This roundtable discussion brings together scholars, artists, and educators to debate relevant issues regarding the teaching art practice in museums and universities, with an emphasis on how these institutions can best foster the development of emerging art practitioners. How should pedagogical models of the twentieth century be updated in light of the way in which contemporary art has evolved? What are the challenges and opportunities in teaching art today given these fast transformations in contemporary art practice? How should the museum and the university and/or art school complement each other in the process of educating audiences and professionals? The program will serve as a culminating summary of discussions from a daylong think tank held at MoMA.

Roundtable Participants:

Ute Meta Bauer, Associate Professor, Director of Visual Arts Program, MIT
Carol Becker, Dean, School of the Arts, Columbia University
Olivia Gude, Artist and Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Chicago
Patricia Phillips, Art Department Chair, Cornell University
Kitty Scott, Director of Visual Arts, Banff Centre, Canada
Howard Singerman, Associate Professor, Contemporary Art and Theory, University of Virginia
Allison Smith, visual artist

Tickets ($10; members $8; students, seniors, and staff of other museums $5) can be purchased online, or at the lobby information desk and the Film desk.

For more info. . .

Panel discussion

Moderator: Dan Cameron, Founding Director and Chief Curator of Prospect.1 New Orleans

Panelists: Janine Antoni, Jacqueline Humphries, Wangechi Mutu, and Nari Ward, Prospect.1 artists

Introduction by Saskia Bos, Dean, The School of Art.

This event is free and open to the public.

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Travitsky will speak about The Online Bibliography of English Women Writers, 1500-1640, a growing list of scholarship of familiar women figures, recusants, women in the colonies, Marrano women, women translators and writers in French, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Gaelic and Welsh.

Free

Contact: 212=817-8905

http://web.gc.cuny.edu/womenstudies

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"From Ethiopia to Chechnya: Reflections on Humanitarian Action," a roundtable discussion sponsored by Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

The panel will look at several key crises at the end of the 20th century, examining how they have affected humanitarian activities and principles today: What did Ethiopia and North Korea teach us about addressing famine? How did interventions in Somalia, Sudan, Chechnya, and the Balkans change the way we think about security and delivering aid? How have humanitarian principles changed since their origins in the 19th century? Are they still suited to the 21st?

The roundtable will include: David Rieff, author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; Dr. Rony Brauman, former president of MSF; and Thomas Keenan, an associate professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College, who will moderate the discussion.

This event, co-sponsored by Bard College and NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge, is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit www.doctorswithoutborders.org or call 800.601.1466.

This spring, MSF will publish From Ethiopia to Chechnya: Reflections on Humanitarian Action, 1988-1999, a collection of essays written by Francois Jean (1956-1999), who was research director at MSF in the 1990s. During his time at MSF, Jean wrote about the difficulties and challenges faced by humanitarian aid workers in a shifting political landscape.

For more info. . .

Will the innovative 1997 Watershed Agreement succeed in protecting New York City's drinking water into the future? Three new ground-breaking studies take stock of the Agreement's performance. They report on water quality in the watershed; implementation of watershed protection measures; and the Agreement's impacts on the upstate economy.

Cathleen Breen, Watershed Protection Coordinator, New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG); Joan Hoffman, PhD, Professor of Economics, John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Bernard W. Sweeney, PhD, Director, Stroud Water Research Center

Moderator: Mirele B. Goldsmith, PhD

Sponsored by: Environmental Sciences Section

Please RSVP to Bernard Tuchman at bdtjpw@rcn.com

For more info . . .

