Leah Modigliani, "The Best Books for Seeing and Moving Through the City With Critical Eyes"
Shepherd "Best Books" Series
College Art Association Annual Conference
Walls, Blockades and Barricades: Art at the Margins of the New Enclosures
Co-chair with Noah Randolph
Friday, Feb 16, 2024 4:30-6:00PM, Hilton Chicago, Salon C-7
We are living in an era of walls. Not only physical walls, which have exponentially increased since the ballyhooed fall of the Berlin Wall, but boundaries made of identities, economies, illnesses, and politics that seem impenetrable. By 2021, 72 border walls covered 31,000 kilometers of the Earth’s surface, 56 of them built after 9/11 and 32 after the Arab Spring. The rigidity of the border wall appears as an ironic indicator of the fear of the loss of state sovereignty, performing what border theorists call a theatrical presence to assuage the anxieties of an internal population. It’s also striking that the image of a wall, barricade or blockade is formally, but not actually, at odds with Capitalism’s reorganization of space over the last four decades. The latter is consistently described by a wide range of scholars as deterritorialization; a process by which surplus labor and capital is deployed to new regional locations to accumulate. This panel considers how artists work in, around, and against political, geo-economic and environmental barriers to question these social relations. What are the solutions and provocations that artists use to confront and unsettle spaces of control? What new imaginaries and speculative futures do such artworks engender?
Panelists:
Anna Sejbæk Torp-Pedersen, KU Leuven, "Counter-Mapping Migration – Erasing the Border"
Karina Skvirsy, Lafayette College, "How to build a wall and other ruins"
Albert Stabler, Illinois State University, "Guerrilla assemblage in the context of urban education"
Shepherd "Best Books" Series
College Art Association Annual Conference
Walls, Blockades and Barricades: Art at the Margins of the New Enclosures
Co-chair with Noah Randolph
Friday, Feb 16, 2024 4:30-6:00PM, Hilton Chicago, Salon C-7
We are living in an era of walls. Not only physical walls, which have exponentially increased since the ballyhooed fall of the Berlin Wall, but boundaries made of identities, economies, illnesses, and politics that seem impenetrable. By 2021, 72 border walls covered 31,000 kilometers of the Earth’s surface, 56 of them built after 9/11 and 32 after the Arab Spring. The rigidity of the border wall appears as an ironic indicator of the fear of the loss of state sovereignty, performing what border theorists call a theatrical presence to assuage the anxieties of an internal population. It’s also striking that the image of a wall, barricade or blockade is formally, but not actually, at odds with Capitalism’s reorganization of space over the last four decades. The latter is consistently described by a wide range of scholars as deterritorialization; a process by which surplus labor and capital is deployed to new regional locations to accumulate. This panel considers how artists work in, around, and against political, geo-economic and environmental barriers to question these social relations. What are the solutions and provocations that artists use to confront and unsettle spaces of control? What new imaginaries and speculative futures do such artworks engender?
Panelists:
Anna Sejbæk Torp-Pedersen, KU Leuven, "Counter-Mapping Migration – Erasing the Border"
Karina Skvirsy, Lafayette College, "How to build a wall and other ruins"
Albert Stabler, Illinois State University, "Guerrilla assemblage in the context of urban education"
In Press, Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City
Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action
By Leah Modigliani
Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action
By Leah Modigliani
ORDER HERE
Through analyses of public artworks that have taken the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s, this book theorises artists’ responses to global inequities as cultural manifestations of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centres.
This book is the first to analyse artworks as forms of counter-revanchism in the context of the rise of the global city. How do artists channel the global spatial conflicts of the 21st century through their behaviours, actions, and constructions in and on the actually existing conditions of the street? What does it mean for artists—the very symbol of freedom of personal expression—to shut down space? To refuse entry? To block others’ passage? The late critical geographer Neil Smith’s influential writing on the revanchist city is used as a theoretical frame for understanding how contemporary artists engender the public sphere through their work in public urban spaces. Each chapter is a case study that analyses artworks that have taken the form of walls and barricades in China, USA, UK, Ukraine, and Mexico. In doing so, the author draws upon diverse fields including art history, geography, philosophy, political science, theatre studies, and urban studies to situate the art in a broader context of the humanities with the aim of modelling interdisciplinary research grounded in an ethics of solidarity with global social justice work. Collectively these case studies reveal how artists’ local responses to urban revanchism since the end of the Cold War are productive reorientations of social relations and harbingers of worlds to come.
By using plain language and avoiding excessive academic jargon, the book is accessible to a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in the fields of studio art, modern and contemporary art history, performance studies, visual culture, and visual studies; especially in relation to those interested in conceptual practices, performance art, site-specificity, public art, political activism, and socially engaged art. Cultural geographers and urban theorists interested in the social and political ramifications of temporary and everyday urbanism will also find the analysis of artworks relevant to their own studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades
1. Acting Politically: Counter-revanchist Art in the Public Sphere
2: River Crossing: Lin Yilin’s Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995)
3. The View from the Cell: Santiago Sierra’s Obstruction of a Freeway with a Truck’s Trailer (1998) in the Long Sixties
4. 24 Hour Placemaking: Heather Peak and Ivan Morison's I lost her near Fantasy Island. Life has not been the same (2006) and Journée des Barricades (2008)
5. Reflecting the Commons at the Border of Enclosure: The Mirrored Repertoires of Euromaidan, Greenham Common and #NODAPL
Conclusion: Counter-revanchist Art and the Inauguration of Change
Bibliography
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Through analyses of public artworks that have taken the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s, this book theorises artists’ responses to global inequities as cultural manifestations of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centres.
