for Ancient Rome, which is now forthcoming form Oxford University Press. His co-edited volume, Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Art was published by the Menil Collection and Yale University Press in January, 2021, with a co-authored introduction and an individually authored chapter on sculpted heads from first-century Gaul.
Professor Dipti Khera writes, “For me, not unlike many others, 2020-21 was a year of ‘hanging’ in here! I waited for times to change, valued the love, health, and riches in my life, and felt overwhelmed by the non-concurrent COVID-19 waves that subsumed my nearest and dearest in NYC, Mumbai, and Delhi. I share these milestones, marked in my academic Zoom rooms, for they brought inspiring art historical insights and an ethics of care and critique onto the same shaky ground. On January 8, 2021, I had a conversation with Dr. Anandi Silva Knuppel, a media specialist working with the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), and Professor Deborah Hutton, art historian of South Asian and Islamic art at The College of New Jersey, about my AIIS journey, from winning the 2008-09 Junior Fellowship to the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in Indian Humanities for my book The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century, published byPrinceton University Press in September 2020 (listen to the AIIS podcast here). Of my various book talks, one held at the University of Oxford’s School of South Asian Studies for Modern South Asian Studies Seminar on May 11, 2021, and “The Mood of a Place: A Sensible History of India’s Eighteenth-Century Locals and Locales,” hosted by The Courtauld Institute of Art on February 18, 2021 (video recording available here), will stay with me for the conversations about methods, fieldwork, and the pace of unraveling primary sources that continued in smaller groups following the talks. Other thought-provoking discussions, such as one with Professor Vikramaditya Prakash, practicing architect and architecture historian at University of Washington, Seattle, can be accessed at Architecture Talk (April 8, 2021); withDr. Nicolas Roth, a historian of gardens and horticulture in early modern India, can be viewed here, Bangalore International Center (June 10, 2021); and book launch at the Institute of Fine Arts-NYU, December 4, 2020, with responses from Professor Vittoria Di Palma, a specialist in eighteenth-century British aesthetics and landscape at the University of Southern California, and Professor Kavita Singh, a historian of Indian Painting and South Asia’s museum cultures and memorialization at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, is available here. In collaboration with the Digital Art History specialist Jennifer Henel, I have expanded my book’s companion website that makes primary sources accessible for further research. We have annotated the ‘Letter of Invitation Sent to the Monk Jinharsh Suri, 1830,’ painted by an unnamed Udaipur painter in opaque watercolor, ink, and gold on a 72-foot-long paper scroll, part of the library collection of the Abhay Jain Granthalya, Bikaner. The Place of Many Moods was shortlisted in June 2021 for the Kenshur Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies by Indiana University.
“I delivered the Franklin Murphy Lecture, titled, ‘Archive/Agency/Argument: Mobilizing the Knowledge of Colonial India’s “Native” Artists in “Global” Art Histories,’ in the series ‘Intersections of Identity: Expressions, Exchange and Hybridity’ at the Department of Art History, University of Kansas, Lawrence, February 26, 2021. I gave the plenary lecture ‘Letters from the Local Bazaar: Unfurling Unseen Moods, Maps, and Memories of India’s Eighteenth Century’ for the Young Scholar Conference ‘I was Looking High and Low: Towards a Redistribution of the Sensible,’ at the School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, March 11, 2021. Both events were meticulously organized by students. The pre- and post-event conversations, especially at the latter, held on the first anniversary of my stalled journey to Delhi due to COVID-19-related border closures, made for emotional and searing insights. We discussed thinking with vernacular sources, colonized presents in art history curriculums, contemporary artists’ newsletters publicizing the largest ongoing farmers’ strike in world history on Delhi’s urban frontiers, and the risks and politics of camping on borders of cities under undemocratic regimes.
“Similar concerns about how the stakes of teaching art history shift when we account for histories of colonialism, enslavement, and the extraction of bodies, land, objects, and knowledge led to the roundtable, ‘Teaching the “Long” Eighteenth Century.’ With Sarah Betzer, Professor of Art History and Interim Chair of the Department of Art, University of Virginia, I organized this event at UVA’s Institute for Humanities and Global Cultures on April 26, 2021. We invited scholars working from a broad range of geographical foci and institutional perspectives to think outward from their pedagogical sites about research and periodization in art history (recording is available here).
