SPEAKERS & ABSTRACTS
The Future is a Rectangle: Modernist University Architecture and the Human Being
International Style modernist architecture, together with many of its major practitioners, arrived in the United States after World War II. It famously took form in corporate office buildings and public housing projects by the mid-1950s. The predominant effect of the International Style’s migration, however, would be its near-universal adoption for new civic architecture in the three decades following 1955. Schools, post offices, jails, churches and influentially, university buildings adopted the simplified, rectilinear vocabulary of this European architectural movement. These little-studied buildings indelibly altered the vernacular American landscape and its meanings. This talk looks closely at some representative university building projects around 1970, in order to uncover their socio-political values, both explicit and implicit.
The new postwar university shunned the body-oriented details of neo-classical and colonial campuses (volutes, brackets, shutters, etc.) for a more abstract geometry. This new civic architecture—like its European precedents—was not, however, simply anti-humanist. Indeed we might understand it as a technocratic humanism—at once a manifestation of and also a bulwark against civil rights, the women’s movement and campus protest. Imagining, like the science-fiction of the day, a future that was simply devoid of race and gender, its utopianism was mild and democratic. The talk considers period documents including architectural drawings, administrators’ memos and coverage in student newspapers.
This talk looks back at vernacular modernism with nostalgia for its dreams of a developing common good but also with criticism of its brash faith in a universal human sovereign. The conclusion considers how the history of university modernism might be mined for rethinking the concept of the human being for our own period of environmental and social crisis.
Joshua Shannon is Professor of contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. His research and teaching interests cover art and visual culture since 1945, including especially sculpture, photography, the urban landscape and realism. He is the author of The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (Yale University Press, 2009) and of The Recording Machine: Art and Fact During the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2017). He has also published articles and reviews in journals such as American Art, The Art Bulletin, Modernism/Modernity and October. Shannon is founder and director of The Potomac Center for the Study of Modernity, an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research initiative hosting events in Washington, DC. He is currently the Terra Visiting Professor of American Art at the Freie Universität Berlin.
International Style modernist architecture, together with many of its major practitioners, arrived in the United States after World War II. It famously took form in corporate office buildings and public housing projects by the mid-1950s. The predominant effect of the International Style’s migration, however, would be its near-universal adoption for new civic architecture in the three decades following 1955. Schools, post offices, jails, churches and influentially, university buildings adopted the simplified, rectilinear vocabulary of this European architectural movement. These little-studied buildings indelibly altered the vernacular American landscape and its meanings. This talk looks closely at some representative university building projects around 1970, in order to uncover their socio-political values, both explicit and implicit.
The new postwar university shunned the body-oriented details of neo-classical and colonial campuses (volutes, brackets, shutters, etc.) for a more abstract geometry. This new civic architecture—like its European precedents—was not, however, simply anti-humanist. Indeed we might understand it as a technocratic humanism—at once a manifestation of and also a bulwark against civil rights, the women’s movement and campus protest. Imagining, like the science-fiction of the day, a future that was simply devoid of race and gender, its utopianism was mild and democratic. The talk considers period documents including architectural drawings, administrators’ memos and coverage in student newspapers.
This talk looks back at vernacular modernism with nostalgia for its dreams of a developing common good but also with criticism of its brash faith in a universal human sovereign. The conclusion considers how the history of university modernism might be mined for rethinking the concept of the human being for our own period of environmental and social crisis.
Joshua Shannon is Professor of contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. His research and teaching interests cover art and visual culture since 1945, including especially sculpture, photography, the urban landscape and realism. He is the author of The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (Yale University Press, 2009) and of The Recording Machine: Art and Fact During the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2017). He has also published articles and reviews in journals such as American Art, The Art Bulletin, Modernism/Modernity and October. Shannon is founder and director of The Potomac Center for the Study of Modernity, an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research initiative hosting events in Washington, DC. He is currently the Terra Visiting Professor of American Art at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Visions of a Decolonizing World: Donald Evans’s Stamp Catalog
In February 1972, Donald Evans, a Cornell graduate with a degree in architecture, well-integrated in the New York art scene of the late 1960s, dropped out from his job and left his country to settle in Amsterdam. In this city at the forefront of Europe’s conceptual art network, he embarked in a thoroughly new and ambitious artistic project: inventing and organizing an imaginary world under the guise of a stamp catalog. In this parallel world, entire nations, with their distinctive history, strategies and aspirations were encapsulated in thousands of size-like stamps, painstakingly drawn and painted with watercolors on perforated typewriter paper. Each was referenced, dated, priced in its own national currency; graphs and tables organized and systematized this self-enclosed fictional world. As fanciful as it may seem at first sight, however, Evans’s world system does speak about what the real world looked like from the perspective of an American relocated in Europe in the early 1970s, in the aftermaths of decolonization. The desert-like nation of Adjudani, with its minarets and pseudo-Arabic calligraphy mixed with French idioms, is bound to call to mind the recently independent Maghreb. Katibo—whose very first stamps as a new liberated nation are included in the catalog—is a mix between the former Dutch colony of Surinam and a Black, sub-Saharan African country. Evans’s Catalog of the World, I will argue, stems from an American artist who voluntarily provincialized his own country, to render of the richness, violence and poetry of a manifold worldview. It is an attempt to grasp and make intelligible the fragmented and eruptive international scene of the 1970s, through the meager and already antiquated means of state bureaucratic mediums such as stamps.
Sophie Cras is Assistant Professor (Maître de conferences) in Art History at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She specializes in American and European art of the 1960s-80s in a global perspective. Her first book, The Artist as Economist (Yale University Press, 2019) considers how money, finance and economics in general became a focus for artistic experimentation in the Sixties. It was awarded the Terra Foundation Translation Grant and the French Voice Award. She is currently completing an anthology of economic writings by artists. She has received grants and fellowships from a number of institutions, including the German Center for Art History (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Max Weber Stiftung), the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Ecole Française de Rome. Her writings have appeared in American Art, Texte zur Kunst and Histoire de l’art.