This book is the first to analyse artworks as forms of counter-revanchism in the context of the rise of the global city. How do artists channel the global spatial conflicts of the 21st century through their behaviours, actions, and constructions in and on the actually existing conditions of the street? What does it mean for artists—the very symbol of freedom of personal expression—to shut down space? To refuse entry? To block others’ passage? The late critical geographer Neil Smith’s influential writing on the revanchist city is used as a theoretical frame for understanding how contemporary artists engender the public sphere through their work in public urban spaces. Each chapter is a case study that analyses artworks that have taken the form of walls and barricades in China, USA, UK, Ukraine, and Mexico. In doing so, the author draws upon diverse fields including art history, geography, philosophy, political science, theatre studies, and urban studies to situate the art in a broader context of the humanities with the aim of modelling interdisciplinary research grounded in an ethics of solidarity with global social justice work. Collectively these case studies reveal how artists’ local responses to urban revanchism since the end of the Cold War are productive reorientations of social relations and harbingers of worlds to come.
By using plain language and avoiding excessive academic jargon, the book is accessible to a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in the fields of studio art, modern and contemporary art history, performance studies, visual culture, and visual studies; especially in relation to those interested in conceptual practices, performance art, site-specificity, public art, political activism, and socially engaged art. Cultural geographers and urban theorists interested in the social and political ramifications of temporary and everyday urbanism will also find the analysis of artworks relevant to their own studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades
1. Acting Politically: Counter-revanchist Art in the Public Sphere
2: River Crossing: Lin Yilin’s Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995)
3. The View from the Cell: Santiago Sierra’s Obstruction of a Freeway with a Truck’s Trailer (1998) in the Long Sixties
4. 24 Hour Placemaking: Heather Peak and Ivan Morison's I lost her near Fantasy Island. Life has not been the same (2006) and Journée des Barricades (2008)
5. Reflecting the Commons at the Border of Enclosure: The Mirrored Repertoires of Euromaidan, Greenham Common and #NODAPL
Conclusion: Counter-revanchist Art and the Inauguration of Change
Bibliography
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Participation in Group Exhibition
The Woodmere Annual: 81st Juried Exhibition
06/03/2023-08/27/2023
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The Woodmere Annual: 81st Juried Exhibition
06/03/2023-08/27/2023
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Archives Research Residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
May & June 2023
Working on a new video/installation Subtle Moves Destroy a Society
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Artist in Residence at the Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy
Sept 12 - Oct 8, 2022
Working on series of photographs titled City of God.
See artists talk on YouTube here.
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Sept 12 - Oct 8, 2022
Working on series of photographs titled City of God.
See artists talk on YouTube here.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------College Art Association Annual Conference 2021
Paper presented: Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, 1995, Guangzhou: Lin Yilin’s Moving Wall as Site-Responsive Adaptation
Panel "Redefining Site Specificity Through Displacement," Online with live discussion scheduled for Thursday Feb 11 at 10-10:30AM.
The paper focuses on Lin Yilin’s performance Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995), a street performance he made in Guangzhou, China in 1995. Lin physically moved a concrete brick wall across a busy street over 90 minutes: one-by-one he removed a column of bricks from the left side, and replaced them on the right until the wall reached the other side as traffic flowed ceaselessly around him. In video documentation workers are seen behind him constructing the then-tallest city tower in Asia. The formal and conceptual aspects of Lin’s work will be analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes critical geographical research on urban revanchism, and art-historical research on site-responsiveness (as distinct from earlier notions of site-specificity). His work will be discussed in relationship to the increasing visibility of displaced migrant labor in Chinese cities at this time, the massive scale of urban development in the Pearl River Delta after Deng Xiaoping’s opening and reform policies, and the work’s relation to Chinese systems of knowledge such as the Daoist principle of attaining wisdom through self-examination and perfected ritual practice (wu wei). Lin’s wall is not a site-specific barricade, but a site-responsive and counter-revanchist adaptation to his and his peers’ quickly-changing social conditions and limitations. The paper is derived from one of the chapters in my book-in-progress Enacting Resistance: Counter-Revanchist Art in the Age of the ‘Free’ Market.
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Paper presented: Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, 1995, Guangzhou: Lin Yilin’s Moving Wall as Site-Responsive Adaptation
Panel "Redefining Site Specificity Through Displacement," Online with live discussion scheduled for Thursday Feb 11 at 10-10:30AM.
The paper focuses on Lin Yilin’s performance Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995), a street performance he made in Guangzhou, China in 1995. Lin physically moved a concrete brick wall across a busy street over 90 minutes: one-by-one he removed a column of bricks from the left side, and replaced them on the right until the wall reached the other side as traffic flowed ceaselessly around him. In video documentation workers are seen behind him constructing the then-tallest city tower in Asia. The formal and conceptual aspects of Lin’s work will be analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes critical geographical research on urban revanchism, and art-historical research on site-responsiveness (as distinct from earlier notions of site-specificity). His work will be discussed in relationship to the increasing visibility of displaced migrant labor in Chinese cities at this time, the massive scale of urban development in the Pearl River Delta after Deng Xiaoping’s opening and reform policies, and the work’s relation to Chinese systems of knowledge such as the Daoist principle of attaining wisdom through self-examination and perfected ritual practice (wu wei). Lin’s wall is not a site-specific barricade, but a site-responsive and counter-revanchist adaptation to his and his peers’ quickly-changing social conditions and limitations. The paper is derived from one of the chapters in my book-in-progress Enacting Resistance: Counter-Revanchist Art in the Age of the ‘Free’ Market.
