2pm – Research, Curation, and Exhibition Design
Join us for a roundtable of museum professionals and curators about the active role research plays in their exhibition design and development as it pertains to Iberian topics throughout time.
Moderated by Dantaé Garee Elliott (New York University) in conversation with Vanessa Valdés (City College [CUNY]) on Juan de Pareja, Carlos Saldaña (Revista Lumière) on film series with Anthology Film Archives, Clarisse Fava-Piz (Meadows Museum) on In the Shadow of Dictatorship.
Presentation Titles:
Dantaé Garee Elliott – Moderator
Vanessa K. Valdés – “Searching for Juan de Pareja”
In this presentation I will speak about the evolution of the exhibition Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, the critical role of Arturo Schomburg and his own quest for Juan de Pareja, and how the exhibition moves forward the fields of early modern European and Africana Studies.
Clarisse Fava-Piz – Curating and Engaging the Community: The Exhibition “In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Creating the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art” at the Meadows Museum, SMU, February 26 – July 30, 2023
This talk will offer an overview of In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Creating the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art currently on view at the Meadows Museum at SMU. It will highlight some of the initiatives undertaken to bring a diversity of voices to the exhibition, and how these collaborations generated new research questions about the role of museums in society.
Carlos Saldaña – Persistence of Vision: Challenges in Curating Contemporary Analog Film from Spain
Speaker Bios:
Dantaé Garee Elliott is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She is particularly interested in contemporary Caribbean Art and its relation to migration within the Caribbean diaspora and region through examining the barrel children phenomenon. She holds a B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature with a concentration in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) from Roanoke College and an M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature focusing on Colonial Literature from the University of Delaware. She is the program assistant for the Caribbean Initiative workshop series at the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies at NYU. In the summer of 2022, she served as Co-Director for the CCCADI (Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute) Summer Seminar for their Curatorial Fellowship class of 2022/2023. She works as an Editorial Assistant for Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. She is a featured artist in Volume 04 of Forgotten Lands, titled Currents of Africa. She is also a spring 2023 Mellon Fellow at the Hemispheric Institute at NYU.
Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is the Associate Provost for Community Engagement at The City College of New York, and as such, she engages with community leaders on issues and programs of mutual interest and benefit to the College, and provides vision, direction, coordination and leadership for campus-community partnerships and programs that originate from or are administered by the Provost’s Office. She is the former interim dean of Macaulay Honors College at CUNY (2021-2022) and the former director of the Black Studies Program (2019-2021). A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, her research interests focus on the cultural production of Black peoples throughout the Americas: the United States and Latin America, including Brazil, and the Caribbean. She is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012); Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012); and Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020). She is the author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). Her latest book is Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez (2023), co-authored with David Pullins; it accompanies the exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on view from April 3 – July 16, 2023.
Dr. Clarisse Fava-Piz is currently the Mellon curatorial fellow at the Meadows Museum at SMU in Dallas, TX, where she curated the exhibition, “In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Creating the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art” in partnership with the Fundación March in Madrid. In July, she will assume the role of Assistant Curator of European and American Art before 1900 at the Denver Art Museum. She holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, and is a specialist of nineteenth and early twentieth-century sculpture in Europe and the Americas. She has previously worked at the Musée du Louvre (Paris), the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), and the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), among other institutions. Her research and curatorial projects have been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Casa de Velázquez, and the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
Carlos Saldaña is a film curator, archivist, and Fulbright Student in the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. He has coordinated digitization projects of 16mm and Super-8 films during his studies at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, and pursued his training at the Museum of Modern Art, Cinemateca Portuguesa, Third World Newsreel, and the Archivo José Val del Omar. He is the editor of four books, including the collected writings of Indian artist Mani Kaul and the first monograph dedicated to US-American filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler. He is a member of the programming team at Xcèntric-CCCB (Barcelona) and has guest-curated film series and screenings at Anthology Film Archives, Filmoteca de Catalunya, Filmoteca Española, CGAI, Nomadica at LABA, Festival Punto de Vista, the Museum of the Moving Image, ZumZeig, Círculo de Bellas Artes and Tabakalera.