Bringing together a group of scholars working at the intersection of printed matter and visual culture this panel will ask, how does does the periodical help us tell cultural histories across geographies? To frame this conversation, Lori Cole (NYU) and Meghan Forbes (MoMA), along with invited panelists Amin Alsaden (independent curator), Olubukola Gbadegesin (St. Louis University), and Naomi Kuromiya (Columbia University), will introduce a range of magazines produced and distributed in disparate contexts: Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central Europe, and Latin America. Through a series of case studies, the panel aims to build a framework for examining magazines as a mode of circulation and exhibition of artwork. Together the panelists will consider what periodicals and other printed ephemera have been left out of cultural histories—both in print and through contemporary collection and exhibition practices—and how new research can address these gaps.
Panelists:
Amin Alsaden, “Publishing Resistance: Agency and Exchanges in Post-WWII Baghdad”
Olubukola Ggadegesin, “The Yoruba Photoplay Series: Photographs, Popular Arts, and Print Culture in Lagos”
Naomi Kuromiya, “Circulating Exhibitions: the Display of Artwork in the Japanese Calligraphy Periodical Bokubi (1951-1960)”
Moderated by Lori Cole and Meghan Forbes
Participants:
Amin Alsaden is an independent curator and scholar whose work focuses on the global exchanges of ideas and expertise across cultural boundaries. His current research investigates a crucible moment in post-WWII Baghdad, when the city became a locus of unprecedented encounters, contributing to the profound transformation of art and architecture globally all the while engendering unique local movements. Alsaden holds a PhD and MA from Harvard University, MArch from Princeton University, and BArch from the American University of Sharjah.
Lori Cole is Clinical Associate Professor and Associate Director of XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement at New York University. She previously taught at Brandeis University, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art and her writing has been published in Artforum, Cabinet, The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas and The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. She is the author of Surveying the Avant-Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018).
Meghan Forbes is the C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives) Fellow for Central and Eastern Europe at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. She is the sole editor of International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019). Besides her academic publications, Meghan publishes regularly in venues of wider readership such as as Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and the Michigan Quarterly Review.
Olubukola Gbadegesin is an associate professor in the Art History and the African American Studies programs at Saint Louis University. Her research is focused on photography, portraiture, political history, the politics of representation, and print culture in Africa and the diaspora. She has published in Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, African Arts, and History of Photography. In addition to a recent book chapter in African Print Cultures (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016), Gbadegesin is currently working on a book manuscript titled “Picturing Our Modern Selves: A Long History of Photography in Lagos, Nigeria, 1861-1966.”
Naomi Kuromiya is a PhD student in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University, where she studies modern Japanese art. Her research interests include the postwar intersections of “avant-garde” and “tradition,” and artistic interactions between Japan, the U.S., and France. She completed her MA at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a thesis that examined the global influence of the postwar Japanese calligraphy collective, Bokujin-kai. She previously worked for The Lyonel Feininger Project, and for The Museum of Modern Art, where she held the Dedalus Fellowship in the Archives.
Cosponsored by XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and the Institute for Public Knowledge.