HEAVY LIGHT SYMPOSIUM - One-Day Seminar

Art and Photography in Japan Today
1 - 3pm
Join selected artists from ICP's upcoming exhibition Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan for an afternoon symposium to discuss their work. The moderators of the sessions will be exhibition curators Christopher Phillips and Noriko Fuku. Serving as interpreter will be Linda Hoaglund, a noted film producer and a leading expert on Japanese culture. Makoto Aida lives and works in Tokyo. Mr. Aida describes his work as "both Japanese and contemporary." His paintings, sculptural objects, videos, and photographs often involve outrageous exaggerations of his compatriots' cultural attitudes. Naoya Hatakeyama lives and works in Tokyo. His large-format color landscapes and cityscapes reflect a continuing meditation on the tensions between human culture and the natural world.
Kenji Yanobe lives and works in Osaka. Mr. Yanobe's imaginative sculptural objects and installations grow out of his childhood fascination with manga, anime, and science fiction films. Many of his works explore the idea of survival in an apocalyptic world.
Tomoko Sawada lives and works in New York. Ms. Sawada attracted wide attention for her ID400 series of photobooth self-portraits, begun while she was still in art school. She has become one of Japan's most frequently exhibited artists, and has continued to use herself as her sole photographic model.

A Conversation with Hiroh Kikai
3:30 - 4:30pm
On the occasion of the publication of Asakusa Portaits by ICP/Steidl, Mr. Kikai will discuss his photographic work with Noriko Fuku and Christopher Phillips.
Hiroh Kikai has carried out an ongoing series of photographic portraits in the Asakusa district of Tokyo since the 1970s. With a radical economy of photographic means, he seems to isolate and lay bare his subject's essential character. His aim, he says, is to create portraits that set in motion a "two-way conversation between the viewer and the picture.

$5.00 / Members Free

Register: By Mail, Fax or Phone 212-857-0001

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In conjunction with the current exhibition by Tomma Abts, Kraus Family Senior Curator Laura Hoptman will moderate a discussion on abstraction as a method and idea with artists Thomas Nozkowski and Dana Schutz.

Thomas Nozkowski is a painter who has had sixty-eight one-person shows. His most recent exhibitions include an installation of new work at the 2007 Venice Biennial, a midcareer survey at the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany, 2007 and the Fisher-Landau Center, New York, 2008, and a one-person exhibition at Pace Wildenstein, New York, 2008. The New York Studio School presented a twenty-five-year survey of his drawings in January 2003. His work is represented in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Phillips Collection among many others. Currently, Nozkowski is the Bob and Happy Doran Visiting Artist at the Yale University Art Gallery. He is also Professor of Painting at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Forthcoming one-person exhibitions include The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and the Musée d'art contemporain, Montreal, Canada.

Dana Schutz was born in Michigan in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in commercial galleries in New York, Boston, and Paris. Schutz's paintings have also been presented in a number of group exhibitions including "Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age," Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2008; "USA TODAY," The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, 2007; "Fractured Figure," DESTE Foundation, Athens, 2007; "Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation," Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, 2007; "Closer to Home," 48th Corcoran Biennial, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2005; "Greater New York," PS1, Queens, (2005); "The Triumph of Painting," The Saatchi Gallery, London, 2005; and the Venice Biennial, 2003. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and many others. Currently, a group of new work by Schutz is on display at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. In July, she will participate in "After Nature," a group exhibition at the New Museum.

*This event is free with Museum admission but tickets are required.

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Decoys Curator Catherine Morris and WACK! Curator Connie Butler speak with exhibiting artists about making sculpture in New York in the 70s, the ways in which feminist content is or is not manifested in their work, and how they see their relationship to feminism then and now.

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A project by Bosko Blagojevic and S.C. Squibb
A film & video program: running time is aprox 50 minutes.

A Q&A with the artists will take place after the screening.

The temptation to anthropology arrives by way of an ostensibly complicit silence. In the translations of moments, motions, forms and bodies into narratives of people and history, silence persists. The constitutive insufficiencies of this language are in this sense both catalyst and climax. Thus this transfer is not, as has been supposed, merely violent — rather it is specifically destructive, a targeted demolition of possibility in return for a progressively impoverished self-knowing. Having built the world in glass we can see forever, only.

Ricardo Valentim's The World Must be Upside Down is a three-part film program that sets a lobotomized anthropology loose on a normalizing, amnesiac culture. Comprised of two films authored by the artist that function like raw documentary film footage, and a third found film, the program sets in motion certain frictions between a displaced strategy of representation and its subjects. The project presents: "O Outro Lado do Uso", 2005, "The Great American Soccer Explosion", 1982 (fIlm included in Film Festival, version 3, 2007) and "Floating Island", 2005.

