The Now Museum: Contemporary Art, Curating Histories, Alternative Models
What do museums of contemporary art stand for today? The last two decades has seen an unimaginable diversification of the museum as a place for exhibiting art and telling history, producing innovative education models, promoting international collaborations, forming alternative archives, and facilitating new productions.This conference aims to tackle key questions around the museum as an institutional entity and contemporary art as an art historical category. Speakers will provide an overview of developments across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Particular attention will be paid to the construction of historical narratives (or their abandonment) through collection displays, the role of research in relation to contemporary art, the alternative models that are already having an impact, and their relationship to more traditional museum infrastructures.
Presented by the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, Independent Curators International, and the New Museum.
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Schedule
Thursday, March 10 | 7–9 p.m. | New Museum
7:15 p.m. “Exhibition Machines”
A conversation with artist Paul Chan and Philippe Vergne, Director, Dia Art Foundation, New York.
Friday, March 11 | 10 a.m.–6 p.m. | CUNY Graduate Center
10:15 a.m. “Revisiting The Late Capitalist Museum”
A panel discussion with Bruce Altshuler, Director, Program in Museum Studies, New York University; Manuel Borja-Villel, Director, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid; and Beatriz Colomina, Professor, Department of Architecture, Princeton University.
Chaired by Johanna Burton, Director, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies.
12 p.m. “Sources of the Contemporary Museum”
A conversation with Carlos Basualdo, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Curator at MAXXI, Rome, and Pamela M. Lee, Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University.
2:30 p.m. “The Artist’s Perspective”
A conversation with artist Dara Birnbaum and Ute Meta Bauer, Associate Professor and Director, Visual Arts Program, MIT.
3:40 p.m. “Contemporanizing History/Historicizing the Contemporary”
A panel discussion with Okwui Enwezor, Director, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Annie Fletcher, Curator, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; Massimiliano Gioni, Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions, New Museum, New York; and Terry Smith, Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Pittsburgh.
Chaired by Claire Bishop, Associate Professor of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center.
Saturday, March 12 | 12–6 p.m. | New Museum
12:15 p.m. “Extending Infrastructures, Part I: Platforms & Networks”
A panel discussion with Zdenka Badovinac, Director, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Anthony Huberman, Distinguished Lecturer, Hunter College and Director, The Artist’s Institute, New York; Maria Lind, Director, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; and Lu Jie, Director and Chief Curator, Long March Project, Beijing.
Chaired by Kate Fowle, Director, Independent Curators International, New York.
2:30 p.m. “Extending Infrastructures, Part II: Bricks & Mortar”
A panel discussion with Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; curator and artist Gabi Ngcobo, Johannesburg; and Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Director, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York and Caracas.
Chaired by Eungie Joo, Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs, New Museum.
4:45 p.m. “What does the museum stand for now?”
Responses by Katy Siegel, Professor, Department of Art, Hunter College and Dominic Willsdon, Curator of Education and Public Programs, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Sunday, March 13 | 2–6 p.m. | New Museum
2 p.m. “Graduate Students Respond”
A graduate student symposium co-chaired by Claire Bishop, Kate Fowle, and Martin Grossmann, Professor, School of Art and Communications, University of São Paulo.
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
www.gc.cuny.edu
Independent Curators International
www.ici-exhibitions.org
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
www.newmuseum.org
