FRIDAY
SESSION 1
Julian Nykolak is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at California State University, Los Angeles. His research has appeared in Art History, Art Journal, and Selva and he has an essay forthcoming in an edited collection with Manchester University Press. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Whitney Independent Study Program, and a Chateaubriand Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He is completing a book project on the politics of collectivity in French art circa 1968 and is currently at work on a manuscript on the East Village art scene.
Ria Pazarlis-Stiles is a second-year PhD student at Newcastle University, supervised by Dr Fiona Anderson in the School of Arts and Cultures. Her research explores the connections between cultural production in Provincetown and downtown New York City during the 1970s and 1980s. Using a queer methodological framework, Ria examines themes of place, tourism, domesticity, care, and rest to reveal new perspectives on the downtown scene and to expand its conceptual and geographical boundaries. She previously completed an MA at The Courtauld Institute of Art with Dr Tom Day on the programme “Drop Dead” New York: Art, Film and Activism Downtown, 1971–1992, and holds a BA in Art History (First Class Honours). Her doctoral research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council via the Northern Bridge Consortium.
Kanako Tajima is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, specializing in the intersection of Japanese and American modern art. Her working dissertation, “Between Tokyo, California, and New York: Feminist Transnational Art Practice by Women Artists from Japan in the 1970s-1980s,” examines the entwined narratives of the American and Japanese Women’s Liberation Movements and art practice through the work of transnationally active women artists from Japan. Her doctoral study has been generously supported by the Fulbright Grant, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and the Schlesinger Library Dissertation Support Grant at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, among others.
SESSION 2
Kara Carmack is an independent art historian and curator who received her PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in modern and contemporary art and visual culture with an emphasis on creative communities, gender and sexuality, video, and archives. Previously, Carmack has served as the Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the New York Studio School; Assistant Professor of Art History at Misericordia University; and head of the Ad Reinhardt catalogue raisonné project. She has curated exhibitions of work by Chuck Bowdish, Lisa Corinne Davis, Pat de
Groot, Shirley Kaneda, Lucy Liu, and Ruth Miller, among others. Her current book project, Marginal Centers: Parties on, off, and through Manhattan Public Access Television, 1972-1983, focuses on public access television shows produced by Anton Perich, Glenn O’Brien, and Andy Warhol. Her research has been supported by the American Association of University Women and the Association of Historians of American Art. Carmack’s writing has appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, Burlington Contemporary, the edited anthology Pop Cinema, and numerous exhibition catalogues and brochures.
David J. Getsy is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. His
books include Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (Chicago 2022, winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Award), Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015/2023), and the anthology of artists’ writings, Queer (MIT 2016). His recent essays on the Downtown scene include “The Spectacle of Privacy: Geoffrey Hendricks’s Ring Piece and the Ambivalence of Queer Visibility” (The Art Bulletin, September 2022), “Bricks and Jails: Martin Wong’s Queer Fantasies” (Martin Wong—Malicious Mischief, exh. cat., 2022), “Waking Dreams: Colette’s Performance Art” (Pioneer Works Broadcast, 2023), and “Queer Life and Its Avoidance in the Art of the 1960s” (Sixties Surreal, exh. cat., 2025). In 2018, he curated the retrospective exhibition Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble in 1970s New York (Leslie-Lohman Museum). The research for that exhibition became the foundation for his new book project, preliminarily titled Street Addresses: Performing the Queer Life of the Street in 1970s New York, which was supported by a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Meredith Mowder is an art historian specializing in the lifecycles of artist communities, performance, and modes of artistic exchange. Her writing has been featured in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Brooklyn Rail, and in numerous other publications. She has taught at Hunter College (CUNY), Cornell University, and Purchase College (SUNY), and was a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center and is currently working on a book about the economics of performance in downtown New York City during the late 1970s and 1980s.
