Ph.D. Program in Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Tonight at 7:30pm! GC Art History Professor Claire Bishop will be in conversation with artist Tania Bruguera to celebrate the release of their book Tania Bruguera in conversation with / en conversación con Claire Bishop, published by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. The conversation will be moderated by art historian Irene Small. Register at the The Center for the Humanities website for the Zoom link!

GC Art History Professor Michael Lobel writes on art, abolition, and the USPS in the October/November print issue of Artforum:

Tomorrow! GC Art History alumna and CUNY Kingsborough Community College professor Midori Yamamura will present Exploring a Moment of Choshojo (Super Girls): Economic Bubble, Consumer Culture, and Women’s Art in Japan, 19861996 as our second Rewald Seminar of the semester. 5:30pm on ZoomRSVP to [email protected]!

In this month's print issue of Artforum, GC Art History PhD student Kerry Doran reviews Housing's summer exhibition "Hard Opening: Vigil for Black Death." 'Hard Opening' was more than a show. It was also a space for love and carnal exuberance. One such example was Keijaun Thomas’s My Last American Dollar: Round 1. Tricking and Flipping Coins: Making Dollars Hit and Round 2. Black Angels in the Infield: Dripping Faggot Sweat, 2019. At the beginning of the video, Thomas taped ...to the wall a sign reading TRANS RIGHTS HUMAN RIGHTS. Outfitted in a corset, mesh garter belt, stockings, and do-rag, she gyrated to 'Dance Like a Stripper,' a song by Atlanta rapper M.E (Main Event). Later, while clad in a thong and pouring glitter over her body, Thomas invited the POC in attendance to join her at the center of the room, cooing, 'This space is for us.' Following some sips of alcohol (being Black and carefree in the face of endless adversity sometimes requires a stiff drink), she said: 'Are y’all OK? . . . I’m so happy that you’re here.'" See more

Tomorrow at 5:30pm! Jolene Rickard, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History/Visual Studies and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University, will present Indigenous Art History and Decolonial Aesthetics as our first Fall 2020 Rewald Seminar. RSVP to [email protected] for Zoom info! Jolene Rickard, Ph.D. is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the intersection of Indigenous knowledge and contemporary art, materia...lity, and ecocriticism with an emphasis on Hodinöhsö:ni aesthetics. A selection of publications includes: Diversifying Sovereignty and the Reception of Indigenous Art, Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017), Aesthetics, Violence and Indigeneity, Public 27, no. 54 (Winter 2016), The Emergence of Global Indigenous Art, Sakahán, National Gallery of Canada (2013), and Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors, The South Atlantic Quarterly: (2011). Recent exhibitions include the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, 2019-2021, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Art For a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950’s to Now, 2018-2020. Jolene is a 2020 Fulbright Research Scholar at McMaster University, ON, an Associate Professor in the departments of History of Art and Art, and the former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program 2008-2020 (AIISP) at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Jolene is from the Tuscarora Nation (Turtle Clan), Hodinöhsö:ni Confederacy. Right image: Ábadakone / Continuous Fire / Feu continuel Exhibition, Tanning Hides, National Gallery of Canada, November 2020 See more

Our Fall 2020 Rewald seminars kick off next Tuesday with Prof. Jolene Rickard! Stay tuned for more details about her lecture, & mark your calendars for the full slate!

Big congratulations to Chris Green, who is both a new father and as of yesterday, a doctor too! Chris successfully defended his dissertation Northwest Coast Native Art Beyond Revival, 1962-1992" with his committee including David Joselit, Romy Golan, Katherine Manthorne, Aaron Glass, and Jolene Rickardand special guest baby Eva!