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Group exhibition
Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale
November 19, 2020 - April 11, 2021
This exhibition invites viewers to consider how size and repetition can be interpreted as political gestures in the practices of many women artists. Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale examines the approaches of women artists for whom space is a critical feature of their work, whether they take the space on a wall, the real estate of a room through sculpture and installation, engage seriality as a spatial visual practice, cast a wide legacy in art history or claim the space of their body. This exhibition invites viewers to consider how size and repetition can be interpreted as political gestures in the practices of many women artists.
Featured artists include Mequitta Ahuja, Polly Apfelbaum, Jennifer Bartlett, Maria Berrío, Chakaia Booker, Emily Brown, Joan Brown, Tammy Rae Carland, Squeak Carnwath, Vija Celmins, Elizabeth Colomba, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Eiko Fan, Louise Fishman, Audrey Flack, Mary Frank, Viola Frey, Hope Gangloff, Judy Gelles, Nancy Graves, Guerrilla Girls, Ellen Harvey, Clarity Haynes, Orit Hofshi, Barbara Kruger, Winifred Lutz, Vanessa Marsh, Ana Mendieta, Leah Modigliani, Elizabeth Murray, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Dona Nelson, Louise Nevelson, Ebony G. Patterson, Liliana Porter, Debra Priestly, Ana Vizcarra Rankin, Faith Ringgold, Mia Rosenthal, Brie Ruais, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Mira Schor, Alyson Shotz, Sylvia Sleigh, Becky Suss, Mickalene Thomas, Stacy Lynn Waddell, Marie Watt, Dyani White Hawk and Deborah Willis.
Featuring works from the permanent collection, including many recent acquisitions, Taking Space is one of three exhibitions at PAFA in 2020–2021 celebrating women artists in honor of the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote.
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"Leah Modigliani: Art as Palimpsest, An Essay By Ksenia Nouril," Grizzly Grizzly, Speak Speak, July 22, 2020.
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Solo Exhibition
Rome, 1947
Grizzly Grizzly, Philadelphia, PA
March 6-29
Opens: Friday, March 6. Runs through March 29, 2020.
From the press release
Press contact: Amy Hicks, [email protected]
This March Grizzly Grizzly premieres Rome, 1947, a solo exhibition by Leah Modigliani. Her new work is made in response to our contemporary political climate to be exhibited in the midst of the democratic primaries in this important election year. For Rome, 1947, Modigliani installs a large-scale puppet of a controversial public figure, an archival photograph, and a political protest poster. She takes her inspiration from a 1947 press photograph that shows Italians protesting Premier de Gasperi’s Christian Democratic Government because of its anti-communist stance and financial ties to the United States. Liberty is bound to the Christian Democratic crossed-shield, and de Gasperi is depicted as a puppet manipulated by Wall Street. Of her version Modigliani states, “Trump takes the place of de Gasperi, but instead of Wall Street he is seen as a puppet of his own narcissistic impulses. Liberty remains trussed to conservative values that, alongside Trump’s ego, constitute the most significant assault to American democracy in decades.”
Modigliani’s work moves fluidly between art practice, academic research, and criticism. Each discipline is an equal partner in a creative practice that draws upon the history and methods of fine art, art history, critical theory, cultural studies, geography, and anthropology. Through sculpture, photography, installation and performance, she re-enacts and re-makes other people’s political actions, objects, and speeches from times lost or forgotten. While retaining as much of the original intent as possible, these productions are modified to reflect her own biography, and to highlight the social values she identifies with. This performative pedagogy, which Modigliani has sometimes called “critical plagiarism,” is enabled through archival research and her commitment to interdisciplinary methodologies of making and thinking. Modigliani’s new speech acts testify to her solidarity with the history of and ongoing collective struggle for equity and social justice. The artist will be present at the opening reception.
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Journal publication
Leah Modigliani, “Critical Plagiarism and the Politics of Creative Labor: Photographs, History, and Re-enactment,” Mapping Meaning, the Journal 3 (Fall, 2019): 86-99.
In the special issue "Archives and Photography," guest edited by Nat Castañeda, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky and Trudi Lynn Smith.
Click here to download or print a copy
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Leah Modigliani, “Critical Plagiarism and the Politics of Creative Labor: Photographs, History, and Re-enactment,” Mapping Meaning, the Journal 3 (Fall, 2019): 86-99.
In the special issue "Archives and Photography," guest edited by Nat Castañeda, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky and Trudi Lynn Smith.
Click here to download or print a copy
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Christine Conley, "Leah Modigliani Engendering an Avant-Garde: The Unsettled Landscapes of Vancouver Photo-Conceptualism," RACAR 44, no. 1 (2019)
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Group Exhibition
The Stamp Gallery
University of Maryland
On View February 13 – March 30, 2019
Visualizing Narratives: Shaping the Resistance
Protests and opposition movements have long been a social tool by which to mobilize groups of people around shared grievances, allowing them to collectively interrogate power structures and enact change through the discursive processes of resistance. Various forms of protest have been an important point at which resistance enters the public space and gains broader visibility, often through media images that become symbols of the movement. The images produced around protests and resistance movements – by artists, the media, or everyday documentarians – thus play a large role in shaping narratives for public consumption.
