Tina Campt: VI/44b Foreign Workers
Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Campt is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. She leads the Black Visualities Initiative at the Cogut Institute for Humanities and is the founding convenor of the Practicing Refusal Collective. Campt is the author of four books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), Listening to Images (2017), and, most recently, A Black Gaze (2021).
Clément Chéroux: VI/39 Festivities
Clément Chéroux is Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art. Prior to that he was curator (2007–12) and chief curator (2013–16) of photography at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Most recently, he held the position of senior curator of photography (2017–20) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chéroux is a photo-historian and holds a PhD in art history. He has curated approximately 30 exhibitions. As author or editor, he has published more than 40 books and catalogues about photography and its history.
Thomas Crow: IV/25 The Clergyman
Thomas Crow is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University. He has authored two influential studies of 18th-century French painting: Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1985), which received the Morey Prize from the College Art Association, and Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (1995). Crow’s most recent books are The Long March of Pop: Art, Design, and Music, 1930–1995 (2015), No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (2017), Restoration: the Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art (2018), and The Hidden Mod in Modern Art, London 1956–1969 (2020). His study of art in California, The Artist in the Counterculture from Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley (and other tales from the edge), will appear in 2022. Before his appointment at the Institute of Fine Arts, Crow was director of the Getty Research Institute, professor of art history at the University of Southern California, professor and chair in the history of art at the University of Sussex, and the Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale.
Mia Fineman: III/17 The Woman in Intellectual and Practical Occupation
Mia Fineman is curator in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since joining the Met in 1997, she has organized numerous exhibitions spanning the history of photography, including Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography (2019), Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists (2017), Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (2012), On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag (2006), and Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection (2000). Her most recent exhibition, The New Woman Behind the Camera, co-organized with Andrea Nelson of the National Gallery of Art, is now on view at the Met. Mia has also written on art and culture for the New York Times, Slate, Photograph, and other publications.
David Gill: IV/20 The Official
Born in 1966, Gill grew up in a Protestant minister’s family in Herrnhut, Saxony, in former East Germany. He was denied a higher education by the communist regime for political reasons. Instead, he trained and worked as a plumber before joining a preparatory Protestant school and later the theological seminary of the Protestant Church in Berlin-Brandenburg. In 1990, he initially was the chairman of Normannenstrasse Citizens’ Committee, which oversaw the dissolution of the Ministry of State Security at the Stasi headquarters and served as the secretary of the Special Committee for the dissolution of the Stasi of the East German Parliament. After reunification, Gill became spokesman and head of the research division of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi-Files before studying law in Berlin and Philadelphia. After holding positions in the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Berlin, he served as the Deputy Representative of the Council of the Protestant Church in Germany to the Federal Republic of Germany and the European Union. During Federal President Joachim Gauck’s term, from 2012 to 2017, he was state secretary and chief of staff of the President. Since August 2017, he has been the German Consul General in New York.
Sarah Kennel: II/9 The Industrialist
Dr. Sarah Kennel is Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and director of the Raysor Center at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to VMFA, Kennel lead the photography department at the High Museum in Atlanta, where she organized Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection and Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings, which she co-curated as Byrne Family Curator of Photography at Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts. At PEM, she organized John Thomson Along the River Min and Order of Imagination: The Photographs of Olivia Parker. From 2004 to 2014, Kennel worked in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, where she organized numerous exhibitions and catalogues, including Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris, Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929, The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Past 100 Years (2012), and In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age (2009). Kennel holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from Princeton University.
Zoe Leonard: Lands and Peoples
Zoe Leonard is a New York–based artist. She has had solo exhibitions at institutions including Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2013–14), Camden Art Centre, London (2011–12), Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York (2008–11), Dia at the Hispanic Society, New York (2008), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2007), and Vienna Secession (1997). Traveling retrospectives of her work originated at Fotomuseum Winterthur (2007–10) and MOCA, Los Angeles (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018–19). Leonard participated in Documenta 9 and 12, and the 1993, 1997, and 2014 Whitney Biennials. Her publications include Analogue (2007), Zoe Leonard: Photographs (2008), You see I am here after all (2010), Available Light (2014), and Survey (2018). She has an upcoming solo show at Mudam Luxembourg, traveling to MAM, Paris (2022).
Molly Nesbit: VI/36 The Street and Street Life
Molly Nesbit is the Mary Conover Mellon Chair of Art History at Vassar College and a contributing editor at Artforum. Her books include Atget’s Seven Albums (1992) and Their Common Sense (2000). Since 2002, together with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, she has been curating the succession of Utopia Stations, an ongoing collective book, exhibition, seminar, and Internet and street project. The Pragmatism in the History of Art (2013) is the first volume of Pre-Occupations, a series collecting her essays; the second, Midnight: The Tempest Essays, was published in 2017 by Inventory Press. She has received many awards, notably from the Guggenheim Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2008 she gave the J. Kirk T. Varnedoe Memorial lectures at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In 2019 she received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art from the College Art Association.