In February 1972, Donald Evans, a Cornell graduate with a degree in architecture, well-integrated in the New York art scene of the late 1960s, dropped out from his job and left his country to settle in Amsterdam. In this city at the forefront of Europe’s conceptual art network, he embarked in a thoroughly new and ambitious artistic project: inventing and organizing an imaginary world under the guise of a stamp catalog. In this parallel world, entire nations, with their distinctive history, strategies and aspirations were encapsulated in thousands of size-like stamps, painstakingly drawn and painted with watercolors on perforated typewriter paper. Each was referenced, dated, priced in its own national currency; graphs and tables organized and systematized this self-enclosed fictional world. As fanciful as it may seem at first sight, however, Evans’s world system does speak about what the real world looked like from the perspective of an American relocated in Europe in the early 1970s, in the aftermaths of decolonization. The desert-like nation of Adjudani, with its minarets and pseudo-Arabic calligraphy mixed with French idioms, is bound to call to mind the recently independent Maghreb. Katibo—whose very first stamps as a new liberated nation are included in the catalog—is a mix between the former Dutch colony of Surinam and a Black, sub-Saharan African country. Evans’s Catalog of the World, I will argue, stems from an American artist who voluntarily provincialized his own country, to render of the richness, violence and poetry of a manifold worldview. It is an attempt to grasp and make intelligible the fragmented and eruptive international scene of the 1970s, through the meager and already antiquated means of state bureaucratic mediums such as stamps.
Sophie Cras is Assistant Professor (Maître de conferences) in Art History at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She specializes in American and European art of the 1960s-80s in a global perspective. Her first book, The Artist as Economist (Yale University Press, 2019) considers how money, finance and economics in general became a focus for artistic experimentation in the Sixties. It was awarded the Terra Foundation Translation Grant and the French Voice Award. She is currently completing an anthology of economic writings by artists. She has received grants and fellowships from a number of institutions, including the German Center for Art History (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Max Weber Stiftung), the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Ecole Française de Rome. Her writings have appeared in American Art, Texte zur Kunst and Histoire de l’art.
Monumental Objects as Counter-Architecture in Non-Western Contexts: East European and Latin American Artists in Dialogue with Claes Oldenburg
This paper explores the development of ‘Radical Architecture’ and ‘Pop Architecture’ in Eastern Europe and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses especially on artistic production that entered in a critical dialogue with the concept of the public monument, as formulated by the Swedish-American artist Claes Oldenburg. The paper asks to what extent Oldenburg’s use of enlarged everyday objects in his Proposals for Monuments and Buildings could be associated with formally similar projects made by East European and Latin American artists in the 1970s, such as Tadeusz Kantor’s Gigantic Chair and Bridge-Clothes-Hanger from the series Impossible Monuments (1970s); Milan Knížák’s gigantic table and chair belonging to the series Dreaming of Architecture (1970s); Marta Minujín’s Obelisk of Sweet Bread (1979); and Milton Machado’s Tropical Hotel in Guanabara Bay in a form of a giant banana (1978).The paper emphasizes the specificity of the Eastern European and Latin American contexts characterized by the lack of developed consumerism and advertising, a very limited possibility of artistic production’s diffusion and controlled public space by the authoritarian regimes. It analyzes the way the architectural projects and utopian urban visions, authored by artists from Non-Western contexts, acquired a political dimension and implied a strong social critique.
Katarzyna Cytlak is a Polish art historian based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, whose research focuses on artistic creation of Central Europe and Latin America. She studies conceptual art, radical and utopian architecture, socially engaged art and art theory in relation to post-socialist countries, seen through transmodern and transnational perspective. In 2012, she received a PhD from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina (CONICET) and at the University of San Martín, Argentina. She is a grantee of the University Paris 4 Sorbonne (Paris), the Terra Foundation for American Art (Chicago, Paris) and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris). In 2018 and 2019, she participated in the CAA-Getty International Program. Selected publications include articles in Umění/Art, Eadem Utraque Europa, Telón de Fondo, Third Text and the RIHA Journal.
This paper explores the development of ‘Radical Architecture’ and ‘Pop Architecture’ in Eastern Europe and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses especially on artistic production that entered in a critical dialogue with the concept of the public monument, as formulated by the Swedish-American artist Claes Oldenburg. The paper asks to what extent Oldenburg’s use of enlarged everyday objects in his Proposals for Monuments and Buildings could be associated with formally similar projects made by East European and Latin American artists in the 1970s, such as Tadeusz Kantor’s Gigantic Chair and Bridge-Clothes-Hanger from the series Impossible Monuments (1970s); Milan Knížák’s gigantic table and chair belonging to the series Dreaming of Architecture (1970s); Marta Minujín’s Obelisk of Sweet Bread (1979); and Milton Machado’s Tropical Hotel in Guanabara Bay in a form of a giant banana (1978).The paper emphasizes the specificity of the Eastern European and Latin American contexts characterized by the lack of developed consumerism and advertising, a very limited possibility of artistic production’s diffusion and controlled public space by the authoritarian regimes. It analyzes the way the architectural projects and utopian urban visions, authored by artists from Non-Western contexts, acquired a political dimension and implied a strong social critique.
Katarzyna Cytlak is a Polish art historian based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, whose research focuses on artistic creation of Central Europe and Latin America. She studies conceptual art, radical and utopian architecture, socially engaged art and art theory in relation to post-socialist countries, seen through transmodern and transnational perspective. In 2012, she received a PhD from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina (CONICET) and at the University of San Martín, Argentina. She is a grantee of the University Paris 4 Sorbonne (Paris), the Terra Foundation for American Art (Chicago, Paris) and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris). In 2018 and 2019, she participated in the CAA-Getty International Program. Selected publications include articles in Umění/Art, Eadem Utraque Europa, Telón de Fondo, Third Text and the RIHA Journal.
