We’re very happy to pass along the news that Saisha Grayson, PhD Candidate and Assistant Curator at the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art, has organized a new exhibition opening this Friday: “Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time.”

Exploring ideas of femininity, empowerment, and multiplicity, Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh draws inspiration from the Museum’s encyclopedic collection, including representations of the goddess Kali, to create a site-specific multimedia installation for the Herstory Gallery.

Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time centers on a monumental mural that takes Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and rebirth, and other figures from Judy’s Chicago’s The Dinner Party as starting points for portraying female power and plurality. The artist expands on this theme by showcasing works from our Egyptian, Indian, and Contemporary collections.

For more than a decade, Ganesh has used the iconography of mythology, literature, and popular culture to bring to light feminist and queer narratives. One of her first major works,Tales of Amnesia (2002)—a zine inspired by Indian comic books that the Museum acquired out of our 2004 exhibitionOpen House: Working in Brooklyn—is also on view.

More on the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum website. Make sure to visit!

The Graduate Center Library recently announced that they will now provide proxy-server access to a wide variety of streaming videos owned by Electronic Arts Intermix. Founded in 1971, EAI is a pioneering nonprofit resource that fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of media art. The ability to access their holdings online will prove immensely useful for students working in this field!

For more information on library resources available to Graduate Center Art History students, make sure to visit libguides.gc.cuny.edu/arthistory.

On Tuesday, December 9^th from 6-8 p.m., Media Farzin, PhD Candidate in Art History and faculty member of SVA’s MFA Fine Arts Program, will speak about her current curatorial, art, and research projects. The presentation is part of the Program’s ongoing 2014-15 faculty talks series.

For more information on this series, and other public programs at the MFA Fine Arts Program, click here.

On Friday, December 5th at 5pm,  Emily Braun, Distinguished  Professor of Art History at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, and Curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, will discuss the work of artist Juan Gris in the Metropolitan Museum’s Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall, in a talk entitled “Pulp Fictions: Fantômas and the Pasted Paper Collages of Juan Gris.”

The talk is free with museum admission and held in conjunction with the landmark exhibition Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection. On view until February 16, 2015, the exhibition presents Lauder’s remarkable collection of Cubist art to the public for the first time. Make sure to visit!

More information on public programs related to the exhibition can be found here.

Organized by the Department of Public Programs.
Room C201, 6:30-8:30pm

As an artist who has exhibited widely in museums and galleries worldwide, and as an influential media theorist, Hito Steyerl has had a major impact on how we understand the character of digital worlds—equally in terms of politics, economics, and aesthetics. In conversation with Graduate Center Distinguished Professor David Joselit, Steyerl will expand on her understanding of the political economy of images, or what she has called “poor images” or the “wretched of the screen.”

Seating will be limited so register now to reserve a spot!

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer. She teaches New Media Art at University of the Arts in Berlin. Steyerl studied film at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo, the University of Television and Film in Munich, and holds a Ph.D in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Steyerl’s work focuses on contemporary issues such as feminism and militarisation, as well as the mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge brought on by digital technologies. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including documenta 12, Taipei Biennial 2010, and 7th Shanghai Biennial, and her written essays have appeared in journals such as e-flux and eipcp.

David Joselit is Distinguished Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His work has approached the history and theory of image circulation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a variety of perspectives, spanning Marcel Duchamp’s strategy of the readymade, in which commodities are reframed as artworks, to the mid-twentieth ecology of television, video art, and media activism, and the current conditions of contemporary art under dual pressures of globalization and digitization. He is author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941 (MIT Press, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, World of Art Series, 2003), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007), and After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012).

Join Jack Crawford, PhD student in Art History, on Thursday, December 4th at 4 pm  in a discussion-based tour of “The Lenin Museum”. The tour will interrogate intersections of queer presence and institutional memory. Considering queer to be both an identity category and a critical modality, we will explore the question of how to remember queerly.

More information on this and other programs associated with “The Lenin Museum” can be found here.

Cosponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Art History; CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies; and Public Science Project

 

On Tuesday, November 25th at 6:30 pm, join Gwendolyn Shaw, Ph.D Program in Art History, for a gallery tour and conversation about Yevgeniy Fiks’ exhibition “The Lenin Museum.” History, subjectivity, and social recognition rely on issues of visibility and legibility. This visibility often relies on the invisibility of others whose tacit absence gives meaning to larger structures of organization and power. This tour will address the ways resistance is possible – and most effective – through the strategic deployment of presence and absence, occupying space and affect.

More information on this and other programs associated with “The Lenin Museum” can be found here.

Co-sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Art History; CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies; and Public Science Project.

On Wednesday evening at 6 pm, join artist Yevgeniy Fiks for the opening reception of The Lenin Museum, an exhibition at The Graduate Center’s James Gallery, curated by Katherine Carl.

The Lenin Museum reflects on the historical contradictions and complexities of intersections between Communism and anti-Communism as well as ideology and sexual identity.

For more on the exhibition, click here. A list of related upcoming public programming, including two tours by Art History PhD students, can be found here. We’ll have more information on the tours soon!

On Wednesday November 19 at 7:00 pm, Michael Leja will deliver a talk at Hunter College’s Kossak Lecture Hall (Room 1527 North Building).

Leja is professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp and Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s. The lecture is drawn from his current research on the industrialization of picture production and the development of a mass market for images in the mid-nineteenth century.

 

 

More information on Leja’s work can be found here.

Professor Cynthia Hahn will deliver a lecture at the University of Texas at Austin on Friday, November 21st  at 4:30 pm entitled “The Making of the Crown of Thorns:  A Relic and its Presentation.”

“The Crown of Thorns is one of the most famous relics of Christendom, yet was little noticed before the tenth century. It was with the Crusades and Louis IX’s acquisition of the relic for France that it came to prominence. The king’s coordinated program of relic promotion—using ceremony, architecture, reliquaries, and the distribution of relics—solidified both the fame of the relic and the French king’s status as “the most Christian king.”

More information on the lecture here!