Student Newsletter

In October 2024, I had the delight to interview Dr. Elina Staikou, who, in 2021, presented "Thinking the Nitrogen Anthropocene” as the third lecture of the year-long IDSVA virtual symposium, On the Anthropocene: Either/Or, addressing the role of art and philosophy in relation to ecology, climate change, co-existence, and sustainability as an existential urgency of our times.

The 2024 Venice Biennale, renowned for its bold themes and global perspective, embraced the concept of "Foreigners Everywhere" this year, tackling migration, diaspora, and the fluidity of identity in an interconnected world. The exhibition pressed us to confront shifting landscapes and reflect on those forced to live on society's margins.

In his most recent book, Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics, Jason Hoelscher, Associate Professor of Art at Georgia Southern University, unfurls the intricate relationship between artistic creation, complex systems theory, and the dynamic networks that shape art's conceptual and material landscapes.

During their Summer residency at Spannocchia, first-year students had the privilege of engaging with Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese, a preeminent Basquiat scholar and Director of the David C. Driskell Center.

Monte Testaccio, or the Hill of Pots, is an ancient garbage dump of broken pottery shards in Rome. During the Italian Residency, I was reminded of Rosalind Krauss’s theory on signifiers and indices, looking at the Monte Testaccio.

While moving hurriedly along Venice’s Grand Canal to an art installation at the Biennale, I caught sight of a sign for a photography exhibition entitled Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death. Published in 1976, the book Portraits in Life and Death is now legendary; for years, the original single print run made the book so scarce that it became a collector’s item.

The event, The Holy See, invites visitors into a rarely seen world inside the walls of an Italian women’s prison, allowing us to witness the intersection of art and incarceration. It’s a unique and immersive experience, melding the surreal and the real to capture the complexity of life behind bars.

With their mystical heritage surrounded by misconceptions, Cycladic figurines still present a unique intersection of aesthetics, art, and cultural and socioeconomic traditions. Their story offers input into the changing notion of perception and the power of poetic language. During our residency in Athens, we had a chance to visit the Museum of Cycladic Art, which is one of the most fascinating museums in the region. The museum holds one of the most comprehensive private collections of Cycladic marble figurines from the fourth millennium BC.

The ancient city of Siena is tucked amid Tuscan hills. Its design is said to have been a work of art intended to blend into the surrounding landscape. The city dates back to the time of the Etruscans, and its historic center is distinguished by Gothic and medieval architecture. It was one of the important and fascinating stops during the IDSVA intensive residency in Italy.

Leave it to Professor Dejan Lukic to situate us toward the “supple amassing of the sea” (6). Bivalve mollusks, born from maternal seas of the Cambrian era, are the neither-fauna nor-flora subject examined in his book, The Oyster: Or, Radial Suppleness. Published in 2020, Lukic co-authored this treasure with Nik Kosieradzki using a method called ‘hallucinalysis.’

Emmanuel Kant’s categorical imperative has been subsumed by a new inexorable force, bubbling up from the molecular: that of the climatological imperative. No longer is it safe to think of a world outside, separate from and organized by the perceptions of the anthropocentric self, rather, it is crucial that human ontology begin to acknowledge its deeply inextricable relationship to the habitat which we constantly reshape, and in which we constantly leave traces.

Check out the latest conference papers, awards, and exhibitions around the world with IDSVA students and alumni.

IDSVA’s intensive residency in Mexico City, takes students to a location that embodies a vibrant cultural history that brings together diverse peoples and languages of multiple cultures and ethnicities. It is a powerful topological space that threads a complex fabric not only of Mexico but reaches far into the Mesoamerican region. The residency is an introduction to the possibilities of pluriverse. A World of Many Worlds, a core reading for the residency, opens the dialogue of what it means to consider a pluriverse.

This past April, the IDSVA community gathered in New York City to celebrate the largest roster of degree recipients in the institution’s history—thirty total; twenty of whom participated at The Morgan Library commencement ceremony in person. In addition to commencement, the event marked the passing of the sacred presidential torch from IDSVA founder Dr. George Smith to Dr. Simonetta Moro. Moro is IDSVA’s second president and first woman president.

