Dr. Kara Carmack, art historian and Exhibitions and Public Programs Officer, New York Studio School, will discuss Andy Warhol’s televised interrogation of two post-Stonewall archetypes of the gay male body: the swish and the clone. In-person and virtual attendance.
The play between word and image in the work of the Palestinian polymath Kamal Boullata (1942–2019) is suffused with a humanistic sensibility. Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU, will consider the nature of Boullata's humanism and its implications for understanding the entanglements between aesthetics, ethics, and history in his painting and writing. RSVP required.
This event is now cancelled. Frantz Fanon is best known as a leading theorist of decolonization, but he was also profoundly interested in questions of culture. For Fanon, the creation of a decolonized art was one of the principal means by which once-subjugated peoples would realize their independence and freedom, and come to terms with the traumas suffered in colonial warfare. In this talk, Adam Shatz, writer and contributing editor, London Review of Books, will discuss how Fanon’s writings might illuminate the traumatic modernism of postcolonial North Africa.
This event is now cancelled. Beirut was the artistic and intellectual hub of the Arab world in the 1950s and ’60s. In this talk, Robyn Creswell, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University, will situate Beiruti modernism within a wider landscape of Cold War politics, aesthetic abstraction, and Arab intellectual history.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, writer, critic, and contributing editor, Bidoun, will explore the multiplicity of modern abstract painting from Lebanon—from Etel Adnan’ evocations of landscape to Huguette Caland’s suggestions of self-portraiture, from Saloua Raouda Choucair’s distilled forms to Saliba Douaihy’s intimations of the divine.
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.
In this talk, Sarah-Neel Smith, Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, Maryland Institute College of Art, will discuss Turkey’s art world of the 1960s through the lens of Abby Weed Grey’s collecting activities, focusing on the intersection of art and international discourses about democracy in the wake of World War II.
Exploring the social and political quagmire of getting dressed, Callen Zimmerman, who teaches Fashion and Art History at City Tech and York College, CUNY, will examine the discursive practices, nuanced modes, and slight twists that fashion undergoes in the hands of queer people.
With Emily Braun, Art History, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Jedediah Purdy, Professor of Law, Duke University, will discuss: How did a ‘War on Coal’ come to stand for an existential fight among Americans, and between different ideas of the country? How did we move from a band of self-styled ‘patriots’ occupying a wildlife refuge in Oregon in 2015 to the President stripping protection from national […]