Crossing Borders Workshop Keynote: “Making Contemporary Art in Yiddishland.”
Wednesday, March 18 | 10 AM - 12 PM | In person | ASU Art Museum (51 E. 10th St., Tempe)
Led by Yevgeny Fiks
In Person Registration
About the keynote lecture: Artist Yevgeniy Fiks will discuss his concept of Yiddish as a “cosmic” language, capable of connecting heaven and earth, everyday life and fantastic utopia, Jewish and global culture. He will reflect on the uniqueness of Yiddish culture as a bridge capable of uniting traditional ethnicity with universal human ideals, the past with the present and the cosmic future, and analyze the special place of Yiddish in contemporary avant-garde art.
About Yevgeniy Fiks: Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West, among them: “Lenin for Your Library?” in which he mailed V.I. Lenin’s text “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” to one hundred global corporations as a donation for their corporate libraries; “Communist Party USA,” a series of portraits of current members of Communist Party USA, painted from life in the Party’s national headquarters in New York City; and “Communist Guide to New York City,” a series of photographs of buildings and public places in New York City that are connected to the history of the American Communist movement.
Workshop: “Crossing Borders: Jewish Art, Literature, and Migration in the Americas.”
Wednesday, March 18 | All day | In person | ASU Art Museum (51 E. 10th St., Tempe)
Led by Chelsea Haines (ASU), Abigail Lapin-Dardashti (UC Irvine) and Stanley Mirvis (ASU)
For ASU graduate students, post-docs, faculty and other invited guests only. Registration required.
In Person Registration
About the workshop: This day-long event presents research-in-progress on artistic and literary responses to Jewish migration to and within the Americas. It advances scholarship on how Jewish artists and writers articulated migration, religion, race and their positionality in their work. The event will feature a public keynote lecture by New York-based artist Yevgeniy Fiks who created his own concept of Yiddish as a “cosmic” language. This program coincides with the exhibition Tierras Reimaginadas: Migration at the ASU Art Museum. For the ASU Community only.
About Chelsea Haines: Chelsea Haines is a historian of global modern and contemporary art and architecture who writes on histories and theories of museums, exhibitions, and the politics of display, focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East and particularly Israel/Palestine. At ASU, she incorporates into her research and teaching critical studies of citizenship, comparative borderlands, and material and ideological imaginings of land, landscape, and environment in modern and contemporary art.
About Abigail Lapin-Dardashti: Abigail Lapin Dardashti’s research examines modern and contemporary Latin American, Latina/o/x, as well as African and Jewish Diasporic art with a focus on international exchange, migration, racial and ethnic formation, and activism. Broadly, her work unpacks the impact of migration and travel on diasporic artistic productions in the Americas during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
About Stanley Mirvis: Stanley Mirvis is the director of Jewish Studies, the Harold and Jean Grossman Chair of Jewish Studies, and Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University. He is the author of "The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition" (Yale 2020).