November 22, Monday 12:30 to 1:45 pm

Alpesh Patel, CSGS Visiting Scholar and Independent Art Historian/Cultural Arts Producer

In the Western art world, a curious alliance has formed between those that are sympathetic to identity politics and those that [...]]]> CAMP AESTHETICS AND DESI VISUAL CULTURE

A Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Alpesh Patel

November 22, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Alpesh Patel, CSGS Visiting Scholar and Independent Art Historian/Cultural Arts Producer

In the Western art world, a curious alliance has formed between those that are sympathetic to identity politics and those that have always been suspect of aesthetic judgment being tied to any notion of identity: both groups agree that we are in a post-identity era. The former does so purportedly to distinguish between different waves of artistic production concerned with primarily racial, gendered, and sexual difference, but seems to fall back on conceptualizing identity as positional or fixed; while the latter suggests that we are post or over identity, but only to return artistic value back to a dis-embodied art object. Drawing on camp theoretical models and their connections with theories of aesthetics, phenomenology, and identity construction (colonial, gender, and queer) and honing in on an exploration of Desi (the Hindi word meaning “from my country”) as affective and visual knowledge, this talk examines a series of contemporary artworks that suggest much more complex understandings of difference as multi-sensorial, spatial, and temporal configurations between and within subjects.

41-51 East 11th Street, Room 741
between University Place and Broadway
(wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets)

Part of the Brown Bag Lunch Talk Series — bring your own lunch and we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

Image: detail of artist Rina Banerjee’s 2003 mixed media installation, Take Me, Take Me, Take Me . . . to the Palace of Love. Installed in Peabody Essex Museum, Essex, MA.

A capacity crowd, their bodies packed against each other in the Studio at the Department of Performance Studies, came out on October 7th for a symposium on the work and legacy of the Cuban-American artist Ana [...]]]> “Where is Ana Mendieta?”: A Revisitation of the Artist’s Life and Work
New York University, 7 October 2010

A capacity crowd, their bodies packed against each other in the Studio at the Department of Performance Studies, came out on October 7th for a symposium on the work and legacy of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta on the 25th anniversary of her death. The symposium was a culminating event of a two-month exhibition held at Fales Library and Special Collections, which was curated by Richard Move (PhD candidate in Performance Studies). Fales was also co-sponsor of the October 7th symposium along with the Department of Performance Studies, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Department of English, the Grey Art Gallery, the Hemispheric Institute, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.

An homage to her legacy through the presentation of photos, film, scholarly presentations, as well as personal reminiscences, the event revisited Mendieta’s “iconoclastic earth, body, performance, and site-specific and visual art works,” explored the breadth of her influence in the world of feminist and multidisciplinary art, and revisited her controversial death. Mendieta died in September 1985; she fell or was thrown from her 34th floor apartment, on Broadway and Waverly Place. In a haunting irony, the chair’s office in the Department of Performance Studies directly overlook the rooftop of the deli where Mendieta’s body landed. Her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was charged and acquitted in her death–an acquittal several participants in the symposium frankly called an “injustice.” The symposium looked both backward–to the influences on Mendieta’s work, her contemporaries, and the protests after Andre’s acquittal–and forward, with participants addressing the ongoing relevance of her body of work as well as the nature and complexity of its reimagination and revisitation by artists and scholars today.

The evening began with Richard Move’s explanation that the exhibition and symposium’s title–”Where is Ana Mendieta?”–was borrowed from The Women’s Action Coalition’s protest outside the Guggenheim Museum Soho’s opening in 1992. At that action, WAC held up a banner that read “Carl Andre is in the Guggenheim. Where is Ana Mendieta? Donde está Ana Mendieta?” Move then “channeled the affective force” of Mendieta’s work with his fifteen-minute film, BloodWork-The Ana Mendieta Story (2009). BloodWork is a cinematic tribute to Mendieta’s work, imaginatively recreating some of Mendieta’s signature pieces, including Rastros Corporales (Body Tracks) and variations of the Untitled (Silueta Series). The film does not aim at exactitude so much as a kind of affective approximation. These creative reimaginations were intercut by interviews with Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, B. Ruby Rich, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lisa Paul Strietfield. In the words of Carolee Shneemann, who was friends with Mendieta, BloodWork is a “true and deep homage [that] clarifies so many deep threads Ana opened, then tangled again.” Significantly, the film and interviewees did not shy from addressing the ongoing controversy over the circumstances of Mendieta’s death.

Kat Griefen, Director of the A.I.R. Gallery responsible for Mendieta’s archive, discussed Mendieta’s 1977-1982 residence. Although much of Mendieta’s work is “practically unsellable,” Griefen explained, A.I.R. was the home of the artist’s first solo exhibit. Mendieta felt the gallery was a great vehicle for her work, but also came to believe it was not as politically motivated as Mendieta would have liked. Griefen also asked what it means, in terms of dislocation, a prevalent theme in Mendieta’s oeuvre, that the artist’s name was constantly misspelled in A.I.R.’s literature, especially considering Mendieta’s active role in the artist-run gallery.