SESSION 3
Afonso Dias Ramos is a Researcher at the Art History Institute and an Invited Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST in Lisbon, Portugal. He was an Art Histories Fellow at Forum Transregionale Studien, affiliated with Freie Universität Berlin, and received his PhD in History of Art from University College London. He has recently co-edited the books Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art with Tom Snow (MIT Press, 2023), and Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975 with Filipa Lowndes Vicente (Palgrave, 2023).
Pilar Forrest (she/her) is an early-career art historian and curator with interests in contemporary art, decorative arts, material culture, installation, and collecting histories. As the current Postgraduate Research Associate in Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, she supports departmental research projects for forthcoming exhibitions and the permanent collection, with a focus on provenance. Her research explores how artists of the Latin American and African diasporas living in the US and UK engage with regional and personal iconographies to express identity, celebrate cultural hybridity, and challenge colonial histories. She is also interested in the use of found objects in art and the practice’s allusions to resourcefulness, domesticity, and kitsch. Forrest holds a BA from Yale University and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, both in History of Art.
Tyler C. Spencer is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, specializing in American art and the history of photography. His research examines the visual culture of the nineteenth-century United States through the intersections of geological science, Manifest Destiny, and Indigenous sovereignty. His dissertation “Ruins of a Bygone Geological Empire”: Deep Time in Timothy O’Sullivan’s Survey Photography, 1867-1874, analyzes how O’Sullivan’s work for postbellum geological surveys visualized emerging concepts of deep time, environmental precarity, and the racialized narratives of decline embedded within settler-colonial science. Drawing on the environmental humanities and Indigenous studies, his project reads O’Sullivan’s photographs against the grain as cross-cultural productions shaped by Native guides and sacred geographies. Tyler currently serves as Curatorial Assistant at the Grey Art Museum in New York, where he contributes to research, exhibition development, and public programs at the Museum. From 2023-2024, Tyler worked at the Boris Lurie Art Foundation where he conducted archival research and catalogued the artist’s work for an upcoming catalogue raisonné of Lurie’s paintings, collages, and sculptures.
SESSION 4
Bentley Brown is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, art historian, and doctoral candidate at The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, based in the Bronx, NY, and Phoenix, AZ. He is a professor of art and history at Arizona State University and the Parsons School of Design and an adjunct instructor in New York University’s Visual Arts Administration graduate program. His research at the Institute explores the pioneering role of Black artists and Black creative spaces within New York City’s contemporary art movements of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. Brown’s research into not only his personal past but the collective history of the African diaspora has led him to attain a master's degree in African Studies from University College London in addition to his doctoral work at New York University. In his artistic practice, inspired by African American cultural production, abstract and figurative expressionist approaches to artistic process and the desert landscape of his native Phoenix, Brown uses the mediums of canvas, found objects, photo-collage, and film to explore themes of Black identity, cosmology, and American interculturalism.
Leah Pires is an art historian focused on the politics of representation in modern and contemporary art. A graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, she is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at Villanova University. Her current book project, Finessing the Frame: Art and Power in Postmodern New York, looks at how artists associated with the experimental galleries Artists Space and Just Above Midtown envisioned structural change in New York circa 1980. The book offers a new history of the emergence of postmodernism and the cultural effects of the neoliberal turn in the United States and examines how these forces reshaped art, institutions, activism, and conceptualizations of identity.
Christa Noel Robbins is an Associate Professor of twentieth-century art and criticism at the University of Virginia and was the 2024-2025 Fellow in the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. Her book Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late- Modernist American Painting was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021. Her essays and reviews can be found in several journals including American Art, The Oxford Art Journal, Criticism, Art in America, Art History, Art Journal, and Critical Inquiry. She was the advisory editor of North American modernism for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and is currently a book reviews editor for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. She is currently writing a book on the abstract painter William T. Williams.
