Paola Antonelli is Senior Curator, Architecture & Design, and Director, Research & Development, The Museum of Modern Art.

The Daniel H. Silberberg Lectures, the longest running lecture series at the Institute of Fine Arts, is planned and coordinated by the Graduate Student Association. Art historians, archaeologists and conservators, specializing in a variety of periods and genres are invited to share their latest research with the IFA community and the public. 

The Silberberg lectures are held on selected Tuesdays at 6 p.m. in the Institute's first floor Lecture Hall at 1 East 78th Street. The lectures are free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis.

2015-2016 Theme: Scapes

Coordinators: Charlotte Healy, Riad Kherdeen, and Johanna Sluiter

The history of art and architecture has a long and complicated relationship with landscape. Traditionally valued in the East as the highest form of painting, the genre was largely marginalized in Western art until the advent of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, as artists moved away from mimetic representation towards abstraction, conceptualism, and eventually installation, land art, and performance, focus similarly shifted from the illusionistic space of nature to the real space of the gallery/site. Michel Foucault diagnosed this pervasive condition in 1967, asserting, “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.” More concretely, the organization of space and the role of land- and cityscapes have always been of primary concern in the realm of architecture and urban design. 

The 2015-2016 Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture Series will not only explore this complex history of landscape in art and architecture, but also examine various historical and theoretical approaches to consideringspace, place, and location in the study of art, architecture, and design. We have taken landscape’s suffix “-scape” – both an anagram and synonym of “space” – to encompass ideas of space, place, and location real and imagined, physical and conceptual, durational and unchanging. IFA professor Jonathan Hay devised the terms “imagescape” and “surfacescape” in order to better characterize Chinese paintings and decorative objects. What are some of the other “-scapes” of art history and how do we describe, theorize, envision, create, measure, map, navigate, and move through them? What tools and methods are at our disposal for critically evaluating space, place, and location in artistic and architectural practice?

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