“Finally, in August 2021, my US Permanent Residency arrived. I became an immigrant academic who can live and work in the US with greater rights and security for the first time in twenty years, since I came to New York city as an international graduate student. Now I cannot wait to pack my bags and travel to hug my family and friends beyond US borders. Like everyone, I desire to stay freely here and elsewhere.”
Professor Carol Krinsky was greatly impressed by the ability of her students to do serious work, even if they were far away in China, Vietnam, Malaysia, South Korea, Lebanon, Kazakhstan, England, Italy, and elsewhere. When the spring semester ended, she turned again to her book-in-progress about the building of 42nd Street from the seventeenth century, when hardly anyone was there, to the present time of skyscrapers and institutional buildings.
Professor Meredith Martin’s book entitled Meltdown: Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy, which is related to an exhibition that she is co-curating with Nina Dubin and Madeleine Viljoen at The New York Public Library, was published this past January. Another forthcoming book, entitled The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Gallery Slavery in Louis XIV’s France (co-authored with Gillian Weiss), was awarded a Millard Meiss Fund Publication Grant by the College Art Association this past spring. In spring 2021 Professor Martin held a fellowship at NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts. She spent the fellowship period working on a project, together with the choreographer and arts activist Phil Chan, to reimagine a lost French ballet from 1739 called the Ballet des Porcelaines, or the Teapot Prince, which will premiere in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art this December before traveling to several venues in the U.S. and Europe.
Professor Louise Rice was awarded a senior fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, Boston College (fall 2020). Her recent publications include a study of seventeenth-century images and theories about magnetism, entitled “Arcanis nodis: The Emblematic Thesis Prints of the Roman College,” in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 65, 2020 (2021), pp. 372-480 (accessible online at jstor or Academia.edu).
Aided by many scholarly contacts via the internet, during the Covid-19 pandemic Lucy Freeman Sandler, Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Art History, emerita, completed a book on images of books in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, Penned and Painted: The Art and Meaning of Books in Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, to be published in spring 2022 by the British Library. Two articles, which had been in press for a long time, were published: “Religious Instruction and Devotional Study: The Pictorial and the Textual in Gothic Diagrams,” in The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Adam Cohen, Marcia Kupfer, and Yossi Chajes, Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 429-48; and “Visions of the Beginning and the End: The Hours of the Angels Added to the Psalter of Yolande of Soissons,” in Tributes to Richard K. Emmerson (Turnhout and London: Harvey Miller, 2021), 81-115. Another article was just published: “It’s an Open Book: The Initial to the Index of Archbishop Arundel’s Copy of the Gospel Commentary of William of Nottingham,” in The Medieval Book as Object, Idea and Symbol, Proceedings of the 2019 Harlaxton Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 31 (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2021), 80-104. Currently Professor Sandler is working on a study of pictorial typology in the Bedford Hours, a celebrated fifteenth-century Parisian manuscript.
Much of Professor Kathryn A. Smith’s work during the 2020-21 academic year pertained to her current book project, Scripture Transformed in Late Medieval England: The Religious, Artistic, and Social Worlds of the Welles-Ros Bible. As the 2020 ICMA at the Courtauld speaker Professor Smith delivered a Zoom lecture on her book project on October 14th, 2020. Thanks to the miracle of Zoom, she delivered the same lecture the next day in the History of Art seminar of the University of Edinburgh. On February 11th, 2021 she gave a different Zoom talk related to her book in Columbia University’s Seminar on Religion and Writing. An article connected to her book was published: “Found in Translation: Images Visionary and Visceral in the Welles-Ros Bible” Gesta 59, no. 2 (2020): 91–130. Professor Smith was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to support the advanced research and writing of this project.