Disordering Circuits and Borders: Open Systems, Politics and the Origins of Institutional Critique in 1960s Argentina
Conceived entirely as a “political-cultural action,” in which art is dissolved “into the social,” the radical, collaborative work Tucumán Arde (1968) sought to open closed disinformation mass media circuits controlled by Argentina’s military dictatorship. Critic and curator Lucy Lippard met four members of Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia de Rosario in the midst of Tucumán Arde, an experience she never forgot. Ever since, Lippard has described the meeting’s profound impact, explaining in 1969, “I returned belatedly radicalized by contact with artists there.” That same year, she co-founded the radical Art Workers Coalition (AWC), and would become active in the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee committed to fighting the underrepresentation of women in the art world, specifically women of color. This essay argues that open systems, deployed in Tucumán Arde, offered a heuristic model for process-oriented, radical institutional critique that connected social, political, and artistic goals. Inverting the center-periphery narrative that vanguard art emanated from the U.S. to Latin America, Lippard and others carried this fundamental form of conceptual art back to the U.S.
Christine Filippone is Associate Professor of Art History and Coordinator of The Women’s and Gender Studies program at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. Recipient of the 2017 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication, her book Science, Technology, and Utopias: Women Artists and Cold War America (Routledge Press, 2017) examines feminist aesthetic approaches to science and technology. Her research has been supported by a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship, an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and a Guggenheim Fellowship from the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. She served as Executive Director of The Print Center in Philadelphia and in curatorial departments at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, International Center of Photography and the Nasher Museum of Art. Currently, she is researching the intersection of systems theory and political utopias in Latin American conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s.
Conceived entirely as a “political-cultural action,” in which art is dissolved “into the social,” the radical, collaborative work Tucumán Arde (1968) sought to open closed disinformation mass media circuits controlled by Argentina’s military dictatorship. Critic and curator Lucy Lippard met four members of Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia de Rosario in the midst of Tucumán Arde, an experience she never forgot. Ever since, Lippard has described the meeting’s profound impact, explaining in 1969, “I returned belatedly radicalized by contact with artists there.” That same year, she co-founded the radical Art Workers Coalition (AWC), and would become active in the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee committed to fighting the underrepresentation of women in the art world, specifically women of color. This essay argues that open systems, deployed in Tucumán Arde, offered a heuristic model for process-oriented, radical institutional critique that connected social, political, and artistic goals. Inverting the center-periphery narrative that vanguard art emanated from the U.S. to Latin America, Lippard and others carried this fundamental form of conceptual art back to the U.S.
Christine Filippone is Associate Professor of Art History and Coordinator of The Women’s and Gender Studies program at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. Recipient of the 2017 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication, her book Science, Technology, and Utopias: Women Artists and Cold War America (Routledge Press, 2017) examines feminist aesthetic approaches to science and technology. Her research has been supported by a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship, an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and a Guggenheim Fellowship from the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. She served as Executive Director of The Print Center in Philadelphia and in curatorial departments at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, International Center of Photography and the Nasher Museum of Art. Currently, she is researching the intersection of systems theory and political utopias in Latin American conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s.
Diaspora Pop: Roger Shimomura’s Minidoka Series and Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII
This paper conducts a close reading of Roger Shimomura’s “Minidoka” series, which he executed in Pop Art style in 1978–79 by appropriating a number of ukiyo-eimages. “Minidoka” refers to an incarceration camp Shimomura and his family were sent to, following the Pearl Harbor attack and the outbreak of the Pacific War. The series consists of six paintings that chronologically narrate Japanese Americans’ experience of incarceration with a number of images borrowed from ukiyo-e artists such as Sharaku, Utamarao, Hiroshige and such. It is difficult, however, to realize the scene is set in a camp, because Shimomura depicts such motifs as barbed wire and a watch tower far in the background. This prompts two questions. A: Why did Shimomura use ukiyo-e images for the series in the first place? B: Why did he create it in Pop Art style in the late-1970s, when the movement was no longer the most dominant on the American or international art scene? I argue that this had something to do with the “Redress Movement” that started in 1978. Before that, Japanese Americans repressed their memory of incarceration and tried to assimilate into the white-dominant American society and it was unthinkable for a minority artist to deal with the subject as a theme of modern art. Shimomura’s Pop Art therefore had to come late and it required ukiyo-e as a camouflage. Often misunderstood as “Japanese” art even today, Shimomura’s work can be seen as “Diaspora Pop,” always somewhat misplaced and displaced within his own country.
Hiroko Ikegami specializes in post-1945 American art and global modernisms. Her main publications include The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (The MIT Press, 2010) and Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York (New Paltz: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 2012). Exhibition catalogues to which she contributed an essay include International Pop (Walker Art Center, 2015), Robert Rauschenberg (Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016–2017), Merce Cunningham: Common Time (Walker Art Center, 2017) and Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth (Royal Academy of Arts, 2017). In 2016, she received the prestigious Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities for the Japanese edition of The Great Migrator. Since 2006, she has served as vice director of Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, an organization devoted to conducting interviews with individuals involved in the field of art in Japan, and making the transcripts available on line as historical documents.
This paper conducts a close reading of Roger Shimomura’s “Minidoka” series, which he executed in Pop Art style in 1978–79 by appropriating a number of ukiyo-eimages. “Minidoka” refers to an incarceration camp Shimomura and his family were sent to, following the Pearl Harbor attack and the outbreak of the Pacific War. The series consists of six paintings that chronologically narrate Japanese Americans’ experience of incarceration with a number of images borrowed from ukiyo-e artists such as Sharaku, Utamarao, Hiroshige and such. It is difficult, however, to realize the scene is set in a camp, because Shimomura depicts such motifs as barbed wire and a watch tower far in the background. This prompts two questions. A: Why did Shimomura use ukiyo-e images for the series in the first place? B: Why did he create it in Pop Art style in the late-1970s, when the movement was no longer the most dominant on the American or international art scene? I argue that this had something to do with the “Redress Movement” that started in 1978. Before that, Japanese Americans repressed their memory of incarceration and tried to assimilate into the white-dominant American society and it was unthinkable for a minority artist to deal with the subject as a theme of modern art. Shimomura’s Pop Art therefore had to come late and it required ukiyo-e as a camouflage. Often misunderstood as “Japanese” art even today, Shimomura’s work can be seen as “Diaspora Pop,” always somewhat misplaced and displaced within his own country.