This exhibition seeks to explore the role of visual production around protests and forms of resistance. It will consider such questions as: How does the mass media visually shape narratives? How does artwork respond to, reshape, interrogate, or blur these narratives? How does the visual response to protests and resistance movements by artists memorialize or historicize the events?
Other artists included are Becci Davis, Malik Lloyd, Susanne Slavick, and the Tug Collective.
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The Stamp Gallery
University of Maryland
On View February 13 – March 30, 2019
Visualizing Narratives: Shaping the Resistance
Protests and opposition movements have long been a social tool by which to mobilize groups of people around shared grievances, allowing them to collectively interrogate power structures and enact change through the discursive processes of resistance. Various forms of protest have been an important point at which resistance enters the public space and gains broader visibility, often through media images that become symbols of the movement. The images produced around protests and resistance movements – by artists, the media, or everyday documentarians – thus play a large role in shaping narratives for public consumption.
This exhibition seeks to explore the role of visual production around protests and forms of resistance. It will consider such questions as: How does the mass media visually shape narratives? How does artwork respond to, reshape, interrogate, or blur these narratives? How does the visual response to protests and resistance movements by artists memorialize or historicize the events?
Other artists included are Becci Davis, Malik Lloyd, Susanne Slavick, and the Tug Collective.
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UAAC conference, University of Waterloo, Oct 26, 2018
Critical Plagiarism and the Politics of Creative Labor: Photographs, History, and Re-enactment
Participation in the roundtable Performing art criticism: new (materialist) research methods for contemporary art organized by Shana MacDonald and also includes Kimberley MCloud and Melanie Wilmink.
Critical Plagiarism and the Politics of Creative Labor: Photographs, History, and Re-enactment
Whether theorized as a puncture in one’s emotional life, as a mediation compelling or protecting from empathic response, as an indexical trace, or as manifestation of ideological construct, photographs are most often understood as evocative markers of the past; evidence of lost loves or labors. However, as Kaja Silverman has recently reminded us, photographs also present viewers with an image they can relate to now, an image analogous to our own condition. In this position paper, through the prism of my own work as an artist, historian and critic whose point of intellectual and creative departure is often a photograph, I follow Silverman’s renovation of the history of photography and add to it performance historian Rebecca Schneider’s proposition that we “think of the still [photograph] not as an artifact of non-returning time, but as situated in a live moment of its encounter that it, through its articulation as gesture or hail, predicts.” I understand this as an invitation to let time and embodied experience travel into the photograph, to allow the image to reveal the world to us now, to speak to our future. But how can one reenact a historical text as a living document that refuses to succumb to what Paige Sarlin described as “New Left-wing Melancholy;” that is the objectification of a historical social process into a contemporary commodity in the cultural realm. As Sarlin said, “What does it mean to be an artist who takes history as her subject?” What is my work? What is at stake?
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Critical Plagiarism and the Politics of Creative Labor: Photographs, History, and Re-enactment
Participation in the roundtable Performing art criticism: new (materialist) research methods for contemporary art organized by Shana MacDonald and also includes Kimberley MCloud and Melanie Wilmink.
Critical Plagiarism and the Politics of Creative Labor: Photographs, History, and Re-enactment
Whether theorized as a puncture in one’s emotional life, as a mediation compelling or protecting from empathic response, as an indexical trace, or as manifestation of ideological construct, photographs are most often understood as evocative markers of the past; evidence of lost loves or labors. However, as Kaja Silverman has recently reminded us, photographs also present viewers with an image they can relate to now, an image analogous to our own condition. In this position paper, through the prism of my own work as an artist, historian and critic whose point of intellectual and creative departure is often a photograph, I follow Silverman’s renovation of the history of photography and add to it performance historian Rebecca Schneider’s proposition that we “think of the still [photograph] not as an artifact of non-returning time, but as situated in a live moment of its encounter that it, through its articulation as gesture or hail, predicts.” I understand this as an invitation to let time and embodied experience travel into the photograph, to allow the image to reveal the world to us now, to speak to our future. But how can one reenact a historical text as a living document that refuses to succumb to what Paige Sarlin described as “New Left-wing Melancholy;” that is the objectification of a historical social process into a contemporary commodity in the cultural realm. As Sarlin said, “What does it mean to be an artist who takes history as her subject?” What is my work? What is at stake?
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Symposium: Photography as Art: Jeff Wall's Significance Today
07/25/18 to 07/26/18
Paper titled “Jeff Wall's Picture for Women (1979) and The Destroyed Room (1978): Colonizing the Space of Gendered Discourse” at at Kunsthalle Mannheim
Jeff Wall sparked intense discussion about photography as art within artistic circles right from his first exhibition in 1978. By the 1990s, he had legitimized recognition of photography as art to the point that the question today is how his art conversely has influenced photography. Wall and his oeuvre are the starting point of the book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008) by art historian Michael Fried, who focuses on Wall’s large format tableaus drawing on the art historical principal of history painting, as well as on Wall’s mise-en-scene in his fine art photography. Wall himself has led development of how his work is perceived through his critical pieces on fellow contemporary artists, his interviews, and artist statements. The symposium focuses on these reciprocal discussions, linking them to current art historical research into the latest fine art photography.
