Uncommon Exchanges: Pippin Frisbie-Calder and Jordan Karubian

Uncommon Exchanges: Pippin Frisbie-Calder and Jordan Karubian

Newcomb Art Museum

October 15 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

 

In partnership with A Studio in the Woods, The ByWater Institute at Tulane University, and The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (Nola Gulf South), Newcomb Art Museum’s interdisciplinary conversation series “Uncommon Exchanges” invites the New Orleans community to interact with diverse experts from Tulane and the Gulf South region. Using the current exhibitions “Flint is Family” and “The American Dream Denied” as a catalyst, Pippin Frisbie-Calder, FATHOM Resident Artist at A Studio in the Woods and Jordan Karubian, Phd, Associate Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Tulane will engage in a unique conversation bridging their different disciplines and expertise to workshop new kinds of questions and establish commonalities.

alumniFree and open to the public, this event takes place inside the museum’s galleries.

Looters: Itinerant Images of West African Architecture

The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design is pleased to announce the fall 2019 exhibition Looters: Itinerant Images of West African Architecture. This exhibition used light projection and sculpture to reveal hidden images of West African architecture in the background of European prints, drawings, and photographs from the 18th through early 20th centuries. Alongside projected images, sculptures and prints by contemporary artists respond to the hidden archive. Looters is particularly relevant for audiences in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, with its latent legacies of West African architecture. Looters is organized by art historian Adrian Anagnost and artists Manol Gueorguiev and Abdi Farah.

Looters focuses on architectural images from three West African sites with historical ties to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast: the city-state of Ouidah, the city of Abomey in the Dahomey kingdom (in present-day Benin), and Benin City (in present-day Nigeria). Much of these sites’ historical architecture is destroyed, and in many cases, only images recorded by European visitors remain. Looters seeks to recover a hidden and perhaps unreliable archive of this architecture, found in the backgrounds of prints and photographs in which Europeans staged their versions of colonial encounters. This 2019 presentation of Looters in New Orleans also commemorates the 300th anniversary of what is thought to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans directly from West Africa to New Orleans in 1719, likely including one or more ships from Ouidah (present-day Benin). 

Looters will hold an exhibition reception from 4:00 to 6:00 PM on Friday, November 15th, and visitors are encouraged to visit the Ashé Cultural Arts Center’s Exploring the Diaspora: The Benin Republic, later that same evening. 

Looters will also feature a children’s art activity inspired by Dahomey carved wood designs on Saturday, November 16th, from 10:30 AM to 1:00 PM. 

Looters is funded in part by the Platforms Fund, a collaborative re-granting effort of Antenna and Ashé Cultural Arts Center with support by the Andy Warhol Foundation, and hosted by The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design. Special thanks to Francine Stock of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University.

The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, 1725 Baronne Street (map)

Artist's Talk: Andrea Fraser

Prospect New Orleans in collaboration with the Newcomb Art Department and the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund present:

Artist’s Talk by Andrea Fraser

 

Monday, September 16

6:00 pm

Freeman Auditorium (Rm. 205, Woldenberg Art Center)

Tulane University

Andrea Fraser performed Not just the few of us for the opening of Prospect.3: Notes for Now.  Not just the few of us is an interpretation of one public confrontation with racist systems in contemporary New Orleans: a 1991 City Council hearing regarding the official desegregation of the unofficially self-segregated Mardi Gras krewes. For Prospect.3 Fraser also installed Um Monumento as Fantasias Descartadas in the Newcomb Art Gallery. 

Andrea Fraser is an artist whose work investigates the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural institutions, fields, and groups. She is Professor, Interdisciplinary Studio Area Head, and Chair of the UCLA Department of Art. Retrospectives of her work have been presented by the Museum Ludwig Cologne (2013), the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2015), the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona and MUAC UNAM Mexico City (both 2016). Her most recent book, 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018)—co-published by the CCA Wattis Institute, Westreich/Wagner Publications, and MIT Press—documents the political contributions of the board members of over 125 major US art organizations in the 2016 election cycle and its aftermath, examining the intersection of cultural philanthropy and political finance in the age of plutocracy. She serves on the boards W.A.G.E, Grex (the West Coast Affiliate of the A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and on the Artist Council of the Hammer Museum.

New faculty: Fan Zhang, Asian Art

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Fan Zhang to the faculty as Professor of Practice, Asian Art.

Prof. Zhang specializes in the art and material culture of early medieval China (3rd–6th century CE) and the cultural interactions among East Asia, Central Asia, and Northeastern Asia through and beyond the Silk Road network. Adopting an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach, her research probes into issues around identity, migration, and hybridity in the ancient world. Her current book project, Cultural Encounters: Ethnic Complexity and Material Expressions in the Fifth-century Pingcheng, draws attention to the funerary art of Pingcheng, the capital city of the Northern Wei Dynasty, and explores how artworks function as effective vehicles for individuals to articulate one’s identities in a multi-ethnic society. Fan Zhang has conducted archaeological fieldwork in both China and Central Asia. She also participated in research and curatorial programs in several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Korea, and the Sichuan Museum.