Hiroko Ikegami specializes in post-1945 American art and global modernisms. Her main publications include The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (The MIT Press, 2010) and Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York (New Paltz: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 2012). Exhibition catalogues to which she contributed an essay include International Pop (Walker Art Center, 2015), Robert Rauschenberg (Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016–2017), Merce Cunningham: Common Time (Walker Art Center, 2017) and Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth (Royal Academy of Arts, 2017). In 2016, she received the prestigious Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities for the Japanese edition of The Great Migrator. Since 2006, she has served as vice director of Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, an organization devoted to conducting interviews with individuals involved in the field of art in Japan, and making the transcripts available on line as historical documents.
Trans/Formations: Lucas Samaras’ Matters
In his manifold oeuvre of paintings, assemblages, installations and Polaroids, Samaras engages with his own self. His works, which are difficult to grasp within the categories of art history, have been interpreted mainly autobiographically, both in the USA and in Europe, whereby his childhood in Macedonia (he was born in 1936 in Kastoria, Macedonia, emigrated to West New York, New Jersey in 1948 and became an American citizen in 1955) and Byzantine culture in particular have been used as a framework for interpretation. In my talk, I will focus on the materials and substances he used in his work of the 1960s and 70s: the shiny Mylar and glittering jewels, the liquid metals and chemical substances. With these matters he produced, so my thesis, particular "skins." I show how Samaras worked with these “skins” to expand bodily boundaries, which mark sexual identities, to re-articulate a (post-humanist) subject. I ask to what extent Samaras’ cultural background was decisive here, or whether his works should be placed in the context of the contemporaneous blending of scientific knowledge, science fiction, and psychoanalytic theory, that Samaras was familiar with. Within this framing I will look for new methodological approaches to the art of the 1960s and 1970s that is still crucial for contemporary ideas of subjects’ relation to their environments.
Antje Krause-Wahl holds a PhD in art history and is currently professor for contemporary art at the art history department at Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main. In her research, she has investigated subject conceptions, both in artists' self-representations and in artistic practices, turning to the mediality and materiality of fashion. Her research project Art, Fashion, Magazine: A Queer History of Images and Surfaces was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Terra Foundation for American Art. She has published widely in magazines like Fashion Theory, Journal of Design History, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, und kritische berichte. She is currently co-editing with Änne Söll and Petra Löffler Materials, Practices and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture (Bloombury 2020).
In his manifold oeuvre of paintings, assemblages, installations and Polaroids, Samaras engages with his own self. His works, which are difficult to grasp within the categories of art history, have been interpreted mainly autobiographically, both in the USA and in Europe, whereby his childhood in Macedonia (he was born in 1936 in Kastoria, Macedonia, emigrated to West New York, New Jersey in 1948 and became an American citizen in 1955) and Byzantine culture in particular have been used as a framework for interpretation. In my talk, I will focus on the materials and substances he used in his work of the 1960s and 70s: the shiny Mylar and glittering jewels, the liquid metals and chemical substances. With these matters he produced, so my thesis, particular "skins." I show how Samaras worked with these “skins” to expand bodily boundaries, which mark sexual identities, to re-articulate a (post-humanist) subject. I ask to what extent Samaras’ cultural background was decisive here, or whether his works should be placed in the context of the contemporaneous blending of scientific knowledge, science fiction, and psychoanalytic theory, that Samaras was familiar with. Within this framing I will look for new methodological approaches to the art of the 1960s and 1970s that is still crucial for contemporary ideas of subjects’ relation to their environments.
Antje Krause-Wahl holds a PhD in art history and is currently professor for contemporary art at the art history department at Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main. In her research, she has investigated subject conceptions, both in artists' self-representations and in artistic practices, turning to the mediality and materiality of fashion. Her research project Art, Fashion, Magazine: A Queer History of Images and Surfaces was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Terra Foundation for American Art. She has published widely in magazines like Fashion Theory, Journal of Design History, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, und kritische berichte. She is currently co-editing with Änne Söll and Petra Löffler Materials, Practices and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture (Bloombury 2020).
Audience and Discourse: Cross-Atlantic Exchanges in the Context of the IAUS in New York City, or Inventing New Eurocentric Architecture Institutions in the 1970s
The paper discusses how the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies constructed, through its discourse and events, an audience for an emerging architecture scene in New York City during the 1970s, with great implications on the current architectural educational scene. The analysis of the multiple events (exhibitions, lectures, classes) and media (Oppositions, Skyline), particularly the ambitious platform OPEN PLAN, evidenced a critical role on the construction of an audience and discourse that over the years transcended the Institute’s walls. Key European figures crossed the Atlantic during that time to feed the IAUS’s programs with the ambition of creating an alternative educational space to that of the formal universities and colleges–at least on the U.S. East Coast. The research reveals the internal politics of the Institute, and argues that although the IAUS transformed the educational landscape on the East Coast from the 1970s onwards, it did by reinstating euro-centric as well as mainstream-style institutions in the context of a bankrupted New York City. The potential for galvanizing alternative educational models in the decade following the 1968 upheavals, such as institutional critique and a culturally intersectional education; have been delayed. Only recently have they started to effect critical changes to the education–and practice of architecture in the U.S. The presented research is based on first hand sources from the IAUS’s archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, as well as a discussion of the IAUS’s members and authors and the topics and texts they produced or that were launched in its context.
Marcelo López-Dinardi is an immigrant, researcher and educator interested in the various scales of design, in the practice of architecture as research, and the intersection of architecture, art and political economy. He is an Assistant Professor of architecture at Texas A&M University. As Partner of A(n) Office, he was selected to represent the United States Pavilion in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale and later selected as a Fellow for Ideas City Athens and Arles, an event organized by New York City’s New Museum. He has written for Avery Review, The Architect’s Newspaper, Entorno, Domus, Planning Perspectives, Art Forum China, and lectured at Cooper Union, Princeton University, RISD, GSAPP, among others. He completed a Bachelor in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (2003) and a MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (2013) from the GSAPP at Columbia University.