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07/25/18 to 07/26/18
Paper titled “Jeff Wall's Picture for Women (1979) and The Destroyed Room (1978): Colonizing the Space of Gendered Discourse” at at Kunsthalle Mannheim
Jeff Wall sparked intense discussion about photography as art within artistic circles right from his first exhibition in 1978. By the 1990s, he had legitimized recognition of photography as art to the point that the question today is how his art conversely has influenced photography. Wall and his oeuvre are the starting point of the book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008) by art historian Michael Fried, who focuses on Wall’s large format tableaus drawing on the art historical principal of history painting, as well as on Wall’s mise-en-scene in his fine art photography. Wall himself has led development of how his work is perceived through his critical pieces on fellow contemporary artists, his interviews, and artist statements. The symposium focuses on these reciprocal discussions, linking them to current art historical research into the latest fine art photography.
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Solo Exhibition
Art Gallery of Windsor
Washington D.C., 1939; Basel, 1957; Paris, 1958; Berkeley, 1969; Chicago, 1969; London, 1969; Windsor, 1983…
Feb. 17 - May 13, 2018
opening is Feb 16 evening, artist will be present
Leah Modigliani: Washington D.C., 1939; Basel, 1957; Paris, 1958; Berkeley, 1969; Chicago, 1969; London, 1969; Windsor, 1983... is a solo exhibition of works by Leah Modigliani reflecting on themes of history, protest and power narrated through a feminist lens. Embedded within a discourse of representation, Modigliani challenges the ways in which political resistance has been disseminated and archived in popular culture. By reconstituting and reimaging moments of activism on white platforms inside the gallery, the artist is both commemorating these moments in history as well as exemplifying a material method for protest. Inevitably, the works also distort the events they make reference to, sometimes reducing them to the level of the commodity, to an easily acquired and consumed surrogate for political action, or into a staged performance-turned sculpture that remains frozen in time and place. However, in each instance, Modigliani has created a restorative gesture to critique the power of the photographic image, the document or the memory of history whose political efficacy remains an open question.
Organized and circulated by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, PEI
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Art Gallery of Windsor
Washington D.C., 1939; Basel, 1957; Paris, 1958; Berkeley, 1969; Chicago, 1969; London, 1969; Windsor, 1983…
Feb. 17 - May 13, 2018
opening is Feb 16 evening, artist will be present
Leah Modigliani: Washington D.C., 1939; Basel, 1957; Paris, 1958; Berkeley, 1969; Chicago, 1969; London, 1969; Windsor, 1983... is a solo exhibition of works by Leah Modigliani reflecting on themes of history, protest and power narrated through a feminist lens. Embedded within a discourse of representation, Modigliani challenges the ways in which political resistance has been disseminated and archived in popular culture. By reconstituting and reimaging moments of activism on white platforms inside the gallery, the artist is both commemorating these moments in history as well as exemplifying a material method for protest. Inevitably, the works also distort the events they make reference to, sometimes reducing them to the level of the commodity, to an easily acquired and consumed surrogate for political action, or into a staged performance-turned sculpture that remains frozen in time and place. However, in each instance, Modigliani has created a restorative gesture to critique the power of the photographic image, the document or the memory of history whose political efficacy remains an open question.
Organized and circulated by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, PEI
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|
Published April 2018 with Manchester University Press Engendering an avant-garde: the unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism ORDER HERE This analysis of the origins of the Vancouver School of Photo Conceptualism in the late 1960s until its development as an international success in the 1990s, offers an innovative interpretation of avant-garde practice as a discursive manifestation of settler colonialism that establishes and replicates white masculine power amongst competing social bodies in peripheral locations, thus unsettling the “spacelessness” associated with global contemporary art. |
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Nuit Blanche, Toronto
Curator: Barbara Fischer
Sept. 30, 2017
Spectre of the Future Accused, 2017
Photo courtesy of Yuula Benivolski
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Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery
St. John's University
Diamonds, Rings and Court: Sports is More Than a Game
From the gallery website: This exhibition brings together the work of eleven contemporary artists and poets who explore the pervasive language, symbolism, and mythology of sports. This exhibition celebrates St. John’s sports history, through its Red Storm basketball team, and its strong Sports Management program. The art work will be displayed in multiple venues creating an event that will be shared campus wide and which will receive strong community participation.
Miracle (2008)
St. John's University
Diamonds, Rings and Court: Sports is More Than a Game
From the gallery website: This exhibition brings together the work of eleven contemporary artists and poets who explore the pervasive language, symbolism, and mythology of sports. This exhibition celebrates St. John’s sports history, through its Red Storm basketball team, and its strong Sports Management program. The art work will be displayed in multiple venues creating an event that will be shared campus wide and which will receive strong community participation.
Miracle (2008)
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Solo Exhibition
How long can we tolerate this? An incomplete record from 1933-1999 (2016)
Colby College Museum of Art
Sept 1, 2017- Jan. 2018
Colby College Museum of Art
Sept. 1, 2017 - Jan. 7, 2018
Solo Exhibition
How long can we tolerate this? An incomplete record from 1933-1999 (2016)
Colby College Museum of Art
Sept 1, 2017- Jan. 2018
Colby College Museum of Art
Sept. 1, 2017 - Jan. 7, 2018
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Solo Exhibition
The City in Her Desolation
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum
June 7 - August 27
What power decides why one city is allowed to stand, but not another; why one body is banned from civic space, but not another?