Golden hour is a magical time for photographers and painters – the first hour of light just after dawn and the last hour before sunset, when light is gentle and warm, and objects appear diffused. Moroccan light has the same quality, but it lingers through the day.

Prehistoric cave paintings and artifacts reveal the long history of the artistic expression of women, displaying their intellectual capabilities, community orientations, and creative spirits.

Melvin Edwards (IDSVA PhD honoris causa ’22) has had a sixty-plus-year career as a sculptor, broadly exhibited in the United States and internationally, who molds industrial materials like barbed wires, chains, and found steel objects into meaningful artworks—free-standing sculptures and installations—with cultural connotations, including his now-famous Lynch Fragments series.

In the piece Carmen (prologue) viewed at Espacio Arte Actual, Quito Ecuador under the exhibition "From One Gaze, Another" French-Ecuadorian artist Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza veils and then reveals a truth.

At IDSVA’s in-person symposium, A Toast to an Ethos of Care, Jeca Rodríguez-Colón and Gabriel Reed, the co-curators of the event, were nothing short of amazing. What started as an open invitation for anyone associated with the IDSVA family to contribute their artistic and philosophical musings via academic papers, visual art presentations, and performances, turned into a vibrant celebration.

Artist-philosophers united for a weekend of joyful gratitude and loving celebration in honor of the largest cohort of graduates in IDSVA’s history, and the historic retirement of founder and president Dr. George Smith.

The spring 2023 residency in Berlin began with Professor Howard Caygill’s lecture, which described Berlin as “a city of becoming” and said, “The city is never what it appears to be.” As we walked around Berlin in the coming days, I thought about these statements and the city’s actions in destroying, conserving, and concealing the past.

The title of the recently published The Vattimo Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), edited by Dr. Simonetta Moro, may cause the unsuspecting reader to have low expectations concerning the breadth of the book’s philosophical value. Its designation as a dictionary may suggest that its contents are merely referential – that is, a resource that contains “a selection of words and information about their meanings, pronunciations, etymologies, inflected forms, derived forms, etc.”

Professor George Smith is founder of IDSVA and author of “The Artist-Philosopher and Poetic Hermeneutics." He held a three-part lecture series on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The following is a first year’s perspective on the lecture series.

The setting is the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. As one of the world’s most famous art museums, it is also one of the most bustling. I am standing before of The Baptism of Christ, an oil painting circa 1475 attributed to Andrea del Verrocchio and his most studious pupil, Leonardo Da Vinci.

On the last day of the Athens residency, we had the option of going on a walking tour with Nina Papazoglou. We walked along the foothills of the Acropolis and learned about how the path was a masterwork of the architect Dimitris Pikionis.

In moments on the street with its movement, texture, smells, and heat, the walls speak to me and others in different, meaningful, and ever-changing ways. Stencil, mural, tag, sticker, word, painting, unfolding like a canvas as we walked through Rome’s Ostiense, San Lorenzo, Esquiline, and Testaccio neighborhoods.

Author Shana Dumont Garr, Cohort ’22 met the artist-philosopher and IDSVA alumna EL Putnam when she was in Boston for her 2023 solo exhibition, Pseudorandom, curated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, cohort ’11, at Emerson College. The exhibition featured video art installations and performances created during the COVID-19 pandemic centering on themes of motherhood, feminism, and collaborations with computers via programs she wrote.

As I step into the halls of the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland College Park, I am keenly aware of the immense privilege as a recipient of their inaugural Archives Research Fellowship.

In May of 2023, several cohorts of IDSVA students, professors, and administrators landed in Marrakech, Morocco. Our schedule for the residency included lectures, seminars, and visits to gardens, traditional architectural sites, and contemporary art museums and galleries.

As an artist, I am interested in human groups' interaction with and through water and how water deals with human-made reality. My works reflect water as a universal medium connected with living or lifeless things.