Tirdad Zolghadr's Tropical Modernism is a short video about the fate of the Iranian Left in the wake of the 1979 revolution. Told by Dr. G Rahati, a member of the Iranian Leftist intelligentsia, the narrative is assembled solely from video footage shot by the subject himself. This method, championed by certain anthropological filmmakers working in Africa, is used by Zolghadr to elliptically trouble the nature of his own investigation.

(born in 1978 in Loulé, Portugal, currently living and working in New York) received his undergraduate degree in anthropology at the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon, and his M.F.A. in visual art at the School of Visual Arts, New York. His exhibitions include Film Festival at e-flux at unitednationsplaza, New York (2006), Contrabando curated by Carolina Grau at Luísa Strina Gallery, São Paulo (2006) and Art Statements at ArtBasel38, Basel (2007). Valentim has recently started a new series of works comprised of lectures including Growth and Culture at Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2008) and is producing a new project for Manifesta7, Trentino Alto Adige, Italy.

Tirdad Zolghadr is a freelance writer and curator based in Berlin. He has curated events in a wide range of venues, writes regularly for frieze magazine and other publications, and is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine. Zolghadr is also a founding member of the Shahrzad Art & Design collective, the co-director of several documentary films, and has published his first novel "Softcore" with Telegram Books London (now available in German and Italian). He is currently teaching at the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College NY, and curating the long term project "Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie" with Nav Haq.

For more info . . .

The Goethe-Institut New York presents "What Is Green Architecture?", a new series of conversations, lectures and events exploring the cutting-edge developments in the field and their impact on contemporary life as well as implications for the future. The series continues with a talk by noted architect Christoph Ingenhoven followed by a conversation with Andres Lepik.

Christoph Ingenhoven founded his Duesseldorf-based practice, Ingenhoven Architects, in 1985. His Projects focus on office buildings, industrial buildings, and landscape design.

Dr. Andres Lepik is Curator in the Architecture & Design Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

Organized by: Goethe-Institut New York

Free admission. No reservations required.

For more info . . .

Peter Rich

The vernacular and pre-colonial cultures of Africa demonstrate a sophisticated approach to living at one with the environment.

Architect and researcher Peter Rich has based his own efforts to build and structure a contemporary African sense of space and place on what he has learned while documenting, observing, and researching the indigenous, organic, and formalized settlements of South Africa, Mali, and Rwanda.

Rich's design practice and consulting work focus on creating space that responds sensitively to its cultural and ecological contexts, and on countering the creeping anonymity of African cities that results from the adoption, without translation, of global culture. He is widely recognized as an authority on African vernacular architecture, with seminal research on Ndebele, Bantwane, and Tswana settlements and recent research on organic urban settlements. In addition to leading his Johannesburg-based design practice, Peter Rich Architects, Rich has recently become Coordinator of the Urban Planning Unit of the city of Kigali in Rwanda.

Admission is free for Architecture League members; $10 for non-members. League members may make reservations by emailing rsvp@archleague.org. If you hold a reservation and your plans have changed, please notify the League. AIA and New York State continuing education credits are available.

For more info . . .

Please join AIA NY and the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for our annual conference on the role that architecture and planning can play in promoting physical activity for New Yorkers.

Introduction:
Commissioner Thomas Frieden, MPH, DoHMH and Commissioner David Burney, FAIA, NYC Department of Design and Construction

Keynote remarks:
Dr. James Sallis, Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University and Program Director of Active Living Research
Jan Gehl, Hon. FAIA, architect and public space consultant from Copenhagen, Denmark

Panel 1: PlaNYC and a Fit NYC
Assistant Commissioner Lynn Silver, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (Moderator); Commissioner Adrian Benepe, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation; Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC Department of Transportation; Alexandros Washburn, Chief Urban Designer at the Department of City Planning

Panel 2: Thoughts from the Field
Joyce Lee, AIA, NYC Office of Management and Budget (Moderator); Brandon Mitchell, Full Spectrum NYC; Vishaan Chakrabarti, Related Companies; Stephanie Gelb, AIA, Battery Park City Authority; Robyne Kassen, Assoc. AIA, Pedestrian Studio Organized by: AIA NY Chapter and the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Contact: Laura Manville, lmanville@aiany.org.