The paper discusses how the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies constructed, through its discourse and events, an audience for an emerging architecture scene in New York City during the 1970s, with great implications on the current architectural educational scene. The analysis of the multiple events (exhibitions, lectures, classes) and media (Oppositions, Skyline), particularly the ambitious platform OPEN PLAN, evidenced a critical role on the construction of an audience and discourse that over the years transcended the Institute’s walls. Key European figures crossed the Atlantic during that time to feed the IAUS’s programs with the ambition of creating an alternative educational space to that of the formal universities and colleges–at least on the U.S. East Coast. The research reveals the internal politics of the Institute, and argues that although the IAUS transformed the educational landscape on the East Coast from the 1970s onwards, it did by reinstating euro-centric as well as mainstream-style institutions in the context of a bankrupted New York City. The potential for galvanizing alternative educational models in the decade following the 1968 upheavals, such as institutional critique and a culturally intersectional education; have been delayed. Only recently have they started to effect critical changes to the education–and practice of architecture in the U.S. The presented research is based on first hand sources from the IAUS’s archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, as well as a discussion of the IAUS’s members and authors and the topics and texts they produced or that were launched in its context.
Marcelo López-Dinardi is an immigrant, researcher and educator interested in the various scales of design, in the practice of architecture as research, and the intersection of architecture, art and political economy. He is an Assistant Professor of architecture at Texas A&M University. As Partner of A(n) Office, he was selected to represent the United States Pavilion in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale and later selected as a Fellow for Ideas City Athens and Arles, an event organized by New York City’s New Museum. He has written for Avery Review, The Architect’s Newspaper, Entorno, Domus, Planning Perspectives, Art Forum China, and lectured at Cooper Union, Princeton University, RISD, GSAPP, among others. He completed a Bachelor in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (2003) and a MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (2013) from the GSAPP at Columbia University.
Beyond “Bad Girls”: Facing the White and Brown Maids of Pop
The feminist revision of Pop has illuminated the discrepant positions underpinning the rise of feminist art in the 1960s, speaking to the plurality of feminist politics and the contradictions of the era, including their legacy on contemporary life and art. Capturing the Janus face of the 1960s through the ways in which both women’s liberation and exploitation mark feminist politics in Pop, in this talk I turn from radical body and representation politics to a multivocal discourse on domestic labor and service, including its racialization.
Drawing from my latest study of labor in American Pop for contextualization, I focus on diversely critical (re)presentations of “women’s work” by Jann Haworth, Martha Rosler, Guvnor Nelson and Betye Saar, through an intersectional feminist lens that pays attention to the role of gender, race and class in the artists’ identifications and politics, the laboring bodies they make visible, their reception, and the inassimilable— for “women”—predicament of domestic labor in its servicing of capitalist patriarchy and white privilege. Reframing the Pop home as an essential part of the “hidden abode” of capitalism’s production, rather than just an arena of consumption, I reclaim as work both the paid and unpaid labor of Pop’s home-makers and home-keepers. I thereby also move beyond the (Warholian) factory and its effect on the understanding of Pop and class politics in postwar art from a contemporary standpoint that acknowledges the global labor crisis and its toll on women. While arguing for their distinct radicality in the context of Pop and 1960s’ gender relations and feminisms, my critical encounter with Pop’s “maids” also addresses the challenges that their affective labor, housekeeping drudgery and above all, color continue to pose for radical and transnational feminism and feminist art history.
Kalliopi Minioudaki is an art historian working as independent scholar and curator in Athens and New York. She is editor of the special issue “On the Cusp of Feminism: Women Artists in the Sixties” (Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 2014), coeditor of Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968 (Abbeville Press, 2010) and author of Women in Pop: Difference and Marginality (PhD diss, IFA, NYU, 2009) and “Pop’s Ladies and Bad Girls: Axell, Pauline Boty and Rosalyn Drexler” (Oxford Art Journal, 2007). She has published on several artists active in the 1960s, such as Axell, Pauline Boty, Marie-Louise Ekman, Rosalyn Drexler, Robert Indiana, Niki de Saint Phalle, Carolee Schneemann, May Wilson and has curated the work of many contemporary artists. Current research projects include the anthology Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race and Class in the Global Sixties (Bloomsbury, 2020) coedited with Mona Hadler, and an essay on the neon sculptor Chryssa for her upcoming survey at Dia (2022).
The feminist revision of Pop has illuminated the discrepant positions underpinning the rise of feminist art in the 1960s, speaking to the plurality of feminist politics and the contradictions of the era, including their legacy on contemporary life and art. Capturing the Janus face of the 1960s through the ways in which both women’s liberation and exploitation mark feminist politics in Pop, in this talk I turn from radical body and representation politics to a multivocal discourse on domestic labor and service, including its racialization.
Drawing from my latest study of labor in American Pop for contextualization, I focus on diversely critical (re)presentations of “women’s work” by Jann Haworth, Martha Rosler, Guvnor Nelson and Betye Saar, through an intersectional feminist lens that pays attention to the role of gender, race and class in the artists’ identifications and politics, the laboring bodies they make visible, their reception, and the inassimilable— for “women”—predicament of domestic labor in its servicing of capitalist patriarchy and white privilege. Reframing the Pop home as an essential part of the “hidden abode” of capitalism’s production, rather than just an arena of consumption, I reclaim as work both the paid and unpaid labor of Pop’s home-makers and home-keepers. I thereby also move beyond the (Warholian) factory and its effect on the understanding of Pop and class politics in postwar art from a contemporary standpoint that acknowledges the global labor crisis and its toll on women. While arguing for their distinct radicality in the context of Pop and 1960s’ gender relations and feminisms, my critical encounter with Pop’s “maids” also addresses the challenges that their affective labor, housekeeping drudgery and above all, color continue to pose for radical and transnational feminism and feminist art history.
Kalliopi Minioudaki is an art historian working as independent scholar and curator in Athens and New York. She is editor of the special issue “On the Cusp of Feminism: Women Artists in the Sixties” (Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 2014), coeditor of Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968 (Abbeville Press, 2010) and author of Women in Pop: Difference and Marginality (PhD diss, IFA, NYU, 2009) and “Pop’s Ladies and Bad Girls: Axell, Pauline Boty and Rosalyn Drexler” (Oxford Art Journal, 2007). She has published on several artists active in the 1960s, such as Axell, Pauline Boty, Marie-Louise Ekman, Rosalyn Drexler, Robert Indiana, Niki de Saint Phalle, Carolee Schneemann, May Wilson and has curated the work of many contemporary artists. Current research projects include the anthology Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race and Class in the Global Sixties (Bloomsbury, 2020) coedited with Mona Hadler, and an essay on the neon sculptor Chryssa for her upcoming survey at Dia (2022).