The Plant Contingent is a creative collective formed in 2020. Members include Ana Fernandez and Maria Patricia Tinajero, who recently received their doctorates in January 2023, and Sam Jones and Nandita Baxi Sheth, who are currently working on their doctoral dissertations.

Upon our arrival in Mexico City, on the first night of our astral dreams, we touched the serpent of the patios and the gardens of Tenochtitlán. It was not the evil serpent of the Spanish conquest, nor Huitzilopochtli, the ancient earthy serpent of the Aztecs, mother of the sun god and god of the war, but the serpent of Los Sueños de la Serpiente, by Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, where the main character recreates his past and reinvents his ancestors with the many lives within himself.

The first time I went to New York City was in April 2022, during my first winter residency with IDSVA. I did not know what to expect, and it was a short trip. Luckily, I was able to head back to NYC in February after receiving an invitation from one of my closest IDSVA colleagues, Veronika Golova ’21, and a recommendation from Dr. Simonetta Moro.

It was a bright and clear January day when a group of us visiting Mexico City for the January 2023 residency headed to the vibrant Frida Kahlo Museum, La Casa Azul, in the Colonia del Carmen neighborhood of Coyoacán.

During the 2022 summer residency at Spannocchia Castle in Tuscany, IDSVA students and faculty members, Dr. Simonetta Moro, Dr. Dejan Lukic, and Dr. Jason Hoelscher, engaged with visiting guest Dr. David Webb, Professor of Philosophy from Staffordshire University in the UK.

If the United States is a bellwether of global trends, organized Christian religion is experiencing severe and impactful stresses to once-settled principles. On the one hand, notions of proper behavior toward fellow human beings, which historically have often been inspired by the ethical, humane actions of Jesus Christ as recounted in the New Testament of the Bible, appear out of vogue.

Summer 2022 residency in Morocco was a kaleidoscope of color, texture, taste, and kinship that was small in group size but large on intellectual impact, spiritual influence, and creative intrigue. From the architecture of medieval mosques, to the spicy and fragrant tagine culinary dishes, to the insightful philosophical lectures, to the day trips led by the very dear and kind-hearted Dr. Ilham Ibnouzahir, it is difficult to pinpoint what was most memorable. What is easy to recall is that every moment felt magical. As much as we were there to absorb Moroccan culture, it was the indigenous people there (and their artistic imprint) which offered opportunities of reflection and serenity to open up our minds and our hearts to deeper conversations, individual reflections and readings, and insights to each other and the ideas behind— and developing towards—our dissertations.

During this summer’s residency, I became inspired by the Israel Pavilion in the Giardini at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, which featured the internationally acclaimed artist Ilit Azoulay from Israel who lives and works in Berlin. In particular, I highlighted the Israeli pavilion because Azoulay’s work reminded me of lustrous maps.

This article discusses the relationship between the fallen heroes and monuments through Kehinde Wiley’s paintings and bronze sculptures in connection to a Hegelian dialectic for recognition. Hegelian recognition is defined through self-consciousness, which leads to the fight to the death for recognition of the master-slave dialectic and is evident in the artwork’s formal features seen in Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition An Archaeology of Silence.

The final destination of our summer residency included an incredible day at the 2022 Venice Biennale, titled “The Milk of Dreams.” One of the rooms in the main pavilion at the Giardini was devoted to women artists who were instrumental in the birth of the Surrealist movement. The room created a space for and shined a rapturous light on female creativity— particularly works of art overlooked or lost as fragments amidst the prominent canon of male Surrealist artists. La fleur des amants (Figure 1), by Nadja, is precisely one of these fragments, an ephemeral drawing that radiates anew in the context of this show.