From the PAFA website: PHILADELPHIA (May 30, 2017) - The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) presents Leah Modigliani: The City in Her Desolation, on view June 8 - August 23 in PAFA's Morris Gallery, 118 N. Broad Street in Philadelphia. In this installation, Modigliani explores the history of two works in PAFA's 19th century sculpture collection by examining the changing role of civic engagement through culture.
PAFA's Curator of Contemporary Art, Jodi Throckmorton, notes, "The fate of all cities, and the fragile promise of the social contract of equality for all, is the subject of Modigliani's work, which tracks the banishment of two important works of art - and the eventual reclamation of one."
Based on research of the archives that Modigliani conducted over the past year in PAFA's Study for the Center of the American Artist, she created six new artworks inspired by the fates of two neoclassical figurative sculptures: William Wetmore Story's Jerusalem in Her Desolation (1873) and Giovanni Battista Lombardi's Deborah (1873). Both unveiled to great fanfare at the opening celebration of PAFA's Historic Landmark Building in 1876, these female personifications of the classical world were symbolic of the imagined destiny of the United States as an ascending power rising from the rubble of history.
By 1949, however, aesthetic tastes had changed and the works were marked for de-accessioning. Jerusalem was relocated to a park in Frazer, Pennsylvania, while Deborah was destroyed in 1950 after a new owner could not be found. Although too late to save Deborah, in 1972 PAFA embarked upon a years-long process of reacquiring Jerusalem. Story's sculpture finally returned in 1986, underwent restoration to repair decades of damage from being outdoors, and in 1992 was placed back on display where it remains today.
"I found the narrative of Jerusalem and Deborah so rich in contemporary meanings: female personifications of justice and faith banished or destroyed; ethical questions about the destruction of artworks; the role of visual culture in mediating trauma and politics; the individual's attempt to take responsibility for a collective wrong, and so much more," Modigliani states. "What power decides why one city is allowed to stand, but not another; why one body is banned from civic space, but not another?"
Solo Exhibition
The City in Her Desolation
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum
June 7 - August 27
What power decides why one city is allowed to stand, but not another; why one body is banned from civic space, but not another?
From the PAFA website: PHILADELPHIA (May 30, 2017) - The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) presents Leah Modigliani: The City in Her Desolation, on view June 8 - August 23 in PAFA's Morris Gallery, 118 N. Broad Street in Philadelphia. In this installation, Modigliani explores the history of two works in PAFA's 19th century sculpture collection by examining the changing role of civic engagement through culture.
PAFA's Curator of Contemporary Art, Jodi Throckmorton, notes, "The fate of all cities, and the fragile promise of the social contract of equality for all, is the subject of Modigliani's work, which tracks the banishment of two important works of art - and the eventual reclamation of one."
Based on research of the archives that Modigliani conducted over the past year in PAFA's Study for the Center of the American Artist, she created six new artworks inspired by the fates of two neoclassical figurative sculptures: William Wetmore Story's Jerusalem in Her Desolation (1873) and Giovanni Battista Lombardi's Deborah (1873). Both unveiled to great fanfare at the opening celebration of PAFA's Historic Landmark Building in 1876, these female personifications of the classical world were symbolic of the imagined destiny of the United States as an ascending power rising from the rubble of history.
By 1949, however, aesthetic tastes had changed and the works were marked for de-accessioning. Jerusalem was relocated to a park in Frazer, Pennsylvania, while Deborah was destroyed in 1950 after a new owner could not be found. Although too late to save Deborah, in 1972 PAFA embarked upon a years-long process of reacquiring Jerusalem. Story's sculpture finally returned in 1986, underwent restoration to repair decades of damage from being outdoors, and in 1992 was placed back on display where it remains today.
"I found the narrative of Jerusalem and Deborah so rich in contemporary meanings: female personifications of justice and faith banished or destroyed; ethical questions about the destruction of artworks; the role of visual culture in mediating trauma and politics; the individual's attempt to take responsibility for a collective wrong, and so much more," Modigliani states. "What power decides why one city is allowed to stand, but not another; why one body is banned from civic space, but not another?"
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ADDENDUM
http://addendum.kadist.org
I'm pleased to announce my participation in a project organized by Joseph Del Pesco at Kadist, and developed with Oliver at The Present Group. It's based on a project called AddArt started by Steve Lambert in 2007. With a single click, you can install an add-on for any web browser that replaces advertising with visual essays by artists. Kadist invited artists to promote any non-profit endeavor, through the series of images they select or make... so the link (or "click-through" in advertising parlance) goes to a website chosen by the artist. There is also a contribution from RomettiCostales and new contributions from artists around the world each month.
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ADDENDUM
http://addendum.kadist.org
I'm pleased to announce my participation in a project organized by Joseph Del Pesco at Kadist, and developed with Oliver at The Present Group. It's based on a project called AddArt started by Steve Lambert in 2007. With a single click, you can install an add-on for any web browser that replaces advertising with visual essays by artists. Kadist invited artists to promote any non-profit endeavor, through the series of images they select or make... so the link (or "click-through" in advertising parlance) goes to a website chosen by the artist. There is also a contribution from RomettiCostales and new contributions from artists around the world each month.