Exploring Mendieta’s affinity with Cuban-American singer La Lupe, Genevieve Hyacinthe, assistant professor of Art History at Purchase College, investigated the influence of Santeria on Mendiata’s work. Arguing that Mendieta referenced elements of Santeria to align herself with the disenfranchised, Hyacinthe explained that the artist, aware of how her color and position could delegitimate her, “abjected” her own body in order to assault her whiteness and its socially afforded privileges.

Multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann juxtaposed slides from her own work and Mendieta’s, commenting on their remarkable coincidence and correspondence. Schneemann explained how their work “[submitted] to the sensory psychic realm” through a commitment to the saturation of the body in natural materials, for “the body moves and is sustained by saturation.” As feminist artists navigating a male-centered artworld, Schneemann and Mendieta both confronted the “dangers of depicting the sensuous female body” and found ways to identify with the “vital energies of nature” while presenting the body as neither essentialist nor abject.

José Esteban Muñoz, Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, asked what Mendieta’s loss signifies and argued that the “sense we make or take from her work cannot be reduced to her biography.” Drawing from his forthcoming book Feeling Brown, Muñoz discussed the effects of Mendieta’s displacement from Cuba and how that sense of loss permeated her work, “a kind of loss that feels like the charred remains of a pandemic.” Muñoz described the affective tone of her work as a contagious “sense of brownness” that “radiatesŠas a thing that is not politics, but not not politics.”

Diana Taylor, University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU, concluded the evening by asking, “What is reperformance?” Explaining that reperformance maintains “an eye towards fidelity” as opposed to originality, Taylor compares the intentions of Marina Abromovich’s recent retrospective at the MOMA and the recreations in Move’s BloodWork. While the Abromovich’s retrospective reveals an intention “to keep the original work alive,” BloodWork, Taylor suggests, acts more like a “project about memory,” more a vindication of Mendieta than a preservation of the work itself. Pointing to the “strong sense of if-ness” to the recreations, Taylor suggests that the “‘re’ is the ‘re’ of the reappearance of the violently disappeared Mendieta; ‘re’ as in the reassertion of her work; and ‘re’ as in remains, work that remains to be done.”

–Krista Miranda

Krista Miranda is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University and the Book Reviews Editor for Woman and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her prior graduate work includes an MA in Humanities and Social Thought with a concentration in Gender Politics and an MA in Writing and Publishing.

9/15/10-10/13/10

MoMA CELEBRATES BARBARA HAMMER, WITH A MONTH-LONG RETROSPECTIVE OF THE PROLIFIC ARTIST’S EXTENSIVE BODY OF WORK

Exhibition Includes the World Premiere of Hammer’s Newest Film, Generations, as well as Her Groundbreaking Experimental Short Films and Documentaries

Barbara Hammer from [...]]]> Barbara Hammer MoMA Retrospective

9/15/10-10/13/10

MoMA CELEBRATES BARBARA HAMMER, WITH A MONTH-LONG RETROSPECTIVE OF THE PROLIFIC ARTIST’S EXTENSIVE BODY OF WORK

Exhibition Includes the World Premiere of Hammer’s Newest Film, Generations, as well as Her Groundbreaking Experimental Short Films and Documentaries

Barbara Hammer from September 15-October 13, 2010 at 
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

NEW YORK, August 13, 2010— A retrospective of works by experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer (American, b. 1939) spanning from 1968 to today, including the world premiere of her new film Generations (2010), made in collaboration with Gina Carducci, will be shown at The Museum of Modern Art from September 15 through October 13, 2010. Hammer is renowned for creating the earliest and most extensive body of avant-garde films on lesbian life and sexuality, including Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976). Barbara Hammer is organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Full Press Release and Schedule:

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1107

Wednesday, September 15, 2010 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Tishman Auditorium 66 West 12th Street

free

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider “general standards of decency and respect” [...]]]> How Obscene is This! The Decency Clause Turns 20: Panel I

Wednesday, September 15, 2010
6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street

free

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider “general standards of decency and respect” in awarding grants, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions and a video interview project evaluating censorship and arts funding today.

Prominent artists, non-profit arts organization directors, art dealers, and founders of alternative spaces examine issues related to how the introduction of the decency clause in particular, and the culture wars in general, have affected funding, free speech and self-censorship, and how attitudes towards notions of decency and respect for the values and beliefs of the American public have changed over the past twenty years.