Professor Smith spoke in the “Works in Progress” series of the Institute of Fine Arts on November 5th, 2020 on “Responsive Books in Some Fourteenth-Century English Illustrated Manuscripts.” This research, originally presented at the St. Louis Conference on Manuscript studies in June 2019 and the following month at the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium at Harlaxton Manor, Lincolnshire, UK, was just published in the volume The Medieval Book as Object, Idea and Symbol, Proceedings of the 2019 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Julian Luxford, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 31 (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2021), 105-28 + plates. Another article published earlier this year, “‘A Lanterne of Lyght to the People’: English Narrative Alabaster Images of John the Baptist in their Visual, Religious, and Social Contexts,” Studies in Iconography 42 (2021): 53-94, analyzes English alabaster reliefs of John the Baptist through the lenses of gender, folklore, the liturgy, devotional practice, sermons, and late medieval English and European visual, material, and popular culture. Professor Smith continues to serve as series editor of Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages, a book series that she developed with Johan Van der Beke of Brepols.
Despite the challenges that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic presents, Professor Smith is gratified to be in the classroom with NYU students in her two fall 2021 courses, “Art of the Early Middle Ages” and “The World of King Arthur: Texts, Images, Ideas, 6th– 21st Century,” an interdisciplinary Medieval and Renaissance Studies course that she and Department of English Professor Martha Rust developed with the support of NYU’s Humanities Initiative.
Professor Edward J. Sullivan writes, “I am very pleased to be able to serve as Acting Chair of the Department of Art History for the fall 2021 and spring 2022 terms. As a graduate of the department, longtime professor and departmental Chair for thirteen years in the late 1980s and ‘90s, it is an honor to again be asked to take this role during a hiatus in the very capable chairmanship of my esteemed friend and colleague Dennis Geronimus.
“Regarding some of my activities for the period 9/2020 to 8/2021 I list a few of them below:
Invited Lectures:
“Brazilian Art in the U.S. 1939-2001” zoom lecture, Department of Art History, UT Austin, November 6, 2020 (Zoom)
“Arte político / arte documental: 5 fotógrafos norteamericanos, 1930-1965” October 26, 2020. Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Invited lecture in series: El auge de la fotografía” (Zoom)
“Les choses américaines: Histoires réelles, métaphoriques et anachroniques de traumatisme, colonialisme, d’esclavage, de racisme et de terreur social à travers les âges et les géographies de l’hémisphère.” January 20, 2021. University of Political Sciences (Sciences Po, Paris) (Zoom)
Articles and Book Chapters
“Francisco Oller and France: New Observations” submitted, forthcoming (September 2021) in Essays on the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century in Honor of Susan Grace Galassi a special issue of Nineteenth Century Studies (eds. Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Eloise Owens and Margot Bernstein)
“Marjua Mallo transatlántica: Mujeres artistas en las vanguardias del continente Americano” in Antonio Gómez Conde, Guillermo de Osma and Juan Pérez de Ayala (eds.) Maruja Mallo. Catálogo razonado de óleos (Madrid: Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía and Fundación Azcona, 2021) pp. 435-449
“Re-thinking Roberto Burle Marx” in online journal PLATFORM, CUNY: The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, February 2021
“Les Choses Américaines: Histoires réelles, métaphorique et anachroniques de traumatisme, colonialism, d’esclavage et de terreur sociale à travers les âges et les geographies de l’hémisphère” published in online journal Arts et Sociétés du Séminaire (Paris: Sciences Po, March 2021)
“Xawery Wolski: Intimate Conversations with Nature” in Xawery Wolski (Milan: Skira, 2020) pp. 15-27
“Soledad Salamé: Moving Through the Earth, Crossing Borders and Boundaries” in Soledad Salam: Forced by Nature” Houston, Transart Foundation, 2021
Selected Book and Exhibition Reviews
Book Review: Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature and Culture, Eleanor Jones Harvey. September, 2020, Burlington Magazine, pp. 1203-1205
“Estamos Bien review of El Museo del Barrio Triennial. Burlington Contemporary. 8/2020
Undergraduate courses taught 2020-2021
Fall 2020: “Big Ideas course: Founders of Modernity in the Arts of the Americas” (lecture and seminar formats: online)
Fall 2020: “Deaccessioning in U.S. Art Museums,” 2-credit directed readings course.