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Arnold W. Brunner (1857-1925): A Life in Architecture An illustrated lecture by Dr. Samuel Gruber, 2006 Brunner Award recipient

Arnold Brunner was a leading American architect and urban planner from 1885 to 1925. Today, most architects know his name, but few know his work or can even name his many buildings. This year, the 150th anniversary of Brunner's birth, architectural historian Samuel Gruber was awarded the Brunner Grant from the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter to research Brunner's life and work. Brunner is known as the first successful American-born Jewish architect, and an important designer of synagogues and Jewish institutional buildings. But he was also one of the founders of modern urban planning and an important designer of civic architecture in New York City, Cleveland, Harrisburg, Albany, and elsewhere. His work on the Cleveland Plan and other "City Beautiful" projects (which he always called "the City Practical") helped transform American cities. In New York, in addition to designing over two dozen buildings, he was also influential in developing the first zoning laws.

Brunner's transition from the H.H. Richardson-inspired architecture of his early career (with Thomas Tryon) to the rigorous classicism and historicism of his mature years is representative of the transition experienced in American architecture between the 1880s and 1920s. In an illustrated lecture, Dr. Gruber will review the highlights of Brunner's career, and place his life and work in the context of Jewish and American values and aesthetics from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age.

SAMUEL D. GRUBER is Director of the Jewish Heritage Research Center (Syracuse, NY). Dr. Gruber is author of American Synagogues: A Century of Architecture and Jewish Community (Rizzoli, 2003) and Synagogues (Metrobooks, NY, 1999); co-author of Survey of Historic Jewish Sites in the Czech Republic (1995) and Survey of Historic Jewish Sites in Poland (1994, second revised edition, 1995); and a contributor to many publications including Jewish Identity in Contemporary Architecture, (Prestel, 2004.). He is a frequent contributor to the Forward newspaper, and the author of numerous reports and articles about medieval architecture, Jewish art and architecture and historic preservation and is presently involved in over thirty research, documentation, conservation, planning and preservation projects worldwide. Dr. Gruber is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and is Rothman Lecturer in Judaic Studies at Syracuse University. He lives in Syracuse, New York, where is President of the Preservation association of Central New York.

Speaker: Samuel D. Gruber, Director of the Jewish Heritage Research Center, Syracuse, NY

Organized by: Center for Architecture. Contact: 212.358.6121

For more info . . .

The Columbia Climate Center and The Earth Institute at Columbia University present "Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Change Reveals About the Current Threat - and How to Counter It," a lecture and book signing with Wallace S. Broecker, Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University.

Featuring remarks by:

Peter Schlosser, Director, Columbia Climate Center

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University

Klaus Lackner, Director, Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy

Tom Chapin, Grammy Award-winning American musician, entertainer, singer-songwriter, storyteller

Contact Earth Institute Events: events@ei.columbia.edu

For more information on the Columbia Climate Center and the Earth Institute visit www.earth.columbia.edu

For more info . . .

Janet Browne, Aramont Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University
MALS Bioethics, Science, and Society Lecture Series

Professor Browne will deliver this years Joseph H. Hazen lecture, and will be speaking about Darwin, the subject of her recent book that was the winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Heinemann Award.

Reception to follow, 7:15-8:00 PM; to RSVP for the reception following the lecture, please contact Joseph Dauben before May 14: jdauben@gc.cuny.edu.

