Live @ NH
Into the Light
29 Jan 2021
12:00 noon EST / 17:00 GMT
An hour of immersion into the artistic experience of creation, viewing and conservation in and out of 16thcentury Florence – a period in which the territory of what is now Europe was at the eve of its expansion, full of social tension, internally plural and culturally diverse. The event is hosted on the occasion of Grey Matters, an exhibition that includes three rare surviving examples of paintings in grisaille by Jacopo Pontormo, the Florentine mannerist artist, which will be seen together for the first time in history at Nicholas Hall Gallery in New York.
Live streaming from the gallery, and animated by artist Christian Nyampeta alongside art historian Dennis Geronimus and conservator Shan Kuang, the event features entries from 16th century musical traditions, rare documents including fragments from Pontormo’s diaries, and a newly recorded video that reconstructs the sonic and lighting conditions under which the likes of Pontormo’s grisailles were made and viewed. Remarkably, the measure of lighting was not marked by its brightness and luminescent intensity but by the movements, imaginations and visions that it inspires.
Text by Christian Nyampeta
About the speakers
Christian Nyampeta organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, and pedagogical experiments in New York, London, the Netherlands and beyond. His recent exhibitions include Words after the World, Camden Arts Centre, London (2017); A Flower Garden of All Kinds of Loveliness Without Sorrow, Museum of Contemporary Art (GfZK), Leipzig (2018); École du soir, The Sculpture Center, New York (2019); Gwangju Lessons, Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (2020). His 2018 film Sometimes It Was Beautiful will be premiered in the US at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in Spring 2021.
Dennis Geronimus is an associate professor of Italian Renaissance Art and Chair of the Department of Art History at NYU. His research interests include artistic crosscurrents between Italy and Northern Europe, as well as between Africa and the Mediterranean, among many others. Professor Geronimus co-curated the frist ever retrospecitve of Piero di Cosimo at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (1 Feb – 3 May 2015; travelled to Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; 23 Jun – 27 Sept 2015). He has authored Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), as well as articles and reviews appearing in Burlington Magazine, Art Bulletin, Renaissance Quarterly, and Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz. He is currently working on a monograph devoted to Jacopo Pontormo, to be published by Yale University Press.
The work of professor Geronimus has been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Clark Art Institute, the ACLS, the Renaissance Society of America, the Warburg Institute in London, the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, and the Dutch University Institute for Art History in Florence. Professor Geronimus earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, to which he returned as a visiting scholar in 2018.
Shan Kuang is Assistant Conservator and Research Scholar at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. As part of the Kress Program in Paintings Conservation, Shan researches and treats Old Master paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection and participates in the teaching of graduate students. She and Clinical Professor, Dianne Modestini, working with the Kress Foundation and C&G Partners are in the process of creating an interactive website to house open access restoration images, technical studies, and reports so that they will be available to colleagues and to the interested public.
Shan completed her graduate training in the conservation of easel paintings at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge. She received her BSc in Chemistry from Yale University in 2011. She has held work placements at the Royal Collection Trust, Simon Bobak Conservation, Yale University Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.