Michael Ray Charles Takes On Pop
This paper explores the relationship of American artist Michael Ray Charles to the tradition of Pop Art. As a graduate student in the early 1990s, Charles took a page from the Pop playbook when he developed a painting style that appropriated and adapted commercially manufactured objects, among them chromolithographic cards and calendars, turn of the twentieth-century postcards depicting so-called pickaninnies, and nineteenth-century “Jolly Nigger” banks. His signature style was influenced as much by a gift of a plastic “Sambo” figurine as by the advertising curriculum he studied as an undergraduate. And while pursuing his MFA, Charles was taught by English artist Derek Boshier, an early participant in British Pop and the one-time professor of David Bowie. My paper considers how Charles engaged with American and British Pop both formally and conceptually and in particular with Boshier—a satirist whose work often tackles brand logos, such as Pepsi and Kelloggs and archetypes, including the Klansman and the cowboy. Where critics attribute ambivalence surrounding national identity to Pop Art, Charles puts over-used symbols back into circulation precisely to critique the United States’ distribution of American-style racial hierarchies globally as well as the country’s consumerist occupations. Charles’s adaptations of American icons convey a decidedly Afro-pessimistic ennui, for a society wracked with social, economic and political inequality including but not limited to injustice, police violence against people of color and mass incarceration that target underrepresented people. I explore how Charles hewed closely to aspects of American and British Pop to undermine the narratives associated with well-worn icons.
Cherise Smith is Chair of African and African Diaspora Studies Department and Associate Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies and Art History. She specializes in American art after 1945, especially as it intersects with the politics of identity, race and gender. Smith joined the University of Texas at Austin in 2005, after finishing the PhD at Stanford University. Her research centers on African American art, the history of photography, performance, and contemporary art. She published the book Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper and Anna Deavere Smith (Duke University Press) in 2011, and her manuscript Michael Ray Charles: Studies in Blackness is forthcoming (University of Texas Press, January 2020). She has contributed essays to Art Journal, American Art, and exposure among other venues. Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Research Fellowship at W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University. She has worked in the curatorial departments of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum among other institutions.
This paper explores the relationship of American artist Michael Ray Charles to the tradition of Pop Art. As a graduate student in the early 1990s, Charles took a page from the Pop playbook when he developed a painting style that appropriated and adapted commercially manufactured objects, among them chromolithographic cards and calendars, turn of the twentieth-century postcards depicting so-called pickaninnies, and nineteenth-century “Jolly Nigger” banks. His signature style was influenced as much by a gift of a plastic “Sambo” figurine as by the advertising curriculum he studied as an undergraduate. And while pursuing his MFA, Charles was taught by English artist Derek Boshier, an early participant in British Pop and the one-time professor of David Bowie. My paper considers how Charles engaged with American and British Pop both formally and conceptually and in particular with Boshier—a satirist whose work often tackles brand logos, such as Pepsi and Kelloggs and archetypes, including the Klansman and the cowboy. Where critics attribute ambivalence surrounding national identity to Pop Art, Charles puts over-used symbols back into circulation precisely to critique the United States’ distribution of American-style racial hierarchies globally as well as the country’s consumerist occupations. Charles’s adaptations of American icons convey a decidedly Afro-pessimistic ennui, for a society wracked with social, economic and political inequality including but not limited to injustice, police violence against people of color and mass incarceration that target underrepresented people. I explore how Charles hewed closely to aspects of American and British Pop to undermine the narratives associated with well-worn icons.
Cherise Smith is Chair of African and African Diaspora Studies Department and Associate Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies and Art History. She specializes in American art after 1945, especially as it intersects with the politics of identity, race and gender. Smith joined the University of Texas at Austin in 2005, after finishing the PhD at Stanford University. Her research centers on African American art, the history of photography, performance, and contemporary art. She published the book Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper and Anna Deavere Smith (Duke University Press) in 2011, and her manuscript Michael Ray Charles: Studies in Blackness is forthcoming (University of Texas Press, January 2020). She has contributed essays to Art Journal, American Art, and exposure among other venues. Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Research Fellowship at W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University. She has worked in the curatorial departments of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum among other institutions.
Future Cities: Conceptual Art as Radical Architecture
This paper explores the interchange between American conceptual artists whose work engaged discourses of architecture and Italian radical architecture and design of the 1960s. Emilio Ambasz’s 1972 Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape" proposed concepts of “radical architecture”--coined by German Celant on this occasion--and “counter-design”--advocated by Ambasz--as a means of theorizing Italian avant-garde movements of the 1960s. These notions emphasized a visionary politics of refusal associated with Florentine collectives Superstudio and Archizoom: a paper architecture that would not participate in the development of capitalist superstructures, but rather, demonstrated “architecture and design in their pure state.”
In this paper I map consonances between the Italian architectural avant-garde and the minimal and conceptual practices of American artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Alan Kaprow, Agnes Denes and Adrian Piper. Celant, the Milanese magazine Domus, the Venetian magazine Metro and other conduits provided transatlantic forums for Italian and American artists. Smithson, Kaprow and LeWitt contributed to a Metro feature "La sfida del sistema" (“The Challenge of the System”) in 1968, offering uncharacteristically political cultural critiques that aligned with Italian leftist movements in this context. I will examine a series of proposals by American artists through the lens of counter-design and radical architecture, including Smithson’s Proposal for a Monument at Antarctica (1966), Piper’s Utah-Manhattan Transfer (1968), and Agnes Denes's "future dwellings," a series of speculative architectural designs from the 1970s that preceded her realization of Wheatfield (1982 Manhattan/2009 London/2015 Milan).