Panel Discussion I

Survival vs. Autonomy: Public Funding of the Arts, Free Speech and Self Censorship

Have arts organizations modified their programming in the aftermath of the culture wars? What alternative funding sources and strategies have they had to employ? How does the commercial market relate to the issue of decency and community standards? What is the future of government funding for arts institutions and individual artists?

The panel examines how the introduction of the decency clause and culture wars over arts funding in general have contributed to a growing distinction between conservative and avant-garde institutions. A number of alternative organizations have sprung up that simply forfeit – or are prepared to forfeit – government funding. Panelists include founders of new alternative spaces that seek autonomy from government funding, leaders of art projects that have been supported by the NEA, and key figures in public art funding.

Moderated by Laura Flanders, GRITtv.

Participants:

Beka Economopoulos, Founder of Not an Alternative and No-Space Gallery
Bill Ivey, Former Chair of the NEA (1998-2001)
Magdalena Sawon, Owner and Director of Postmasters Gallery
Nato Thompson, Chief Curator at Creative Time
Martha Wilson, Founding Director of Franklin Furnace

Friday, March 5th at 6:30 PM

Panelists Dr. Katherine Manthorne of City University of New York’s Graduate Center; Catherine Coleman Brawer, M.A. Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and Ph.D student Whitney Thompson, also of City University of New York’s Graduate Center, discuss the [...]]]> Presented by the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden

Friday, March 5th at 6:30 PM

Panelists Dr. Katherine Manthorne of City University of New York’s Graduate Center; Catherine Coleman Brawer, M.A. Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and Ph.D student Whitney Thompson, also of City University of New York’s Graduate Center, discuss the work of three extraordinary yet often- overlooked 19th and 20th century artists. Eliza Pratt Greatorex was an illustrator of rural Manhattan; Hildreth Meière was famous for her murals in buildings throughout the country; and Fanny Palmer was a prolific Currier and Ives Lithographer.  Guests are invited to learn about these unique women and how they became successful artists.

This program funded by the New York Council for the Humanities.

General admission to A Feminine Palette is $12 for Museum members and students and $15 for non-members. Reservations are recommended and can be made at (212) 838-6878. The Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden is located at 421 East 61st Street between York and First Avenues. Nearest subway: N, W, R, 4, 5, 6 at the 59th Street/Lexington station.

ABOUT THE MOUNT VERNON HOTEL MUSEUM & GARDEN

The Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden is dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and research of art and artifacts pertaining to the Mount Vernon Hotel.

New York City’s only surviving day hotel, this landmarked building, which was constructed in 1799, brings the bygone era of old New York alive by promoting the dissemination of historical knowledge through docent-guided tours of its historic rooms, education programs, exhibitions, publications, lectures and symposia. For more information, please call 212.838.6878.

Linda Gordon

21 October, Wednesday 7 PM

Presented by the Leon Levy Center for Biography @ CUNY

Join us for the launch event for the highly anticipated biography of a complex figure in the American cultural and political landscape. Widely regarded as the most influential American female photographer of the twentieth century, Dorothea [...]]]>

Linda Gordon

21 October, Wednesday
7 PM

Presented by the Leon Levy Center for Biography @ CUNY

Join us for the launch event for the highly anticipated biography of a complex figure in the American cultural and political landscape. Widely regarded as the most influential American female photographer of the twentieth century, Dorothea Lange is known for her iconic documentary photographs of the Depression generation. The first biography of this seminal artist, written by renowned historian Linda Gordon, DOROTHEA LANGE: A Life Beyond Limits [W. W. Norton & Company, 2009] is a sweeping account of this fascinating photographer’s life and work.

Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of numerous books and won the Bancroft Prize for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction.

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.

CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue @ 34th Street
The Skylight Room – Room 9100

Adelaide Labille-Guiard (1749-1803), a remarkable portraitist, was among the small number of women ever granted membership in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Her work was sought out by such diverse figures as the aunts of Louis XVI and the future American president Thomas Jefferson. She remained in France during the [...]]]>

Adelaide Labille-Guiard (1749-1803), a remarkable portraitist, was among the small number of women ever granted membership in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Her work was sought out by such diverse figures as the aunts of Louis XVI and the future American president Thomas Jefferson. She remained in France during the Revolution and participated in the reinvention of the country, its art, and its women. Tracing the fascinating story of her rise and fall in the context of her tumultuous times, Laura Auricchio fills major gaps in the scholarship on art in the age of the French Revolution, on women artists, and particularly on the intriguing figure of Labille-Guiard herself.

Laura Auricchio, Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design, 
discusses her new book:

ADÉLAIDE LABILLE-GUIARD: 
ARTIST IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

Monday, October 12th from 12-2 PM

80 5th Ave, Room 802

This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Presented by the New School Gender Studies Program, History at Eugene Lang College, the Committee on Historical Studies at New School for Social Research, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation