Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold Lecture 2025

English lecture by Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley..
Invited by the Research Department in cooperation with American Academy and the Dresden Cabinet of Prints, Drawings and Photographs.

In conversation with the collection of Indian art at the Dresden Cabinet of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, historian and Academy fellow Abhishek Kaicker discusses three ancient collections of miniatures. Documented in Dresden as early as 1738, the shape and content of these three convolutes bear witness of different ways in which ideas of Asia’s history may have been received, reimagined, and reinvented at Dresden’s Electoral-Royal Court in the 18th century.     

Adam D. Weinberg Arnhold Lectures

The Whitney Biennial - formally initiated in 1932 - was established as a survey of contemporary American art at time when there were few opportunities for progressive artists to showcase their work in museums or galleries. The Biennial sought to be an inclusive, democratic barometer of current artistic tendencies that would coalesce into a “viable” American art. The organizing ethos was to follow artists wherever they led even though it often entailed risk.
From its earliest manifestations, the Biennial was often the target of criticism by the press and the public as well as artists: ranging from abstractionists who opposed realists and regionalists who opposed urbanist artists to the contestations of Black and women artists regarding their lack of representation and decolonizers who protest the power structure of the museum itself. While such demonstrations have often been fraught for the Whitney, it is precisely this openness that makes the Biennial a vital and responsive cultural platform. This lecture will explore the history, structure, and evolution of the Biennial on the occasion of the 2024 Biennial - Even better than the Real Thing - which opens in March.

Adam D. Weinberg has served as the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art since 2003. He holds a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop, SUNY-Buffalo. Weinberg previously served as director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, and as Senior Curator and Curator of the Whitney’s Permanent Collection, as artistic and program director of the American Center in Paris, and as director of education and assistant curator at the Walker Art Center.
Weinberg is a board member of the American Academy in Rome, Terra Foundation for American Art, Storm King Art Center, and the Star of Hope (Robert Indiana) Foundation and has served prior on the boards of the American Federation of the Arts and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Archives of American Art, the Scientific Committees of the Sebançi Museum (Istanbul) and the Art Mill Museum (Doha) and a member of the director selection commission of the MADRE Museum (Naples). He served as the Chair of the Visiting Committee for the Harvard University Art Museums, a member of the Art Committee of Madison Square Park Conservancy, and as a member of the Committee of Selection of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
Weinberg has received honorary degrees from Colby College, Hamilton College, and the Pratt Institute. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the recipient of the Merit Award from the American Institute of Architects, Rudin Award for Exemplary Service to New York City from New York University, and the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2015, Weinberg was awarded the Insignia of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. 

LISA AND HEINRICH ARNHOLD LECTURE 2023

Throughout modern history, Black thinkers in Central Europe — from the Trinidadian George Padmore to African Americans Shirley Graham Du Bois and Ollie Harrington to Black German May Ayim — have pursued radical projects pointing out the lack of basic human rights of marginalized communities. In this talk, Tiffany N. Florvil argues that these individuals and others have drawn upon their cross-cultural experiences to highlight how the intersecting oppressions of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism have persisted throughout the twentieth century. Traversing geographical and aesthetic boundaries, these activists, cartoonists, and intellectuals advocated for civil, social, and political change in their respective countries and beyond, advancing a cosmopolitan ethos that allowed them to offer new forms of knowledge and instigate change. Florvil contends that these Black radical actors advanced politics on their own terms while at the same time showing that Germany was a key site for the transnational Black diaspora.

Tiffany N. Florvil is an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico. Co-editor of the volume Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories (Peter Lang, 2022, 2018), she is the author of Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois, 2020), which received the 2021 Waterloo Centre for German Studies First Book Prize. The German translation will be published in April 2023 by Ch. Links Verlag with the title Black Germany: Schwarz, deutsch, feministisch - die Geschichte einer Bewegung. Florvil is the founding editor of the book series “Imagining Black Europe” at Peter Lang Press and currently working on an intellectual biography of Black German author and activist May Ayim. She is the spring 2023 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold Lectures

In 1870, Arab Jews and Berber Jews who lived in Algeria for centuries were separated from the rest of the indigenous population and proclaimed by their colonizers as French citizens. As a consequence of this imposed citizenship, they had to renounce much of their pre-colonial ways of life. Almost a century later, with the demise of French rule in Algeria in 1962, this citizenship doomed Arab and Berber Jews to expulsion from their homeland. In this lecture, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay questions the double disappearance of the Jews – from North Africa and from the history of the French colonization of Algeria – and the role this erasure plays in rendering a Jewish-Muslim world unimaginable. Her argument stresses the role of jewelers in this the lost world, thereby reconstructing the place of Jews as the jewelers of the ummah (nation). In so doing, Azoulay traces their centuries long presence in the Maghreb, invokes the “unruliness” of the jewels they created, and proposes a potential history of a Jewish-Muslim world.