Date:
Location:
2011 10th Reunion Classmate Academic Series
Monday, May 17, 2021, 12:00-1:00 p.m. EDT
Nancy Lin '11 and Davida Fernández-Barkan '11, AM '17, PhD '21
From Embattled Colonialism to Art-World Multiculturalism: Paris's Palais de la Porte Dorée
Paris’s Palais de la Porte Dorée has housed museums with many different names over the years, reflecting changes in French attitudes toward colonized and formerly colonized peoples. Now the site of the “Museum of the History of Immigration,” the building began as the “Permanent Museum of the Colonies,” constructed for the International Colonial Exposition in 1931. Bringing together a scholar of international modernism and a scholar of Chinese contemporary art, this talk explores how the building has evolved as a site for both the expression and contestation of the colonial enterprise, including in the work of the late Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, an émigré to France.
Nancy P. Lin is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese art and architecture at The University of Chicago and a 2021 incoming Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. She received her B.A. summa cum laude in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the intersection of art, architecture, and urban visual culture in examining the spatial and site-oriented artistic practices of Chinese contemporary artists from the late 1970s to the present. From 2019 to 2020 she was an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Curatorial Intern at the Smart Museum of Art, where she worked extensively on the exhibition The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China.
Davida Fernández-Barkan is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She holds an A.B. and A.M. in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard and an M.A. in Curating the Art Museum from The Courtauld Institute of Art. She has worked or interned in curatorial departments at the Harvard Art Museums, the Centre Pompidou, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the National Gallery of Art, Tate Britain, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Her work recently appeared in the journal Public Art Dialogue. Davida's dissertation is titled, “Mural Diplomacy: Mexico, the United States, and France at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris.” She was a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum during the 2019–2020 academic year and is currently a Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) David E. Finley Fellow (2020–23).