Hala Auji, American University of Beirut Elizabeth Rauh, American University in Cairo Anissa Rahadiningtyas, Cornell University Alya Karame, American University of Beirut Nur Sobers-Khan, Aga Khan Documentation Center MIT
Friday, October 15th, 12:00pm ET
[Online] Silsila Fall 2021 Series
“The Battle of Karbala”, Mohammad Sane’i, 1930s Iran – Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen 7031-32u
In what ways have concepts, methods, and technologies of modernity, since their rise in the late seventeenth century to their present-day manifestations, intersected with the production of sacred art and material culture in Islamic societies? Unlike artworks created prior to the Industrial Revolution, which were typically hand-crafted in medium-specific artist workshops, more recent visual practices in the Islamic world were transformed by and widely dispersed through modern technologies and tools. Among these are lithography, mechanized printing, silkscreen artworks, digital interfaces, and even felt-tip markers. This webinar will critically examine sacred objects across different media and Muslim communities—from the Middle East to Southeast Asia—to explore the changing continuities in popular veneration engendered by modern technologies of the Islamic world. While discourses on modernity have often been associated with notions of secularism and rupture, the papers will demonstrate how some modern artworks produced in the Islamic world maintain strong connections to ritual, sacrality, divination, and other still-common quotidian practices through these new material and technological matrixes. Qur’an manuscripts written in marker, lithographed cosmological charts, hand-tinted pilgrimage prints, and glass paintings of religious figures demonstrate ongoing ties to ritual and tradition. These artworks, often marginalized in Islamic art history due to their mechanical modes of production, allow for discussions of everyday piety and its modern complexities. Concurrently, such works challenge notions of modernity in Islamic societies that favor post-Enlightenment discourses on rationalism and secularism at the expense of the sacred. In highlighting the continued importance of religious and ritual practice in Islamic artistic productions, this webinar will demonstrate how these objects connect to the realm of the sacred in as much as they also belong to practices and visualizations of modernity.12.00-12.05 Introduction, Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU12.05-12.25 Hala Auji, American University of Beirut, “The Business of Sacred Kitsch: Made-to-Order Qur’ans and their Audiences”12.25-12.45 Elizabeth Rauh, American University in Cairo, “Sacral Highlights: Coloration in Early 20th-century Islamic Poster Prints”12.45-1.05 Anissa Rahadiningtyas, Cornell University, “The Sacred and the Illegible: Isim and Rajah in Prints and Paintings of Haryadi Suadi (1939-2016)”1.05-1.25 Alya Karame, American University of Beirut, “Unpacking the Qur’an Manuscript Today”1.25-1.45 Nur Sobers-Khan, Aga Khan Documentation Center MIT, “Mass-producing the Cosmos: Visuality and Divination from Manuscript to Lithograph in 19th-century South Asia”1.45-2.30 Questions and DiscussionPaper abstracts and further details.
Hala Auji is Associate Professor of Art History at the American University of Beirut where she teaches courses on Middle Eastern and Islamic art. Her work explores the visual dimensions of modernity in the eastern Mediterranean, including print culture, book history, museum practices, and portraiture. Her first book, Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016) explored the growing significance of the aesthetic dimensions of print culture in Ottoman Syria and its contribution to wider discourses on socio-cultural modernization and reform. She has also published research in numerous venues, including Review of Middle East Studies, Visible Language, and the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Auji is currently a 2021-2022 EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin where she is working on her second book, tentatively entitled “Pictorial Impressions: The Making of Printed Portraiture in the Eastern Mediterranean.” Her new project considers the translocal visuality, production, social history, and theoretical framing of printed memorial portraiture, at the nexus of photography and painting, in fin-de-siècle Syria and Egypt.