The Hazen Lecture is cosponsored by the History of Science Society and the New York Academy of Sciences.
The History and Philosophy of Science Section of the New York Academy of Sciences holds multiple meetings covering a wide range of topics within the field. The Section's advisory committee works to bring together distinguished lecturers and scholars to promote discussion of their most recent research, or topics of critical current interest on issues related to the history and philosophy of science, technology, medicine, and relevant social and ethical questions. Topics include the history of related disciplines in all historical periods from antiquity to the present, studied through diverse methodologies. The goal of the Section is to keep the Academy, its members, and those who attend its meetings well-informed about current work and the major figures-- nationally and internationally--who are making the most significant contributions to the history and philosophy of science.

Free. Contact: 212-817-8481

For more info . . .

Alex Zaks, Schering Plough; Raina Maier, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Arizona; Birgit Kosjek, Merck; Panel Moderator: John Leazer, Merck

This highly interdisciplinary group brings together scientists and engineers with key stakeholders and policy makers from academia, business, and government who are interested in understanding the broad range of scientific methods and disciplines that underlie key environmental challenges. This year's focus will be on issues related to global warming with an emphasis on energy sources, energy storage, and carbon management.

Abstracts

Biocatalysis from an Environmental Perspective: An Alternate Look at the Emerging Field
Alex Zaks, Schering Plough
The value of biocatalysis for the development of pharmaceuticals is becoming increasingly clear. Indeed, numerous environmentally friendly commercial processes that exploit an enzyme's selectivity and ability to operate under mild conditions have been developed and scaled-up. The talk will exemplify how biocatalytic approaches can satisfy the green chemistry requirements in maximizing atom economy, minimizing waste, and eliminating the need for temporary protections and de-protections.

Reception to follow.

Sponsored by: Green Science and Environmental Systems, a PS&E program

For more info . . .

Designing Projects in China and Beyond - Avoiding Legal Pitfalls and Overcoming Other Practical Obstacles

When taking advantage of the building boom in China and working on projects elsewhere in the world, U. S. architects should be aware of the cultural differences, practical difficulties and legal pitfalls they will be facing in other countries, and should know how to deal with these issues and to protect themselves.

Learn more from Yao Fu Bailey, a New York attorney specializing in advising architects on design agreements. Mrs. Bailey grew up and practiced in China before beginning her legal career in the United States. She is a partner of Menaker & Herrmann LLP, and is recently selected to receive the "2008 Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business" Award sponsored by Asian American Business Development Center. Mrs. Bailey's practice focuses on real estate, with a concentration in commercial leasing, and commercial and residential real property transfer, construction law, and corporate law.

Presented by Yao Fu Bailey of Menaker & Herrmann LLP

Organized by AIA International Committee

Member Price: Free / Nonmember Price: $20

For more info . . .

The Hispanic World of Jonathan Brown: A Symposium
Sir John Elliott, Keynote Address, "Monarchy and Empire" and the presentation of a new book of Jonathan Brown's collected writings on Velázquez

Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History, University of Oxford

This lecture will explore the ways in which our understanding of Spain's monarchy and empire have benefited from and been changed by the interaction of historians and art historians. It is the keynote address of "The Hispanic World of Jonathan Brown," a two-day symposium jointly presented by The Frick Collection and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in honor of Jonathan Brown, Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts, New York University.

No RSVPs are necessary. Seating is limited and will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Additional seating with audio-visual feed will be available in the adjacent room.

For more info . . .

Dance critic and writer Elizabeth Zimmer presents this video-illustrated Dance Talks program. The presentation will introduce the choreographers and works that comprise The French Collection, a new series presented by the Joyce Theater, featuring three of France’s premier contemporary dance companies: Compagnie Heddy Maalem, Compagnie Maguy Marin, and Ballet Biarritz.

Presenter: Ms. Zimmer writes for Dance Magazine, Metro, and other publications here and abroad.

The French Collection at the Joyce Theater
Compagnie Heddy Maalem, June 10 -15
Compagnie Maguy Marin, June 17-22
Ballet Biarritz, June 24 – June 28

For more info . . .

Mark Leckey will give a lecture on the unstable nature of images accompanied by a collection of visual examples. He will address the divisions between static and time-based imagery, and the theoretics of a highly visual culture. This talk will be performative and informative, engaging the structure of the lecture format while working inside of it.

For more info . . .