Kirsten Swenson is the author of Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt and 1960s New York (Yale University Press, 2015) and co-editor and author of Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (University of California Press, 2015). She is currently writing a book entitled Public Works: Land Art and Urban Renewal addressing the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Agnes Denes and Nancy Holt. Her writings on twentieth century and contemporary art have appeared in the Art Journal, Art in America, American Art and in edited volumes and exhibition catalogs, including Sol LeWitt Structures, 1966-2006 (Yale and Public Art Fund, 2011), Eva Hesse 1965 (Yale, 2013), Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt (Blanton and Yale, 2014), Robert Ryman (Dia and Yale, 2017). Recent and forthcoming essays include contributions to Donald Judd: Paintings 1960-1961 (Prestel, 2019), Sol LeWitt and Eadweard Muybridge (Craig F. Starr Gallery, 2019) and Locating LeWitt: Between Mind and Body) (2019). She was recipient of the 2011 Art Journal Award for her edited forum of essays on “Land Use in Contemporary Art.” Kirsten is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the Reviews Editor for the Art Journal.
This paper explores the interchange between American conceptual artists whose work engaged discourses of architecture and Italian radical architecture and design of the 1960s. Emilio Ambasz’s 1972 Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape" proposed concepts of “radical architecture”--coined by German Celant on this occasion--and “counter-design”--advocated by Ambasz--as a means of theorizing Italian avant-garde movements of the 1960s. These notions emphasized a visionary politics of refusal associated with Florentine collectives Superstudio and Archizoom: a paper architecture that would not participate in the development of capitalist superstructures, but rather, demonstrated “architecture and design in their pure state.”
In this paper I map consonances between the Italian architectural avant-garde and the minimal and conceptual practices of American artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Alan Kaprow, Agnes Denes and Adrian Piper. Celant, the Milanese magazine Domus, the Venetian magazine Metro and other conduits provided transatlantic forums for Italian and American artists. Smithson, Kaprow and LeWitt contributed to a Metro feature "La sfida del sistema" (“The Challenge of the System”) in 1968, offering uncharacteristically political cultural critiques that aligned with Italian leftist movements in this context. I will examine a series of proposals by American artists through the lens of counter-design and radical architecture, including Smithson’s Proposal for a Monument at Antarctica (1966), Piper’s Utah-Manhattan Transfer (1968), and Agnes Denes's "future dwellings," a series of speculative architectural designs from the 1970s that preceded her realization of Wheatfield (1982 Manhattan/2009 London/2015 Milan).
Kirsten Swenson is the author of Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt and 1960s New York (Yale University Press, 2015) and co-editor and author of Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (University of California Press, 2015). She is currently writing a book entitled Public Works: Land Art and Urban Renewal addressing the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Agnes Denes and Nancy Holt. Her writings on twentieth century and contemporary art have appeared in the Art Journal, Art in America, American Art and in edited volumes and exhibition catalogs, including Sol LeWitt Structures, 1966-2006 (Yale and Public Art Fund, 2011), Eva Hesse 1965 (Yale, 2013), Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt (Blanton and Yale, 2014), Robert Ryman (Dia and Yale, 2017). Recent and forthcoming essays include contributions to Donald Judd: Paintings 1960-1961 (Prestel, 2019), Sol LeWitt and Eadweard Muybridge (Craig F. Starr Gallery, 2019) and Locating LeWitt: Between Mind and Body) (2019). She was recipient of the 2011 Art Journal Award for her edited forum of essays on “Land Use in Contemporary Art.” Kirsten is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the Reviews Editor for the Art Journal.
Cinetismo and Sistemas: Situating the Work of Hans Haacke within Advanced Art Exchanges in the Americas
This paper analyzes a series of Hans Haacke’s artworks realized at transnational shows held in Mexico, Canada and Argentina between 1968 and 1971. I set Haacke’s environmental projects in a continuum with his broader oeuvre and argue that they engage in “systems politics”: the identification and interruption of normally naturalized systems. For instance, Haacke’s Wind Room (1968), which he realized for Willoughby Sharp’s Cinetismo: Esculturas electrónicas en situaciones ambientales (1968), employed fans to subtly intervene in the ecology of the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte at the Universidad Autonóma de México (UNAM). The exhibition formed part of the “cultural Olympics” accompanying the Mexico City Games. The electric grid, a source emphasized by the exhibition’s Spanish-language title, powered Wind Room’s air flows. As Haacke wrote in September 1967, his works register and intervene in institutional environments: viewers “see the frame” and become “part of a larger system.” Moreover, by dissolving the art object into the surrounds, his artwork—and others in Sharp’s show—rejected the program of the 18 monumental modernist sculptures commissioned for the Olympic Freeway. Following George Flaherty, concurrent anti-government student protests at UNAM amplified the kinetic works—inflecting them with activist energy and rendering them “forcefully communicative.” Tracing Haacke’s artistic dialogue with the various sites and curators, including Sharp, Lucy Lippard and Jorge Glusberg, I explore the global networks in which ideas and art circulated; I attempt to contextualize his critical projects and enrich the history of advanced art in the Americas.
John Tyson is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Prior to this, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art (USA). Tyson’s scholarship focuses on art and technology since the 1960s as well as early twentieth century American art. Among his activities at the National Gallery, was the creation on a scholarly web feature, New Waves: Transatlantic Bonds between Film and Art in the 1960s. He is presently developing a book on Hans Haacke’s works from the 1960s and 70s, which relates them to politics, performance and play. His recent publications include “Politics of the Press: Newspapers and the Representation of Art by African Americans in the Nation’s Capital” in American Art (Summer 2019) and “Beyond Systems Aesthetics: Politics, Performance and Para-Sites” in the catalogue for the New Museum’s Hans Haacke: All Connected (2019).
This paper analyzes a series of Hans Haacke’s artworks realized at transnational shows held in Mexico, Canada and Argentina between 1968 and 1971. I set Haacke’s environmental projects in a continuum with his broader oeuvre and argue that they engage in “systems politics”: the identification and interruption of normally naturalized systems. For instance, Haacke’s Wind Room (1968), which he realized for Willoughby Sharp’s Cinetismo: Esculturas electrónicas en situaciones ambientales (1968), employed fans to subtly intervene in the ecology of the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte at the Universidad Autonóma de México (UNAM). The exhibition formed part of the “cultural Olympics” accompanying the Mexico City Games. The electric grid, a source emphasized by the exhibition’s Spanish-language title, powered Wind Room’s air flows. As Haacke wrote in September 1967, his works register and intervene in institutional environments: viewers “see the frame” and become “part of a larger system.” Moreover, by dissolving the art object into the surrounds, his artwork—and others in Sharp’s show—rejected the program of the 18 monumental modernist sculptures commissioned for the Olympic Freeway. Following George Flaherty, concurrent anti-government student protests at UNAM amplified the kinetic works—inflecting them with activist energy and rendering them “forcefully communicative.” Tracing Haacke’s artistic dialogue with the various sites and curators, including Sharp, Lucy Lippard and Jorge Glusberg, I explore the global networks in which ideas and art circulated; I attempt to contextualize his critical projects and enrich the history of advanced art in the Americas.
