On Saturday November 8th, Professor Cynthia Hahn will deliver the keynote address for the 2014 New England Medieval Conference “Copies, Copying, and Mimetic Acts” held at at Middlebury College. Her talk is entitled “Like Life-Giving Seeds: the Multiplication and Dissemination of Relics and Reliquaries.”
More information on the conference here, and on Professor Hahn’s work here.
AH student Gwendolyn Shaw was recently selected as a Schomburg Digitization Fellow, in partnership with the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC). Now in its second year, the fellowship provides hands-on experience with the digital humanities.
The Schomburg Digitization Fellowship is one of several created by The Graduate Center in partnership with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the world’s leading research facility focused on the global African and African diaspora.
More information on the partnership here.
Congrats to Gwendolyn!
On Wednesday October 29th at 7pm, Artists Space will host a discussion on art, artists, and activism with author Chris Kraus, Thomas Gokey, an artist, educator, and organizer with Strike Debt, and Yates McKee, a writer, activist, and student in the Art History Department who is completing a manuscript for Verso entitled Art After Occupy.
What kinds of actual social movements and radical projects are actual artists engaged in today? Do they participate as artists, or is this aspect of their identity incidental to their involvement? Do artists have particular skills and knowledge that can be useful to emancipatory struggles? Conversely, in what ways do artists, wittingly or otherwise, contribute to the cooptation and recuperation of these struggles?
Full details on the event here!
Over the past year, AH PhD student Alise Tifentale has worked in a project team lead by Lev Manovich, Professor of Computer Science at the GC, to explore the role of social media photography in the world today.
The team’s latest study – “The Exceptional & The Everyday: 144 Hours in Kiev” – uses computational techniques and data visualizations to explore patterns in Instagram usage during the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution. While other researchers have already examined the use of Twitter and Facebook during recent social protests such as Arab Spring, this is the first study to focus on the visual medium of Instagram. The collected images depict not only confrontations between demonstrators and Ukrainian government forces, but also present everyday life in Kiev juxtaposed against the backdrop of an unfolding uprising and political revolution.
One of Alise’s contributions to the project was its Iconography section, which examines the themes and visual grammar of Ukrainian Instagram imagery. She’ll also co-present the team’s findings at the upcoming Big Humanities Data conference in Washington D.C.
Our congratulations!
Professor Jennifer Ball on currently sabbatical this year and serving as Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is at work on a new book-length project Habit Forming: Representations of Byzantine Monastics 9th-15th Centuries.
We’re looking forward to learning more about the project as it develops!
The Infiltrators
Conversation
Oct 28, 2014, 6:30 pm
William P. Kelly Skylight Room (9100)
Next week, Art History student Chelsea Haines moderates a Center for Humanities discussion that examines the current state of border-crossing in Israel by African asylum seekers and refugees through the lens of recent artist projects and curatorial interventions in that region.
In Israel, the term “infiltrators” is used to describe the transgression of the country’s political borders in order to commit a terrorist act, while the more general meaning of this term describes the hostile crossing of enemy lines. At present, this term is also commonly used in Israel to refer to Africans who have crossed the border from Africa into Israel; alongside additional terms such as “refugees,” “asylum seekers,” and “immigrant workers,” it plays an important role in the discussion of the status and future of these groups. This panel discussion examines this current situation of “infiltration” through the framework of artistic practice and exhibition making, taking up the recent exhibition “The Infiltrators” at Artport, Tel Aviv, as its point of departure. The discussion will analyze what (if any) impact participatory artistic gestures may have in the face of Israel’s fraught political realities.
Speakers include Anthony Alessandrini (Associate Professor, English, Kingsborough Community College); Christopher Robbins and John Ewing (artists, Ghana ThinkTank), and Maayan Sheleff (curator, The Infiltrators).
Art History PhD students Liz Donato, Mya Dosch, and Luisa Valle have organized a conference on urban spatial practices in contemporary Latin America that will be held at the Graduate Center on April 27th – Interested parties are invited to submit a paper abstract of no more than 400 words along with a brief biographical statement to citybodyconference@gmail.com by Friday, December 5, 2014
Full CFP details below!