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Juror for the Annual Juried Show at the Abington Art Center
Deadline is Feb. 15
Follow this link if you are local and would like to apply.
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Deadline is Feb. 15
Follow this link if you are local and would like to apply.
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Solo exhibition
Center for the Humanities at Temple University
Opening Feb. 15, 4-5:30PM
How long can we tolerate this? An incomplete record from 1933-1999 (2016) is a thirty-two foot long photo assemblage comprised of press photographs of evictions taken during the years of the Glass-Steagall Act. Assuming the form of a city skyline, it is at once a timeline, a historical archive and a representation of working and middle-class material displacement. In the context of an increasingly divisive 2016 federal election, this work speaks powerfully to the role the press plays in shaping political consensus about what constitutes a shared ethical responsibility towards others. The Glass-Steagall act was signed into law shortly after Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, and his inaugural address has been adapted to speak to the present in Modigliani’s work Only a Foolish Opportunist Can Deny the Dark Realities of the Moment: A Presidential Address (2016). The astute relevance of many of FDR’s words eighty-three years later, in conjunction with the past and present evictions of working class people remind us that democracy is a powerful symbol, an imperfect goal, and a work in progress.
Center for the Humanities at Temple University
Opening Feb. 15, 4-5:30PM
How long can we tolerate this? An incomplete record from 1933-1999 (2016) is a thirty-two foot long photo assemblage comprised of press photographs of evictions taken during the years of the Glass-Steagall Act. Assuming the form of a city skyline, it is at once a timeline, a historical archive and a representation of working and middle-class material displacement. In the context of an increasingly divisive 2016 federal election, this work speaks powerfully to the role the press plays in shaping political consensus about what constitutes a shared ethical responsibility towards others. The Glass-Steagall act was signed into law shortly after Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, and his inaugural address has been adapted to speak to the present in Modigliani’s work Only a Foolish Opportunist Can Deny the Dark Realities of the Moment: A Presidential Address (2016). The astute relevance of many of FDR’s words eighty-three years later, in conjunction with the past and present evictions of working class people remind us that democracy is a powerful symbol, an imperfect goal, and a work in progress.
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Anarchist Studies
My essay The Snake and the Falcon has just been published in Anarchist Studies V23 No. 2, which includes content related to the British art historian Herbert Read's 1941 text To Hell with Culture.
Anarchist Studies
My essay The Snake and the Falcon has just been published in Anarchist Studies V23 No. 2, which includes content related to the British art historian Herbert Read's 1941 text To Hell with Culture.
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Solo exhibition
Washington D.C., 1939; Basle, 1957; Paris, 1958; Berkeley, 1969; Chicago, 1969; London, 1969…
Confederation Centre for the Arts
Oct. 3, 2015 - Feb. 13 2016
Solo exhibition
Washington D.C., 1939; Basle, 1957; Paris, 1958; Berkeley, 1969; Chicago, 1969; London, 1969…
Confederation Centre for the Arts
Oct. 3, 2015 - Feb. 13 2016
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Mississauga/GTA, July 2 - Sept. 13, 2015
Be A Sport
Art Gallery of Mississauga
Group show featuring Hudson Christie, Lia Darjes, Jeff&Gordon, Marc Losier, Leah Modigliani, Graeme Patterson, Diana Thorneycroft, Weber & Schneider
Mississauga/GTA, July 2 - Sept. 13, 2015
Be A Sport
Art Gallery of Mississauga
Group show featuring Hudson Christie, Lia Darjes, Jeff&Gordon, Marc Losier, Leah Modigliani, Graeme Patterson, Diana Thorneycroft, Weber & Schneider
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Philadelphia, May 1 - May 31, 2015
April 27, 1972, University of Pennsylvania
Solo exhibition at Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia
Opening the evening of Friday May 1, 2015.
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New York, Feb. 14, 2015, 9:30 AM - 12PM
Hilton Conference Center, New York, 3rd Floor, Petit Trianon
Artist Stephanie Syjuco and I are co-chairing a panel at the 2015 College Art Association: Should You Stay or Should You Go? Discussing the Debt to Asset Ratio of the MFA.
Chairs: Leah Modigliani, Tyler School of Art, Temple University; Stephanie Syjuco, University of California, Berkeley
Numbers Alone Do Not Tell the Whole Story, but They Do Say Something
Morgan T. Paine, Florida Gulf Coast University
Investing in Failure: The Curious Relationship between Higher Education and Sales of Artworks
Michael Maranda, Art Gallery of York University
All Together Now: The Real Question Is How Should We Pay for It?
Troy Richards, University of Delaware
Creative Transition: What Might the Twenty-First-Century Art School Become?
Edwina Fitzpatrick
The Future Is Self-Organized: Alternatives to the Traditional MFA
Sarrita Hunn, independent artist
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Manchester, Oct. 30, 2014
I will be presenting (debuting) a new work titled "The Snake and the Falcon," at the Manchester School of Art on Oct 30. The text I am writing and will be performing is based on Emma Goldman's 1933 speech “An Anarchist Looks at Life,” from 1933. The event, To Hell With Culture?, is organized by Danielle Child and Huw Wahl:
http://tohellwithculturemanchester.wordpress.com/
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I will be presenting (debuting) a new work titled "The Snake and the Falcon," at the Manchester School of Art on Oct 30. The text I am writing and will be performing is based on Emma Goldman's 1933 speech “An Anarchist Looks at Life,” from 1933. The event, To Hell With Culture?, is organized by Danielle Child and Huw Wahl:
http://tohellwithculturemanchester.wordpress.com/
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Albuquerque, Oct 16, 2014
I will be giving an artist' talk at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Details to be announced...
