News and Events
News
Read stories and articles for and about current and prospective students and faculty in the Art History program, or catch up on the latest program updates in our announcements below or by following us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook
Get the latest Art History news
You can also browse an archive of books published by program faculty and scholars.
Events
The Art History program hosts numerous events for its students and faculty, as well as the wider Philosophy community.
View all upcoming Art History events
Rewald Seminar
Rewald Seminars take place every two weeks, and offer an opportunity for faculty and students to hear cutting-edge research in progress by scholars from inside and outside CUNY.
John Rewald (1912-1994) was a Distinguished Professor of Art History at the Graduate Center, beginning in 1971. Rewald was known for his important work in late 19th century art, especially The History of Impressionism, published in 1946. The Rewald endowment was established to support art history students and is used to fund our annual Rewald seminar series focusing on new research in progress from outside of and within CUNY. The Rewald endowment also funds two to three student-led conferences a year, among other scholarly activities.
Art History Announcements
More Like ThisArt History Student Has Award-Winning Exhibition Catalogue
Nina Stritzler-Levine, a student in the GC Art History program, has received the Society of Architectural Historians' Exhibition Catalogue Award for 2022 for her catalogue Eileen Gray, which she coedited with Cloe Pitiot, Bard Graduate Center, 2020. The book also won the DAM Architectural Book award and a design award from AIGA the professional design association.
- Announcement
Art History Student Named a Winner of the 2022-23 Rome Prize
Saskia Verlaan, a doctoral student in the GC Art History program, has been named a winner of the 2022-23 Rome Prize, presented by the American Academy in Rome.
These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. Verlaan will receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, starting in September 2022.
- Announcement
Recent Books
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The Owls Are Not What They Seem: Artist as Ethologist
The Owls Are Not What They Seem is a selective history of modern and contemporary engagements with animals in the visual arts and how these explorations relate to the evolution of scientific knowledge regarding animals. Arnaud Gerspacher argues that artistic knowledge presents a valuable supplement to scientific knowledge when it comes to encountering and existing alongside nonhuman animals and life worlds.
Though critical of art works involving animals that are unreflective and exploitative, Gerspacher’s exploration of aesthetic practices by Allora & Calzadilla, Pierre Huyghe, Agnieszka Kurant, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Martin Roth, David Weber-Krebs, and others suggests that, alongside scientific practices, art has much to offer in revealing the otherworldly qualities of animals and forging ecopolitical solidarities with fellow earthlings. This book is part of the series Forerunners: Ideas First.
Arnaud Gerspacher, Ph.D. Art History, 2017, is an adjunct professor at City College, CUNY.
Published May 2022
University of Minnesota Press
Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art
With Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art, Peter Chametzky presents a view of visual culture in Germany that leaves behind the usual suspects — those artists who dominate discussions of contemporary German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Rosemarie Trockel — and instead turns to those artists not as well known outside Germany, including Maziar Moradi, Hito Steyerl, and Tanya Ury. In this first book-length examination of Germany's multicultural art scene, Chametzky explores the work of more than 30 German artists who are (among other ethnicities) Turkish, Jewish, Arab, Asian, Iranian, Sinti and Roma, Balkan, and Afro-German.
With a title that echoes Peter Gay's 1978 collection of essays, Freud, Jews and Other Germans, this book, like Gay's, rejects the idea of “us” and “them” in German culture. Discussing artworks in a variety of media that both critique and expand notions of identity and community, Chametzky offers a counternarrative to the fiction of an exclusively white, Christian German culture, arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness. He considers works that deploy critical, confrontational, and playful uses of language, especially German and Turkish; that assert the presence of “foreign bodies” among the German body politic; that grapple with food as a cultural marker; that engage with mass media; and that depict and inhabit spaces imbued with the element of time.
American discussions of German contemporary art have largely ignored the emergence of non-ethnic Germans as some of Germany's most important visual artists. Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art fills this gap.
Chametzky received a Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center in 1991.
Published December 2021
MIT Press, 2021
Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s
Zone Books, 2021
Flashback, Eclipse is a groundbreaking study of 1960s Italian art and its troubled but also resourceful relation to the history and politics of the first part of the twentieth century and the aftermath of World War II. Most analyses have treated the 1960s in Italy as the decade of “presentism” par excellence, a political decade but one liberated from history. Romy Golan, however, makes the counterargument that 1960s Italian artists did not forget Italian and European history but rather reimagined it in oblique form. Her book identifies and explores this imaginary through two forms of nonlinear and decidedly nonpresentist forms of temporality—the flashback and the eclipse. In view of the photographic and filmic nature of these two concepts, the book’s analysis is largely mediated by black-and-white images culled from art, design, and architecture magazines, photo books, film stills, and exhibition documentation.
The book begins in Turin with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings; moves on to Campo urbano, a one-day event in the city of Como; and ends with the Vitalità del Negativo exhibition in Rome. What is being recalled and at other moments occluded are not only episodes of Italian nationalism and Fascism but also various liberatory moments of political and cultural resistance. The book’s main protagonists are, in order of appearance, artists Michelangelo Pistoletto and Giosetta Fioroni, photographer Ugo Mulas, Ettore Sottsass (as critic rather than designer), graphic designer Bruno Munari, curators Luciano Caramel and Achille Bonito Oliva, architect Piero Sartogo, Carla Lonzi (as artist as much as critic), filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci, and, in flashback among the departed, painter Felice Casorati, writer Massimo Bontempelli, art historian Aby Warburg, architect Giuseppe Terragni, and Renaissance friar-philosopher-mathematician Giordano Bruno (as patron saint of the sixty-eighters).
Published November 2021