In summer 2013, protests against a twenty-cent bus fare increase in São Paulo, Brazil brought thousands of people to the streets. Exploding into a wide range of demands that transcended transit fares, the uprisings combined demonstrations, media-activism, participatory works of art, and spontaneous convivial encounters that emphasized bodily presence in urban space. This engagement with the city as a tool and stage for protest persists not only in Brazil, but also throughout major Latin American cities, from student actions in Chile to escraches in Argentina.
This day-long conference focuses on the potencia of the body and everyday social interactions in the production of Latin American and U.S. Latino urban environments. We ask: What are the possibilities and limitations of creative urban interventions that emphasize the social/the body? Can an emphasis on “lived space” provide an alternative to both the nostalgic retrieval of modernist utopias and overdetermined narratives about the failure of modernism? While we focus on present-day claims to urban space, we also wish to consider the legacies of conflictive spatial politics in the region, from the rise of military dictatorships to the subsequent tensions during so-called processes of democratic transition and aggressive neoliberalism.
Bringing together perspectives from diverse fields such as art and architectural history, urbanism, sociology, and geography, we invite papers by scholars, activists, artists, and advanced graduate students that engage critically in a discussion on the production of lived and/or social space in Latin American cities, from the 1960s to the present.
Potential paper topics may include, but are not limited to:
Sponsored, in part, by the Rewald Fund of the PhD Program in Art History, The Center for the Humanities and The Committee on Globalization and Social Change, The Graduate Center, CUNY
On Wednesday October 15th, Professor Claire Bishop will speak at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in conjunction with the Pompidou’s new presentation of art since the 1980s.
Her talk “Déjà vu: Contemporary Art and the Ghosts of Modernity” addresses the proliferation of art produced over the past twenty years that deals with modernism.
Brush up on your French with the full description below!
L’un des thèmes les plus persistants de l’art contemporain depuis 1989 a été la prolifération des œuvres qui traitent des « utopies modernistes » : un art qui prend l’architecture et le design du XXe siècle comme point de départ pour la sculpture, l’installation, la vidéo et la recherche contemporaines. Il paraît ironique que le modernisme, avec son inflexion futuriste prononcée, soit désormais le sujet de ces pratiques artistiques rétrospectives. Cette conférence soulève des questions sur un art contemporain de la citation, sa relation à la temporalité, ainsi que de sa tendance à enterrer les préoccupations contemporaines sous une fascination pour les figures canoniques du passé. Elle nous invite ainsi à poser d’autres questions : Quelles sont les raisons institutionnelles pour cet historicisme contemporain croissant ? Quelles nouvelles cultures sont éludées par la fétichisation de l’abstraction moderniste? Comment pouvons-nous concevoir des rapports plus politisés à l’histoire?
We’re very excited to see that recent alum Amy Brandt‘s Interplay: Neoconceptual Art of the 1980s was just released by MIT Press this past week!
Brandt investigates the East Village art scene of the 1980s and argues that the neoconceptualists’ theoretical orientation distinguished them from other artists of the era. She traces the divergence in art critics’ responses to the group’s work and charts their market success. Brandt examines in detail the references to art history found in the work; she explores the group’s formal connections to pop, minimalism, and conceptualism; and she investigates the relationships between the neoconceptual artists and another loosely connected group of artists, the Pictures generation.
Art Historian Richard Meyer writes: “Interplay is the definitive guide to the movement formerly known as neo-geo. Amy Brandt traces the development of neoconceptual art across the 1980s with a combination of critical rigor and pleasurable accessibility. Interplay is a must-read for anyone who cares about contemporary art and its history.”
Brandt currently serves as the McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. She received a PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York; an M.A. from Tufts University; and a License in art history from the University of Paris, Sorbonne.
Read more about Interplay at MIT Press and purchase a copy on Amazon!
On October 14th, Professor Romy Golan will participate in a conference at NYU’s Villa Sassetti in Florence on contemporary museums in Italy, with a talk entitled “Italy 1967-1970: The Temporary Exhibition as Interface.”
A full conference description is forthcoming, but more information can be found here.