Smooth Nzewi: I/ST Portfolio of Archetypes
Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi joined MoMA in 2019 as the Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. He was formerly curator of African art at the Cleveland Museum of Art as well as at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire. He is currently working on a number of projects at MoMA, including a forthcoming monograph on the Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré. Recent publications include Dak’Art: The Biennale of Dakar and the Making of Contemporary African art (2020) and Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art (2019).
Julian Sander: IV/24 The Aristocrat
Julian Sander is chair of the August Sander Stiftung and owner of Galerie Julian Sander in Cologne. In the fourth generation of the Sander family, Julian Sander represents the work of August Sander and deals professionally with art. The work of his great-grandfather August Sander is and remains the strongest point of reference and basis of his curatorial work in all mediums. Focusing on explaining August Sander's humanistic aspirations as well as the conceptual aspects of his work, Julian Sander has set himself an authority on August Sander’s legacy. In his gallery, Julian Sander shows works that represent the continually shifting nature of the art world in its role as a reflection of societal changes. With the August Sander Stiftung, a foundation inaugurated in 2015, he also fosters research on August Sander and an artistic dialogue with this oeuvre. The August Sander Stiftung has supported and collaborated with academic and museum institutions such as MoMA, Tate, Yale University, Von der Heydt-Museum, NS-Documentation Center Cologne, and Mémorial de la Shoah Paris.
Antonio Somaini: IV/26 The Teacher and Educator
Antonio Somaini is professor of film, media, and visual culture theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He is the author of the books Cultura visuale. Immagini, sguardi, media, dispositivi (2016, with A. Pinotti) and Ejzenštejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio (2011) and the editor of the collective volumes La haute et la basse définition des images. Photographie, cinéma, art contemporain, culture visuelle (2021, with F. Casetti) and Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Towards an Inventory (2020, with PhD Keidl, L. Melamed, V. Hediger). He has edited, in English, French, and Italian, anthologies of essays by Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, László Moholy-Nagy, and Dziga Vertov. In 2020 he was chief curator of the exhibition Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities. He is currently preparing a book entitled Medium Archaeology.
Moderators
Luis Pérez-Oramas received his PhD in art history at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1993). In 2003 he became adjunct curator in the Department of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art; in 2006, he was appointed the Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at MoMA, a position that he held until 2017. Prior to MoMA, Pérez-Oramas was professor of art history at the Université de Haute Bretagne-Rennes 2, France (1987–91), Ecole Régionale Superieure des Beaux Arts de Nantes, France (1992–94), and the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón, Caracas, Venezuela (1994–2002), as well as curator of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas (1994–2002). Pérez-Oramas served as the chief curator of the Thirtieth São Paulo Biennial, The Imminence of Poetics, in 2012. He is the author of several exhibition catalogues, seven volumes of essays on art, politics, and social issues, and eight books based on his poetry. Since 2017 he has served as curatorial advisor to the Hochschild Correa Collection of Latin American Art in Lima, and since 2019 he has acted as curatorial advisor and senior curatorial director of the Nara Roesler group of galleries in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and New York.
Deborah Willis, PhD, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, and co-editor of To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, among others. Willis’s curated exhibitions include Framing Moments in the KIA; Migrations and Meanings in Art; Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits at the International Center of Photography; Out of Fashion Photography: Framing Beauty at the Henry Art Gallery; and Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments at Indiana University.
Codirectors
Noam M. Elcott (Columbia University) and Sarah H. Meister (Aperture, formerly MoMA)
August Sander (German, 1876–1964) created the most ambitious and influential portrait of the people of the 20th century. This encyclopedic photographic project—anchored in the farmers of the Westerwald but extending to the furthest reaches of professional, bohemian, and polite society—was never completed. And its most comprehensive form—over 600 photographs divided into seven volumes and nearly 50 portfolios—has never been exhibited in North America. In 2015 MoMA acquired all 619 photographs that comprise People of the Twentieth Century. Leading art historians, curators, artists, and other scholars and writers have gathered once a year for five years. At each daylong meeting, 10 participants each presented a single portfolio, according to her or his expertise and interest. Over the course of five years, we have returned to the seven basic groupings—The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes and Professionals, The Artists, The City, The Last People—from multiple perspectives: historical and curatorial, artistic and poetic, philosophical and conceptual. Among the numerous topics summoned by Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century are portraiture; the Weimar republic; gender, class, and other social structures; photo books and archives; documents and documentary; physiognomy: the art and “science” of reading faces; humanism and anti-humanism; Sander’s post-WWII aesthetic legacy; and the multifarious contemporary efforts—honorific and repressive—to compile and organize photographs of faces.
The August Sander Project is made possible through the generous support of David Dechman, Richard Rieger, and Artur Walther.
Visit this link to join the webinar on Friday, September 10, 2021 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm. EST.
Email [email protected] for the Zoom passcode and webinar information.