Elizabeth Rauh (PhD, University of Michigan, 2020) is Assistant Professor of Modern Art and Visual Cultures at the American University in Cairo, and currently a Faculty Fellow at the Cleveland Institute of Art (2021-2022). Specializing in modern arts and visual cultures of Iran, Iraq, and Western Asia, her work examines artist engagements with Islamic heritage, popular image practices and technologies in Shi`i Islam, and arts of the twentieth-century “Shi`i Left”. She also pursues research in ecological art practices in the history of the Persian Gulf, such as her study: “Experiments in Eden: Midcentury Artist Voyages into the Mesopotamian Marshlands” (Journals of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, March 2021). Her research has been funded by The Academic Research Institute in Iraq, the Darat al Funun Center for Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, the Max Weber Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Anissa Rahadiningtyasis an art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art in Indonesia and Islamic Southeast Asia. She received her B.F.A. and M.A. from Institut Teknologi Bandung in 2008 and 2012 before pursuing her Ph.D. from the History of Art and Visual Studies Department at Cornell University from 2013-2021. She was a 2019 fellow at Cornell Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences and has held the position of a graduate Curatorial Assistant of Asian Art at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum (2020-2021). At Cornell, she was an instructor of record for a course about traveling objects and images in Islam. She has also worked as an independent curator since 2008 in Indonesia. Her interests include postcolonial theory, Indian Ocean studies, comparative modernisms, and Islamic studies. Since 2021, Anissa is Assistant Curator of Islamic Aesthetics of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art at the National Gallery of Singapore.
Alya Karame is currently a research affiliate in the Fine Arts and Art History Department at the American University of Beirut where she previously held the Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship in 2019-20. In 2018-19, Karame was a postdoctoral fellow supported by the Barakat Trust in the Khalili Research Centre of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. In 2016, she joined the Kunsthistorisches Institut research program in Florence Connecting Art Histories in the Museum and was based for two years at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2018 in Islamic Art History from the University of Edinburgh and her MA in History of Art & Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2011. Her research has been supported by the Historians of Islamic Art Association (Grabar Postdoctoral Grant), the Arab Funds for Arts and Culture (Research on the Arts Program), and the Forum Transregionale Studien (Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices). She has been lecturing widely on the Qur’an manuscript and leading workshops in museums and academic institutions. She is currently working on her first book project in which she focuses on an understudied corpus of medieval Qur’an manuscripts, investigates the materiality of the Qur’an, and challenges established biases in the field.
Nur Sobers-Khan is currently the director of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, an archive and research centre of Islamic art, visual culture, urbanism and architecture. She was previously the Lead Curator for South Asia Collections at the British Library and Curator at the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. Her research interests cover the early modern Islamic world, the history and continued life of Islamic dream interpretation practices.
Date: Friday, October 15th Time: 12:00-2:30pm Location: Online This event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:00pm ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_v19Qqu2DT9agmIWB66QiwQ
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: http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.html
Dr. Julia Perratore (B.A., Art History ’03; Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania ’12), Assistant Curator of Medieval Art at The Met Cloisters, will deliver the Forsyth Lecture sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA).
In her lecture, “Representing Medieval Spain at The Met Cloisters,” Dr. Perratore will speak about the process of putting together her important exhibition, Spain, 1000-1200: Art at the Frontiers of Faith. She will deliver her lecture via Zoom on October 14 from 2:00-3:00 PM ET. The lecture is hosted by the University of Alabama. True to the spirit of the Forsyth lecture series, she will also run a workshop exclusively for graduate students at the University of Alabama and Florida State University.
The Forsyth Lecture fund, established in memory of medievalists George H. Forsyth, Jr. (Professor of Fine Arts and Director of the Kelsey Museum of Ancient and Medieval Archaeology at the University of Michigan) and William H. Forsyth (Curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), is intended to sponsor a lecture by a distinguished scholar of medieval art, to be presented at multiple venues. Lectures are typically held every other year. Previous Forsyth lecturers include Jannic Durand, Curator of Objets d’Art at the Musée du Louvre (2008); Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen, former director of the Museum Schnütgen, Cologne (2010); Anne Derbes, Professor Emerita of Art History, Hood College (2012); Anthony Cutler, Evan Pugh Professor of Art History, Pennsylvania State University (2014); and Jacqueline Jung, Professor of the History of Art, Yale University (2017).
Fields of Vision 