SESSION 5
Nicole Eisenman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and the Carnegie Prize. Her work was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale and the 1995, 2012, and 2019 Whitney Biennials. Recent solo exhibitions include What Happened, at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, traveling to Whitechapel Gallery, London and MCA Chicago. Heads, Kisses, Battles: Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns’ at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, traveling to Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, and Kunstmuseum, Den Haag. Her work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY the Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Tate London, and the Los Angeles County Art Museum. Having established herself as a painter, Nicole Eisenman has expanded her practice into the third dimension.
Svetlana Kitto is a writer, editor, and oral historian. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Cut, VICE, and elsewhere. Her book of interviews, Sara Penn’s Knobkerry: An Oral History Sourcebook (2021), formed the basis of an exhibition at the SculptureCenter and was acclaimed by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Artforum. She’s currently co-editing the first monograph on Trial Balloon, a lesbian-run gallery in the 1990s, to be published by Karma in 2026. As an arts writer and oral historian she has been commissioned to write about and interview many artists including Robert Morris, Nancy Brooks Brody, Barbara Hammer, David Hammons, Frederick Weston, and Leidy Churchman, among others. She works as Editor at Dia Art Foundation, where she’s edited monographs on Dorothea Rockburne, Senga Nengudi, and Renée Green.
Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Soboleva practices an autobiographical approach to art history and an art historical approach to autobiography. Her writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Cultured, Ursula, frieze, Hyperallergic, as well as various artist monographs and exhibition catalogues. Soboleva has held fellowships at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as a Vilcek Curatorial Fellow, and at the New York Historical as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History. She is the recipient of the 2025 Dora Maar Cultural Center Fellowship and is currently completing her book manuscript What Happens After: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Histories. She teaches at NYU Steinhardt.
Nicola Tyson (b. 1960) is a British artist living and working in New York. Primarily known as a painter, Tyson has also worked in sculpture, photography, and the written word. She ran Trial BALLOON, a women-only, lesbian-focused NYC project space in the early 90s. Dead Letter Men, her collection of satirical letters, was published in 2013, and her unique archive of color photos, Bowie Nights at Billy's Club, London, 1978, documenting the London club scene of the late 70s has been the subject of shows in both London and New York. Her most recent exhibition of paintings, I am a teapot, was on view at Petzel in January 2025. Her work is included in museum collections such as MoMA, SFMOMA, and the Tate Modern. She is represented by Petzel Gallery (NYC), Sadie Coles HQ (London), Nino Mier (Brussels), and Kiang Malingue (Hong Kong).
SATURDAY
Amna Abdus-Salaam is a Reference Associate in Special Collections at New York University, where she works with rare books, activist ephemera, and archival materials. Her research focuses on practices of anonymity, restriction, and refusal across archival and print cultures, from medieval religious texts to contemporary activist archives. Her work considers how marginalized communities shape their own visibility and how institutions can ethically steward incomplete, dispersed, or intentionally limited records.
Eli Harrison is a curator, writer, artist, and organizer living in Brooklyn, NY. They are currently the Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where they manage the Sondra Gilman Study Center for works on paper and work closely with the permanent collection. They curated the collection exhibition Ken Ohara: CONTACTS, on view through February 8th. Eli’s art practice includes prints, drawings, collages, zines, and hand-painted banners and backdrops. They are a member of Shoestring Press and Jewish Voice for Peace-NYC.
Adam Moritz is an editor, writer, and graduate student at New York University. His research focuses on the social formations which frame experimental art and writing, most notably those of avant-garde print and publishing in postwar New York City. He currently works at Cabinet Magazine and edits The Examined Review, a publication by the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life.
Soft Network is a non-profit organization that empowers contemporary artists and those working with artist estates and archives to imagine and implement new and sustainable legacy models. Our mission is to provide space for shared dialogue around this critical yet overlooked field and to redress exclusions in art history.
Our core offering is a fully-funded program of support for under-resourced artist estates and archives. Through research, archiving, public programs, digitization, exhibitions, and publications, Soft Network preserves and provides access to the work of vital yet often vulnerable artists and supports those who care for their legacies.