This essay reviews a talk between artist Emilia Kabakov and IDSVA Director Dr. Simonetta Moro. The talk was part of the 2022 IDSVA New York Residency bringing together faculty, staff, and students in person after two years of pandemic travel pauses. Moro asked Kabakov questions as they sat on stage in a lecture hall in the auditorium of the New Museum in New York City. Emilia and her husband, the artist Ilya Kabakov, collaborate on a variety of projects, including installations and public sculptures

Food nourishes the body—bodies require the intake of nutrients for physiological and cognitive growth. Food, as the old adage goes, also nourishes the soul. In a series of lectures to IDSVA, Chef Nephi Craig describes his use of indigenous foodways as a therapeutic modality to repair the detrimental physical, psychical, and spiritual effects of colonial violence. For Craig, growing, preparing, consuming, discussing, and sharing indigenous food act as powerful restorative practices to nourish various aspects of Native American life.

We packed our bags and woke up in Paris, France, where rainy tarmacs greeted us in the city of lights. We rambled our way through the transit system and popped out at the Arc de Triomphe. Let the revolution begin! We embarked on a somewhat post-pandemic residency through Europe for four weeks in six cities. France and Italy unfolded in all their splendor and challenges. We became awake again after years of quarantine and sacrifice and kicked off the adventure in Paris.

Steampunk art finds itself at the intersection of nineteenth-century aesthetics and the technology of an imagined and distant future. How did I find this fascinating genre and end up writing about it for my doctoral dissertation? Soon after enrolling at IDSVA, I encountered Steampunk at the San Diego Comic-Con, a huge gathering of comic book fans, technology geeks, and entertainment industry insiders.

The Gallery of Art of Temple University Rome in participation with the American Academy of Rome presented the virtual exhibition of "Mapping A Friendship": Joyce Kozloff and Simonetta Moro on Tuesday, May 18th, 2021. The exhibition was accompanied by a conversation with the artists, who are also two fellows of the American Academy in Rome:Joyce Kozloff, a recipient of the distinguished Rome Prize, and Dr. Simonett aMoro, the recipient of the prestigious Italian Fulbright Fellowship in the Visual Arts.

When we entered Aga Ousseinov’s studio – albeit virtually – I noticed what initially looked like wall hangings in the background. As Ousseinov discussed his work and his interests, I was excited to know that he designs kites and has interests in aviation and futurism.

Last year, I had two writing projects published. The first one is the article: “Porous Bodies, Toxic Kin: Mapping the Massena Critical Zone,” in the peer-reviewed journal, Writing Visual Culture Vol.10 (2022): “What the World Needs Now is Artists Engaging with Science.” The second is “Hidden Architectures in the Urban Landscape (Brownfields, Landfills, and Phyto-scapes),” for the upcoming book: Design in(g) Environments: Social and Cultural Implications of Architectonic Landscapes, edited by Dr. Sarina Miller.

We are very pleased to announce the launch of our newly designed website, idsva.edu, where every aspect of the PhD program is covered in detail. In particular, we are proud to highlight the publications of our students and core faculty.

Dorit Yaron is a curator, museum professional, grant writer, art historian, and now, member of the academic affairs committee and the board at IDSVA. Since 2004, she has served as the Deputy Director of the David C. Driskell Center for Study of African American Art at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Terrence Phearse is 33 years old and lives nearly 3,000 miles away from me in New York City. He’s a researcher, photographer, writer, and curator who comes to IDSVA through a life of World exploration. We are separated by millions of people, hundreds of cities, numerous states, yet we are at IDSVA studying together. Somewhat fortunate, I’d say.

During the IDSVA Summer Residency in June 2021, students and faculty enjoyed a lecture and virtual exhibition titled Photo-Drawing- Passage-Line, Haptic and Sensory Habitus by Daphné Le Sergent.

In On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (2013), Howard Caygill describes Kafka’s parable, Before the Law, detailing the duel between the "Doorkeeper and the Man from the Country’ and how the parable forms an “exemplary meditation on the success and failure of resistance” (Caygill, Afterword).

