First known and signed work of Francisco Xavier Lobo, translator, playwright, poet and painter from Lisbon during the eighteenth century for the collegial-church of Espírito Santo (Castelo de Vide), heavily marked by decency concerns as response to a progressively more sensual painting.

Efforts had been made to portrait Francisco Pérez Bayer in his visit to Portugal in 1782, but with a «shadowing memory» result as we seen today at Évora Museum reserves and originally from D. Frei Manuel do Cenáculo’s pinacotheca. Portraits of edifying figures of society had been included in his collection reinforcing the position of this genr…[Read more]

Weimar antimilitarist imagery shows that ideals of manliness and maternity, concepts central to the German patriotic view of World War I, were not limited to use by the political right but were redefined and deployed by antiwar artists Otto Dix and Käthe Kollwitz, and in photographs published by the pacifist propagandist Ernst Friedrich, who…[Read more]

Public racist stereotypes after the election of Barack Obama

On the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the visual politics of power

On pacifist and patriotic visual imagery and the tenth anniversary of the First World War in Weimar German

On the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko

On looking at lynching photographs

The politics of Rivera’s RCA mural in New York City.

One of the most pressing challenges in the world today is access to clean water. This chapter explores the crises of contaminated water in Flint, water shutoffs in Detroit, and larger questions about the control of water by private corporations and the changing nature of urbanization. As neoliberal policies seek to privatize infrastructure and…[Read more]

Two-part interview about the book Beautiful Terrible Ruins

By depicting urban decay and ecological crisis, ruin imagery shows the people and places that capitalism left behind.

Acknowledging the central role art from around the globe played in the production of the modern, this seminar will engage with the emergent art historical, methodological, and theoretical literature shaping the history of modern art after the global turn. Particular case studies of regional art movements (in e.g. Cuba, Brazil, India, Japan, Iran,…[Read more]

Artists around the world grappled with the modern, working through local concerns and struggles but continually engaged with counterparts in Europe, North America, and across the “global South.” This course will introduce art, artists, movements, and institutions of modernism from approximately 1880 to the present and from outside of the nor…[Read more]

This paper explores the role of mobile telecommunication and technology firms (MTTs) in the distribution of recorded music in Ghana and Kenya. These countries both have vibrant music markets with weak formal distribution networks. Limited enforcement of copyright regimes and weak market regulation created new entrepreneurial business models. While…[Read more]

An essay written for the catalog for the exhibition, “Benga: Kenyan Kaleidoscope” (Bureau Sepän). Originally written in English; French translation by Gabriella Seemann.

Abstract from the catalog:
Se référant à une performance musicale à laquelle il a assisté et impliquant l’un des musiciens les plus en vue du Kenya, Dan Aceda, dans cet ess…[Read more]

In this keynote, Kijas explores issues embedded in musicological traditions of canonicity and discusses the need for recovery of underrepresented composers in order to build a more inclusive digital canon.