Barabara Moore is an art historian, writer, and former rare book dealer, who served as director of the Peter Moore Photography Archive for sixty years. She was a witness to and often a participant in avant-garde art from the 1960s through the 1980s. Beginning as the editor at Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press, she has written and lectured about artist's books, multiples, and alternative media, as well as curated exhibitions for venus including MoMA Library; Franklin Furnace; P.S. 1 and The Clocktower/The Institute for Art and Urban Resources; and Swiss Institute, New York. She has lectured at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the NYPL 42nd Street Main Branch; Movement Research, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Grey Art Gallery, New York University; Harvard University Art Museums; the Andy Warhol Foundation; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Danspace Project, New York; and Judson Memorial Church, New York.
Moore has been closely associated with Fluxus, both as a scholar and as a participant in numerous Fluxus events, often with her late husband Peter Moore, who was the Fluxus photographer of record. From 1976-1983 she co-owned Backworks, which was one of the first shops that dealt with avant garde material internationally. From 1989-2004, she owned and operated Bound & Unbound, a shop dedicated to alternative and avant-garde artists' publications, through which she also curated exhibitions and published exhibition catalogs.
Farris Wahbeh is the Benjamin and Irma Weiss Director of Research Resources and Collection Management at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He works within the field of cultural informatics to enhance access to art and archival collections. At the Whitney, he oversees the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives, the Permanent Collection Documentation Office, which maintains the cataloguing and content standards relating to works of art in the Whitney’s permanent collection, as well as Collection Management, Digital Asset Management, and Licensing. Wahbeh also spearheaded, along with the Conservation Department, the Media Preservation Initiative (MPI), a focused project on the digital preservation and archival documentation of time-based media works of art. Wahbeh has gained experience from a wide range of institutions, including Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the Getty Research Institute, the Creative Audio Archive, and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.
SUNDAY
SESSION 1
Penny Arcade aka Susana Ventura is an internationally respected performance artist, actress, poet, and theater maker. Her text-based work is known for its humor, high content, and highly quotable wit and focuses on community building as the goal of performance and performance as a transformative act. Her dedication to social practice and activism began in 1977 when she identified herself as an advocate for other artists. She continues in this role as an international community elder and icon of artistic resistance.
Kyle Croft is the executive director of Visual AIDS where he works to preserve the legacies of artists lost to AIDS and support a global community of artists living with HIV. He has edited volumes on Darrel Ellis, Frederick Weston, and William Olander, and holds an MA in art history from Hunter College.
David Hirsh cofounded the Visual AIDS Archive in 1994 with artist Frank Moore. He was a prolific art critic from 1990 to 1994, writing about gay and lesbian art for the New York Native and the Bay Area Reporter. He also co-organized a four-week Dance Festival of Lesbian Choreographers, and helped place the Martin Wong Collection of Graffiti Art at the Museum of the City of New York.
A singular figure of the Downtown arts scene, Agosto Machado is a Chinese-Spanish-Filipino-American performance artist, activist, archivist, muse, caretaker, and friend to countless celebrated and underground visual and performing artists. He has been a vital participant and witness to cultural and creative life in New York since the early sixties, from art, theater, performance, and film to social and political counterculture and the dawn of the gay liberation movement. He is represented by Gordon Robichaux in New York.
Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez is an art historian, photographer, and archivist based between New York and Puerto Rico. He holds a PhD in Art History from Stanford University, and he is currently adapting his dissertation, “The Disappearance of Landscape: Artists on Fire Island, 1937-1987," into a book. He works part-time between the Archives of American Art and the Department of Art History at New York University.