There is no doubt that close reading brings us into close relation with texts. This way of reading (and re-reading) is a hermeneutic engagement that fosters novel insights and pathways into and out of the work. It is important to acknowledge, however, that the vitalism at the heart of the work of hermeneutic reading is a reciprocal responsiveness; the close relationship between text and reader develop in relation to each other—in response to one another—that is, ecologically and alive.

On October 23, 2021, Professor Dejan Lukic offered an intriguing lecture on the presence of the wound in the animal world, opening with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties” (8).

In the first of the fall lecture series, “On the Anthropocene: Either/Or,” Professor Howard Caygill presented on the concept of Anthropocene which at its root identifies humanity’s comprehensive impact on the environment.

Since enrolling at IDSVA, students have led panel discussions and presented papers at prominent conferences, published papers and articles in leading publications, been awarded fellowships and promotions, and participated in solo and group exhibitions around the world. We’re pleased to announce that four of our recent graduates have forthcoming book publications from their dissertations.

We are very excited to announce two Visiting Faculty appointments for the coming spring semester at IDSVA: Professors Grant Farred and Jane Taylor.

For my Fall 2020 Independent Study, Dr. George Smith, our respected President and founder of IDSVA, assigned me a task.

At this moment, I am sitting and I am taking time out to breathe, to breathe for jus(tice) this one moment in time that allows me to be, just to be me. As I sit here reflecting on my 2020 Summer Residency experience at IDSVA, I see the rise and the fall of my chest, as I inhale and I exhale.

On June 15, 2020, our cohort had the pleasure of participating in the summer’s philosophical event with a lecture by Jean Luc Nancy on the Sense of the World (first published in 1993), introduced by Dr. Giovanni Tusa.

Someone knew that Marvin Milian and I needed to collide. Not to meet, but to collide. “To strike together.” The interview transcribed below constitutes a collision of two David C. Driskell Fellows, two parents (each with two children), raising families on two opposing coasts, striking-together a set of new thought-chords as artist-philosophers.

Last year, Summer 2019, IDSVA students were on the countryside, together enjoying organic Italian cuisine while acting out Manet’s Olympia painting to develop a possible narrative in the name of hermeneutics. After a whirlwind week in Rome, we arrived at Spannocchia, a Medieval castle and farm in the hills near Siena. Spannocchia was a beautiful and trying time for me.

In this write-up, I read Paul Armstrong’s article “The Conflict of Interpretations and the Limits of Pluralism” (1983) with his Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative (2020) for a short intertextualized review.

Last summer, due to Covid-19, we could not take a trip to Berlin as planned, so IDSVA had to move our intensive residencies online. During our second year Topological Studies summer course, Professor Howard Caygill prefaced that he would not be giving the usual lecture with Q&A, but instead would provide the experience of a virtual, walking tour of Berlin.

Presenting our papers at the First Colloquium of Visuality and Power: The Visual Turn in Socio-Environmental Struggles, Quito-Ecuador allowed us to deepen our ongoing conversations of plants, soil, indigenous knowledge, cholos, longos, and more topics that straddle the conceptual and practical North-South borderlines.

We may be more familiar with the names of Dostoyevsky and Hegel than of the author of Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears, László F. Földényi, professor at the University of Theatre, Film, and Television in Budapest, Hungary.

As I write this, the Presidential election looms less than two weeks away in the United States of America, and the world peers anxiously in as political parties brace themselves on opposite ends of a dialectic. Media storms engulf the digital airwaves while the world’s political culture buckles under a fervent reality of alternate facts.

The following is an exchange between Jeca Rodríguez-Colón and George Orwel, two IDSVA PhD candidates who participated in the IDSVA Student Symposium “Difference and Opacity: New Topologies of Thought” on November 21st, 2020. This exchange took place in anticipation of the Symposium.

Elina Staikou, an Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Winchester in Hampshire (UK) has written numerous texts on migrations, boundaries, and the metaphysics of travel and writing. As a guest lecturer for our IDSVA Topological Studies II program in the Summer of 2020, she offered insights into Martin Heidegger, Donna Harraway, Jacques Derrida, and Immanuel Kant, among other philosophers.