John Tyson is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Prior to this, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art (USA). Tyson’s scholarship focuses on art and technology since the 1960s as well as early twentieth century American art. Among his activities at the National Gallery, was the creation on a scholarly web feature, New Waves: Transatlantic Bonds between Film and Art in the 1960s. He is presently developing a book on Hans Haacke’s works from the 1960s and 70s, which relates them to politics, performance and play. His recent publications include “Politics of the Press: Newspapers and the Representation of Art by African Americans in the Nation’s Capital” in American Art (Summer 2019) and “Beyond Systems Aesthetics: Politics, Performance and Para-Sites” in the catalogue for the New Museum’s Hans Haacke: All Connected (2019).
Emily Brady, Philosophy | Texas A&M University
Emily Brady is the Susanne M. and Melbern G. Glasscock Director and Chair at the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and also, Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. Her research and teaching interests span aesthetics and philosophy of art, environmental ethics, eighteenth century philosophy, animal studies and the environmental humanities. She has published seven books, including, Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley (co-edited with Jerrold Levinson, Oxford University Press, 2001), Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments (co-authored with Isis Brook and Jonathan Prior, Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). Currently, she is working on a philosophical history of aesthetic theory and nature in the eighteenth century.
Vanita Reddy, English | Texas A&M University
Vanita Reddy is a feminist scholar and cultural theorist whose research focuses on the intersections of race, sexuality and gender in global contexts. She is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University with a faculty affiliation in Women’s and Gender Studies and the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute. Dr. Reddy’s research focuses on contemporary South Asian diasporic literature and culture, examining practices of cultural identity, belonging and political community within the South Asian American and the global South Asian diaspora. It seeks to make visible subjects and populations who have occupied a historically marginal place within studies of diaspora and globalization, such as women, girls, service sector workers, undocumented migrants and sexual minorities.
Roger Malina, Physics | University of Texas at Dallas
Roger Malina is a physicist, astronomer and Executive Editor of the Leonardo publications at MIT Press. With dual appointments as Professor of Physics and Professor of Arts and Technology at UT Dallas, his work focuses on connections among the natural sciences and arts, design and humanities. Malina is the former Director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence (OAMP) in Marseille and was a member of its observational cosmology group which collaborated on investigations regarding the nature of dark matter and dark energy. He has been a member of the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Study (Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées, IMERA), that contributes to trans-disciplinarity between the sciences and the arts and places emphasis on the human dimensions of the sciences. He also founded the Leonardo organizations in San Francisco and Paris, whose missions are to promote work that explores the intersection of the arts, sciences and new technologies.
Joshua Shannon, Art History | University of Maryland
Joshua Shannon is Professor of contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. His research and teaching interests cover art and visual culture since 1945, including especially sculpture, photography, the urban landscape, and realism. He is the author of The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (Yale University Press, 2009) and of The Recording Machine: Art and Fact During the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2017). He has also published articles and reviews in journals such as American Art, The Art Bulletin, Modernism/Modernity and October. Shannon is founder and director of The Potomac Center for the Study of Modernity, an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research initiative hosting events in Washington, DC. He is currently the Terra Visiting Professor of American Art at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Emily Brady is the Susanne M. and Melbern G. Glasscock Director and Chair at the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and also, Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. Her research and teaching interests span aesthetics and philosophy of art, environmental ethics, eighteenth century philosophy, animal studies and the environmental humanities. She has published seven books, including, Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley (co-edited with Jerrold Levinson, Oxford University Press, 2001), Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments (co-authored with Isis Brook and Jonathan Prior, Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). Currently, she is working on a philosophical history of aesthetic theory and nature in the eighteenth century.
Vanita Reddy, English | Texas A&M University
Vanita Reddy is a feminist scholar and cultural theorist whose research focuses on the intersections of race, sexuality and gender in global contexts. She is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University with a faculty affiliation in Women’s and Gender Studies and the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute. Dr. Reddy’s research focuses on contemporary South Asian diasporic literature and culture, examining practices of cultural identity, belonging and political community within the South Asian American and the global South Asian diaspora. It seeks to make visible subjects and populations who have occupied a historically marginal place within studies of diaspora and globalization, such as women, girls, service sector workers, undocumented migrants and sexual minorities.
Roger Malina, Physics | University of Texas at Dallas
Roger Malina is a physicist, astronomer and Executive Editor of the Leonardo publications at MIT Press. With dual appointments as Professor of Physics and Professor of Arts and Technology at UT Dallas, his work focuses on connections among the natural sciences and arts, design and humanities. Malina is the former Director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence (OAMP) in Marseille and was a member of its observational cosmology group which collaborated on investigations regarding the nature of dark matter and dark energy. He has been a member of the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Study (Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées, IMERA), that contributes to trans-disciplinarity between the sciences and the arts and places emphasis on the human dimensions of the sciences. He also founded the Leonardo organizations in San Francisco and Paris, whose missions are to promote work that explores the intersection of the arts, sciences and new technologies.
Joshua Shannon, Art History | University of Maryland
Joshua Shannon is Professor of contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. His research and teaching interests cover art and visual culture since 1945, including especially sculpture, photography, the urban landscape, and realism. He is the author of The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (Yale University Press, 2009) and of The Recording Machine: Art and Fact During the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2017). He has also published articles and reviews in journals such as American Art, The Art Bulletin, Modernism/Modernity and October. Shannon is founder and director of The Potomac Center for the Study of Modernity, an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research initiative hosting events in Washington, DC. He is currently the Terra Visiting Professor of American Art at the Freie Universität Berlin.