2024 Smithsonian American Art Museum Fellows Lectures

From May 8–10, 2024, the Smithsonian American Art Museum will present a series of lectures by the museum’s 2023–2024 research fellows. This webcast captures the five talks presented in Sessions V and VI of the series on May 10. For more information on SAAM’s fellowship program, visit https://americanart.si.edu/research/f....

The fifth session brings together discussions of three contemporary artists and their relationships to museums and institutions, featuring new scholarship by predoctoral fellows Sadé Ayorinde and Adela Kim and senior fellow Alex Dika Seggerman. Presentations in this session address the use of invisibility as a strategy in the work of Glenn Ligon; Andrea Fraser’s interventions in curatorial methods of display at the University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley; and the relationship of artists Shirin Neshat, Ghada Amer, and Shahzia Sikander with both American art and the art of Islam.

The sixth session pairs new research by senior fellows Jenni Sorkin and Namita Wiggers on developments in American craft history over the last three decades. These presentations take as their subjects group exhibitions of textile-based sculpture in the 1990s and exhibitions trends in U.S. craft museums between 2000 and 2020.