Art History

Alex Kitnick, Brant Foundation Fellow in Contemporary Arts, Faculty, CCS,  will participate in a public forum addressing the recent US presidential election,
the implications of a Trump presidency, and possible means of resistance.

Saturday, December 10th, 10:30 am – 5:30 pm
Einstein Auditorium (Room 105)
Barney Building
34 Stuyvesant StreetNew York, New York 10003

For more information: http://blogs.bard.edu/arthistory/files/2016/12/Sense.pdf

Sponsored by Contemporary Aesthetics Collaborative with generous assistance from the NYU-Steinhardt Dept. of Art and Art Professions

In conjunction with the exhibition S/Election, curated by Maxwell Barnes, Sarah Bastacky, Aaron Boehlert, Anne Burnett, Issy Cassou,
Adrienne Chau, Reza Daftarian, Hannah Kay, Alex Kitnick, Harrison Kroessler, Alex Lau, Sondra McGill, Erin O’Leary,Flannery Seager-Strode, Raphael Wolf, and Sam Youkilis, there will be a screening of two videos at:

6pm on Thursday, December 8, 2016
Center for Curatorial Studies
Bard College

Paul Chan’s Now Let Us Praise
American Leftists (2000) and
Jacqueline Goss’s Hart’s Location (2016)

There will be a discussion after the screening. All are invited to attend.

Curated by the students of ArtH 211
under the supervision of Professor Susan Aberth

Exhibition in the Stevenson Library Vitrines

November 29- December 29, 2016

Please come visit the camera obscura set up behind the campus center by ARTH 211, “Sightseeing.” The class built the camera obscura with a grant from the Experimental Humanities program. If there is sun, the camera will produce a beautiful “natural” image, made by light rays reflecting from objects outside the box onto its interior surface.

The camera obscura will be set up until Sunday (12/4) afternoon.

Wednesday, November 30th, 6pm
Henderson Annex 106
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has just released an amazing set of data pertaining to its exhibition history, beginning with the institution’s founding in 1929 and spanning up until the epochal year of 1989. The question that presents itself to us now is how to use it. What questions should we ask of this enormous trove of information, which includes not only things like installation photographs but also press releases? This Experimental Humanities Critical Potluck will consider questions of canon formation (how, for example, did Picasso come to be thought of as the modern artist par excellence?) as well as changing conceptions of the exhibition format itself. While techniques of “distant reading” have recently become important in the field of literary studies, art history is just starting to assimilate these methods. EH Fellow Collin Jennings will lead us through some of these methods, and Alex Kitnick from the Art History Program will serve as interlocutor. Both faculty and students are invited to attend.

Sponsored by Experimental Humanities

THE ANNUAL ART HISTORY MAJORS EVENT!
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
5:00 pm
Fisher Studio Arts Center Studio

Students learned about Spring 2017 course offerings and heard 
presentations by three alumni art history majors on 
their experiences since graduating from Bard.  Claire Demere ’14, Fiona Laugharn ’12 and Max Yeston ’08 shared their journeys into the work world.

For Day of the Dead celebrations at Bard College an ofrenda was created in the campus center. Prof. Susan Aberth, (Latin American Art History),  along with students from the Queer/Straight Alliance, Latin American Students Organization, Caribbean Students Organization and Black Students Organization created this altar to those who died at Pulse in Orlando, Florida this past summer. The students found a Mexican bakery that sold Bread of the Dead, Prof. Aberth lent her calaveras and finally photographs of all those murdered in Orlando were placed as a memorial backdrop. A very meaningful event that honored the dead and brought solidarity to the Bard community.

LILLIAN SCHWARTZ: COMPUTER ART PIONEER
on view through October 30.

MAGENTA PLAINS | 94 Allen Street | New York, NY 10002 | 917.388.2464
Gallery hours are Wednesday – Sunday, 11am – 6pm.

Lillian Schwartz: Panel & Conversation
Friday, October 28 from 6 – 8 PM
Conversation to begin promptly at 6:30
Magenta Plains is pleased to welcome Rebekah Rutkoff, Jon Gertner, Alex Kitnick, and Ben Rubin for a panel discussion on Lillian Schwartz this Friday, October 28th from 6 – 8 PM.
ALEX KITNICK is an art historian and critic based in New York, and Brant Family Fellow in Contemporary Arts at Bard College. An editor of numerous volumes, including a collection of John McHale’s writings, The Expendable Reader: Articles on Art, Architecture, Design, and Media, 1951–1979, and October 136 on New Brutalism, he is also a frequent contributor to publications including Artforum, May, October, and Texte zur Kunst. He is currently teaching a course on Experiments in Art and Technology at Bard College.

Recent Press for Lillian Schwartz:
The New York Times
The New Yorker
Artforum Cover Feature
Artforum Critics’ Picks
The Village Voice
HYPERALLERGIC

Professor Susan Aberth in
Black Mirror 1: embodiment

“Ingestion and Descent: The Chthonic Realms of Leonara Carrington”

Fulgur Limited, Somerset, UK, 2016

Please clink here to read:

ingestion-and-descent

Amin Shopping Mall

A lecture by
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow (NYU)

Tuesday, November 1st, 6:30pm
Olin 102
Co-sponsored by the Art History, Africana Studies, and Human Rights Programs (maybe Anthropology as well?)

This talk examines a history of the world’s largest designated set of settlements for refugees through its constructed environment and archival record, interrogating an ephemeral territorial form and the paradoxical heritage it proposes. If architecture and infrastructure have entrenched a quarter century of humanitarian intervention by the United Nations at Dadaab, Kenya, the site has been depicted instead as precarious. Occluded at once through aesthetic codings and archival silences, its permanence has been veiled in fragile architectures of an international humanitarian aid operation and in pastoral landscapes of a contested desert borderland traditionally inhabited by nomadic Somalis. Rather than a provisional artifact of the 1991 crisis that occasioned humanitarian operations in northeast Kenya, I posit that this territory unfolded as exceptional and emergent over the course of a century: knowable through visual, historical, and ethnographic study of architecture and territory. My research recuperates a figuration and construction of humanitarian territory in missionary settlements for freed slaves in the nineteenth century, imperial and postcolonial systems of land tenure in the twentieth, and forced sedentarization of pastoralists in the twenty-first. Through this analysis, I interrogate a problematic humanitarian heritage of furtive architectures, which at once liberate and coerce, resist as well as assert colonial and national borders, and make claims upon abject suffering as well as its salvation. These confront and index our representations and constructions of emancipation, emergency, city, Africa, the native, and the precariousness of ephemerality itself.

Patricia Karetzky, Guest Curator, Professor of Asian Art, Bard College
Infinite Compassion Curator’s Tour, Sunday, November 6, at 2:00 pm