SESSION 2
Maria Dominguez was born in Puerto Rico and is a lifelong resident of New York. Her diverse creations are influenced by environmental, cultural and community experiences. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and established her career as a muralist after an internship with CITYarts.org. Her trajectory led to her commission by The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City and her permanent glass installation “El –Views” in 2002. In 2023 the 16 original paintings for the "El Views" commission were acquired by the Museum of the City of New York for their permanent collection. Her latest “Sendero Verde” mural in East Harlem was installed and celebrated in 2024.
Al Hoyos-Twomey is an art historian whose research explores contested histories and geographies of Latinx art and activism, with a focus on the Loisaida movement of the late twentieth century. He is currently Lecturer in Contemporary Art Education at Kings College London.
Yasmin Ramirez is a curator, writer, and cultural worker known for her extensive work in the arts, beginning with her academic memorialization of Nuyorican cultural contributions. Born in Brooklyn, Ramirez was an active member of New York City’s early 1980s creative scene, paying close attention to visual culture in the form of street art, explorations of subculture, and more. Beginning in the 90s, she curated exhibitions exploring the intersection of cultural identity, race, gender, and social justice, particularly in relation to Latinx identity and diasporic communities—making her a pivotal figure behind the push for greater visibility of Latinx artists, and the evolving discourse around racial and ethnic identity across the Americas. In addition to her curatorial pursuits, she has written essays and critical pieces addressing the complexities of navigating cultural spaces. Dr. Ramirez is an Adjunct Professor at The City College of New York; her latest publication is Nuyorican & Diasporican Art: A Critical Anthology.
Organizer’s Bios
Tom Day is Director of the Yale Film Archive. Prior to joining Yale he was Executive Director of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York City. A historian and curator, he has held teaching and research positions at the University of Edinburgh and the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London) where he was also interim Director of the Terra Foundation Centre for American Art. He has curated and contributed to screenings and exhibitions at venues including the Camden Art Center, Film at Lincoln Center, Light Industry, Maysles Documentary Center and the Public Art Fund. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in venues including Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Panorama and British Art Studies and he has contributed chapters to number of edited collections, including his own volume Pop Cinema (co-edited with Glyn Davis, Edinburgh University Press, 2024), the first book-length examination of the relationship between Pop art, experimental film and video art. He is currently working on a book entitled Drop Dead: Art, Urban Crisis and the End of New York which explores the multifaceted decline and neo-liberalization of New York City through the prism of art and artists thinking about public space, housing, sanitation and policing. The project was awarded a Robert David Foundation Fellowship from the New York Historical Society. With Fiona Anderson (Newcastle University), he organised ‘Approaching Downtown’ in 2022 at The Courtauld Institute of Art.
Megan Heuer is Director of Public Programs and Academic Engagement at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Prior to joining the Whitney, she was a Research Associate at the New Museum and a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An art historian by training, her writing has been published in a variety of forums including Art in America, ArtNews, Paper Monument, The Brooklyn Rail, as well as exhibition catalogues and anthologies.
Olivia McCall (she/her) is an art historian and curator whose work advances scholarship on artists bearing witness to the AIDS epidemic and queer experience in the 1970s–1990s, with a primary focus on lens-based media. She is currently a second-year PhD student in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she is supported by an Areté Fellowship. She holds an MA in the History of Art, awarded with High Distinction, from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and was a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow in the 2023–24 Whitney Independent Study Program. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and on the Visual AIDS website, as part of their Research Fellowship. From 2022–24, she was the Edith Gowin Curatorial Fellow in Photography at The Morgan Library & Museum, where she contributed extensive research to a forthcoming exhibition and publication of Peter Hujar’s contact sheets.
Nicholas Martin (he/him) is a curator, archivist, and writer working in New York City. He is the Curator for the Arts & Humanities at New York University Special Collections. He is the curator of Working On & Out Things: Selections from the Bill Dixon Papers, on view in the NYU Special Collections Galleries through January 26th. His recent publications include contributions to David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Skira, 2025), The Stuart Sherman Papers (Flat i, 2025), and Christopher D’Arcangelo (Kunstverein & Artists Space, 2023).