Clare Davies, associate curator for modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, visited the American University of Beirut (AUB) as a guest of the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nahyan Chair for Arabic and Islamic Studies at the university.
She held a luncheon workshop with the graduate students of AUB’s Department of Fine Arts and Art History, during which she discussed her work as a curator at an encyclopedic museum, describing the challenges she faces as she seeks to put the museum’s modern and ancient collections in dialogue, and outlining the acquisition process, particularly in relation to several pieces she has acquired by artists from the region.
Davies also gave a talk at the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at AUB, drawn from a book manuscript she has just finished, in which she critiqued what she calls the “additive” approach by which art history attempts to account for non-Western modernisms when what is needed is a rewriting of art history that addresses its constitutive exclusions, and that addresses its habit of decontextualizing objects from colonial historical circumstances. She modeled an alternative historiography by drawing on examples from her research on modern art in Egypt.
The lecture was attended by members of the AUB community and Beirut’s art world, filling the Department of Fine Arts and Art History’s famous room, “The Skeleton,” on the top floor of Nicely Hall.