Several GC Art History PhD Candidates are co-chairing panels at the 2021 CAA Advancing Art & Design's conference this coming February. Read abstracts for "Radical Acts of Care: Feminist Art, Healthcare, and Community" (co-chaired by Basia Sliwinska and the GC's Helena Shaskevich), "The Specter Haunting Art History: A Third Wave of Marxism?" (co-chaired by the GC's Joseph Henry and Kaegan Sparks), and "Contested Terrain: Art and Urban Crisis after 1960" (co-chaired by Marissa Baker and the GC's Maya Harakawa). Deadline September 16! Visit CAA's website here to apply: https://caa.confex.com//2021/webprogramprelim/meeting.html

GC Art History welcomes new and returning students to the start of a new academic year! This semester curator and writer Claire Tancons will serve as our department's first Mellon Global Curatorial Professor. Prof. Tancons is teaching a seminar entitled "Roadworks: Processional Performance and the Diasporic." The course will chart the revival of processional performance, a millennium-old mass medium, to the transformation of forms of mass address in the aftermath of the dual ...pandemic of the global coronavirus outbreak and the racially motivated police violence in America. Readings will include theories of diaspora (Brent Hayes Edwards), dispossession (Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou), processions of the dispossessed (Homi K. Bhabha and Leora Maltz-Leca on William Kentridge), the non-object (Monica Amor) among others. A wide variety of artists and settings will be studied, contrasting Euro-American and African diasporic especially Caribbean performances as well as processional forms of protest around Black Lives Matter. Claire Tancons is an internationally recognized curator and researcher, whose work focuses on post-colonial and Afro-diasporic art and performance. Born in Guadaloupe, and now based in Berlin, she has received masters degrees from the Ecole du Louvre (Paris) and the Courtauld Institute of Art (London). She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program (2001) before embarking on a decade-long project researching carnival practices of the Caribbean. The outputs of this research include exhibitions (New Orleans, Tate Modern) and the publication En Mas': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (co-authored with Krista Thompson). She has extensive experience globally as a biennial curator, including New Orleans and Gwang-Ju (both 2008), Cape Town (2009), Bénin (2012), Göteborg (2013) and Sharjah (2019). In 2018 she received an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant to write Roadworks: Processional Performance in the New Millennium, which will be the focus of her teaching at the Graduate Center.

As a difficult semester wraps up, we celebrate the many outstanding external fellowships awarded to our students!

Today at 4pm, GC Art History PhD candidate and Junior Fellow at the The Frick Collection's Center for the History of Collecting Blair Asbury Brooks presents "Heinz Berggruen (1914-2007): The Transatlantic Origins of a Collector and Dealer." Register for the webinar at the link below! Image: Heinz Berggruen, ca. 1990. Photo by Maurice Aeschimann, courtesy of the Berggruen Family. https://register.gotowebinar.com/regist/6915139095983487758

GC Art History PhD student Aubrey Knox writes on art and the 1918 influenza pandemic for Art in America: "On October 6, 1918, a newspaper spread appeared in cities across the United States that conflated science, painting, nationalism, and war. The layout mingled scientific diagrams of the human respiratory system with a reproduction of a ca.-1900 painting of a bubonic plague victim by the British artist John Maler Collier, a late follower of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. T...his lurid work, shown at the 1902 Royal Academy exhibition, features a finely dressed woman collapsed on the floor of a luxurious interior, bathed in the oblique light of a large, multi-paned window. A lamp rolls across the floor as if it has just been dropped, and a man in the background, also sumptuously garbed, backs away from the scene, steadying himself against a large tapestry. The woman, beautiful and unmarred, looks as though she has simply fainted rather than fallen victim to contagion. This image of a swooning maiden sanitizes the grotesque reality of death by plague, which was rapid, violent, and anything but visually pleasing." See more

"Our campuses are not cloisters; they’re classrooms out of the pages of Plato and Huey Newton, where philosophy is set in motion in and by the street. Like other public colleges and universities, CUNY is a mustard seed of intellectual life, a source of reinvention and renewal. If we are to endure this crisisand, later, to learn from itsome of our most original thinkers and leaders will come from schools like City College."