“An Art History Yet to Come”: Kirsten Scheid on Palestinian Art

10/13/20 • 43 min

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Kirsten Scheid, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Beirut. In 2019–2020, while the Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, Kirsten worked on an ethnography of aesthetic encounters in contemporary Palestine, building on her career-long research into and archival documentation of art-making in Palestine and Lebanon. In their conversation, Kirsten and Caro discuss issues of access and ethics around archives, and Kirsten shares her belief in the power of archives to “hail an art history yet to come.” They also talk about curatorial projects and consider imagination as an ethical practice.

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“A Set of Ways of Engaging”: Lisa Lee on Thomas Hirschhorn & Materiality

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler speaks with Lisa Lee, Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and Florence Gould Foundation Fellow at the Clark in spring 2020. While a fellow, Lisa worked on a project tentatively titled “Thomas Hirschhorn’s Real Abstraction, 1984–94,” which focuses on a critical period in the life of the Swiss artist, who is known for his work in collage and monument-making, primarily with found materials. Through working with these materials, often in public spaces, his art grapples with the political, economic, and social conditions of contemporary life. Lisa also discusses her work on the German artist Isa Genzken. This conversation explores Lisa’s interest in the tension of what she describes as work that highlights the possibility of art and its everyday political power.

Next Episode

“Looking as Knowing”: Svetlana Alpers on Critical Thinking and Photography

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Svetlana Alpers, a specialist of Dutch Golden Age painting and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. In this conversation, Svetlana shares how literary criticism influenced her early encounters with art and reflects on her intellectual formation at Harvard in the 1960s, and her role forming the art history department at Berkeley. She reflects on the altered state of the discipline today, and levels a critique of the turn towards global art history. Finally, they discuss the relation between painting and photography in light of her new book on Walker Evans, and Svetlana draws out parallels between this new project and her seminal book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century.

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing - “An Art History Yet to Come”: Kirsten Scheid on Palestinian Art

Transcript

Caro Fowler

Welcome to In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing. I am Caro Fowler, your host and Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In this series of conversations, I talk with art historians and artists about what it means to write history and make art, and the ways in which making informs how we create not only our world, but also ourselves.

In this episode of In the