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I will be giving an artist' talk at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Details to be announced...
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Nov 15, 2013
Issue 28 of Prefix Photo is launching next week and includes my essay The Invisible Giant in the Room: Jeff Wall's Pictures of Women. Other essays and writers in this issue are Rituals and Rupture: The Art of Adrian Paci by Mark Durden, Not in the Age of the Pharoahs by Bruce W. Ferguson, and The Pleasure of Hell on Earth by Eldon Garnet.
Artists portfolios include work by Halil Altindere, Lara Baladi, Ahmed Basiony, Coco Fusco, Oliver Hartung, Jan Kempenaers, Amal Kenawy, Michael Love, Adrian Paci, Bahia Shehab, and Jeff Wall.
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July, 2013
I'm pleased to announce that I will be joining the faculty of Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia as Assistant Professor of Visual Studies this summer. I look forward to new beginnings and new inspirations in Philadelphia!
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June, 2013
See Cmagazine 118 (Summer 2013) for my book review of The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 1968-1978, Gary Neill Kennedy, MIT Press, 2012.
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Sept., 2012
Feature essay titled The Vancouver Occupations of 1971 in Cmagazine 115
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Charlottetown, Feb. 2012
Some of my hockey work is included in the exhibition curated by Eleanor King and Stefan Hancherow: The King and I: Hockey Bar at the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown, PEI.
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Ottawa, Oct., 2011
I will be the respondent on the panel So It Is What It Is? with Susan Douglas (University of Guelph) and Anne Whitelaw (Concordia University) at the annual UAAC conference, Oct. 27-29.
At the same conference I will be presenting a paper based on my recent article "Collaborating on Conceptual Art: An Aesthetics of the Impossible," in the panel Trafficking Documents: Researching Exhibiting and Teaching Conceptual Art in Canada with Barbara Fischer and Adam Welch (Univ. of Toronto), Adam Lauder (York Univ.)
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July, 2011
Feature essay titled Collaborating on Conceptual Art: an Aesthetics of the Impossible? in Cmagazine 110.
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May, 2011
See the new issue of Prefix Photo 23 for my book review of Byproduct on the Excess of Embedded Art Practices, ed. Marisa Jahn, YYZ Books and REV, 2010.
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Halifax, April 16, 2011
I will be speaking at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the symposium that has been organized in conjunction with the large touring exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980.
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Toronto, Nov. 27, 2010
I will be speaking at the University of Toronto in the symposium that has been organized in conjunction with the large touring exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980.
Issue 28 of Prefix Photo is launching next week and includes my essay The Invisible Giant in the Room: Jeff Wall's Pictures of Women. Other essays and writers in this issue are Rituals and Rupture: The Art of Adrian Paci by Mark Durden, Not in the Age of the Pharoahs by Bruce W. Ferguson, and The Pleasure of Hell on Earth by Eldon Garnet.
Artists portfolios include work by Halil Altindere, Lara Baladi, Ahmed Basiony, Coco Fusco, Oliver Hartung, Jan Kempenaers, Amal Kenawy, Michael Love, Adrian Paci, Bahia Shehab, and Jeff Wall.
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July, 2013
I'm pleased to announce that I will be joining the faculty of Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia as Assistant Professor of Visual Studies this summer. I look forward to new beginnings and new inspirations in Philadelphia!
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June, 2013
See Cmagazine 118 (Summer 2013) for my book review of The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 1968-1978, Gary Neill Kennedy, MIT Press, 2012.
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Sept., 2012
Feature essay titled The Vancouver Occupations of 1971 in Cmagazine 115
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Charlottetown, Feb. 2012
Some of my hockey work is included in the exhibition curated by Eleanor King and Stefan Hancherow: The King and I: Hockey Bar at the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown, PEI.
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Ottawa, Oct., 2011
I will be the respondent on the panel So It Is What It Is? with Susan Douglas (University of Guelph) and Anne Whitelaw (Concordia University) at the annual UAAC conference, Oct. 27-29.
At the same conference I will be presenting a paper based on my recent article "Collaborating on Conceptual Art: An Aesthetics of the Impossible," in the panel Trafficking Documents: Researching Exhibiting and Teaching Conceptual Art in Canada with Barbara Fischer and Adam Welch (Univ. of Toronto), Adam Lauder (York Univ.)
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July, 2011
Feature essay titled Collaborating on Conceptual Art: an Aesthetics of the Impossible? in Cmagazine 110.
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May, 2011
See the new issue of Prefix Photo 23 for my book review of Byproduct on the Excess of Embedded Art Practices, ed. Marisa Jahn, YYZ Books and REV, 2010.
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Halifax, April 16, 2011
I will be speaking at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the symposium that has been organized in conjunction with the large touring exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980.
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Toronto, Nov. 27, 2010
I will be speaking at the University of Toronto in the symposium that has been organized in conjunction with the large touring exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980.