Director's Message: Summer 2023

In summer the energy shifts at Columbia, especially in late June and July, before everyone starts revving up again for the fall semester. By August you can feel the excitement, and also the anxiety, that the summer will soon turn over to a new semester. It’s not weather or the heat or the sun, it’s the rhythm of academic life. While the university slows down, the rest of the city is vibrant and alive with free outdoor offerings and important museum shows. With our summer exhibitions, we become a node in this bustle of activity. This year we are presenting the third edition of the Uptown Triennial, with its focus on the sonic in the visual arts, on view until September 17.

In a world where mainstream media is forcefully impacting the shaping of value, and reading is on the decline, we see how the visual arts can play an important role in creating spaces of discursive exchange with our exhibitions that are geared towards knowledge production that challenges the status quo. In addition, in light of the shrinking interest in global exchanges, we want to foster an understanding of our local milieu while offering audiences opportunities to become familiar with art that is culturally more distant. It is our work with curators, artists, and scholars across a large swath of practices and interests that makes this possible.

In order to be at the forefront of contemporary theoretical debate and innovative curatorial practice we make an effort to proactively break down barriers and build bridges of camaraderie amplifying the value of engaging with difference of all kinds. With special attention to social justice, cultural theory, inequity history, public space, and social activism, we offer a platform to curators and artists engaged in critical art practices. We also focus on how history, memory, and current events impact artistic production and reception across different time periods. This includes art incorporating the speculative, the archive, and ecological concerns and supporting new frameworks at the intersection of history and art.

Following the Uptown Triennial 2023, this fall the Wallach Art Gallery will be presenting works from the Middle East in Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1960. In early 2024 we present Melencolia, a project by Hong Kong artist Angela Su, inspired by an engraving by Albrecht Dürer from 1514. This suite of programs manifests our engagement with our publics. When considered across time we hope that intratextual nuances will emerge to create new relational meanings across varied cultural contexts.

Hot or not, summer is a time for new explorations. I hope you can come by soon.