Professor Sarah Linford Invited as Keynote Speaker at Book Presentation at The Met
JCU Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, Dr. Sarah Linford was invited to be a keynote speaker at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) presentation of the 2023-2024 illustrated edition of Atlante dell’arte contemporanea (Atlas of Contemporary Art, Giunti Editore, 2024) in New York on May 25, 2024. Edited by Daniele Radini Tedeschi and Stefania Pieralice, who head the publication’s Scientific Committee, the Atlante is the oldest-running encyclopedia of contemporary art and the only volume of its kind included in the Venice Biennale’s Padiglione del Libro, or Book Pavilion, where a selection of the world’s most authoritative recent publications on contemporary art are displayed.
Professor Linford’s contribution to the volume was a short essay, in Italian, on the development, issues, challenges and import of American Art of the 20th and early 21st centuries. A version of this text, adapted to focus on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s contemporary holdings, was presented in the form of a slide lecture at the Italian Senate’s Sala Capitolare in the Palazzo della Minerva inRome, on the occasion of the February 9, 2024 conference entitled “1940-2023: più di ottant’anni di storia dell’Atlante dell’Arte Contemporanea” (1940-2023: Over eighty years of the history of the Atlas of Contemporary Art.)
In Rome as in New York, Professor Linford’s lectures aimed to contribute to fostering further bilateral cultural exchanges between Italy and the U.S. Her talk at the Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York addressed the Atlante’s resonance with the Met by providing a history of this iconic universal survey museum, its mission and collections, its dedication to education and research. The packed lecture hall included journalists, artists, curators, critics and art historians — most notably from Italy and the United States — who also witnessed the bestowing of a medal to the Met from the Consiglio Accademico of the Florentine Accademia Medicea, a selection of artists’ talks related to the donation of contemporary Italian artworks to the Met, and a presentation by the Atlante’s director of publication, Daniele Radini Tedeschi.
Art historian, curator, and educator specializing in modern and contemporary art, Professor Sarah Linford holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and a Research Doctorate from the Université Blaise Pascal in France. She taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome before joining JCU’s Art History Department. She recently published Force Fields: Rome and Contemporary Printmaking with Devin Kovach (Palombi Editori and Temple University Press, December 2020) and contributed to Une Tradition révolutionnaire. Les Arts figuratifs de Rome à Paris 1905-1940 (Académie de France-Villa Médici, December 2020).
