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Nora Annesley Taylor

Professor, Alsdorf Professor in South Asian Art History

Contact

Bio

Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History (2007); BA, 1984, Brown University; MA, PhD, 1997, Cornell University. Books: Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art; ed., Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, An Anthology; ed., Le Vietnam au Feminin; ed., Studies in Southeast Asian Art History: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O'Connor. Articles: Art Journal, Arts Asiatiques, Third Text, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Ethnos, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crossroads, Flash Art, Asian Art News. Curation: Breathing is Free: 12,756.3, Recent Work by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (2009); Changing Identity: Recent Work by Women Artists from Vietnam (2005–2009, travelling); Blue Memory: Tran Trong Vu (2004); Post-War Vietnamese Art: Paintings from the Collection of Bruce Blowitz/Albert Goodman (2016); John David Mooney Foundation, Chicago, 2016. Awards: John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2014–2015; Getty Collaborative Research Award, 2009; Fulbright Scholar; Asian Cultural Council; Rockefeller-Joiner Center.

Experience at SAIC

Chair, Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism, 2018-2021; Elected Faculty Liaison, 2015-2018; Chair, Faculty Contract and Tenure Review Board, 2013; Director of the Graduate Program in Modern and Contemporary Art History, 2009–2012; SAIC Faculty of the Year, 2011.

Books

  • Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (University of Hawaii and National University of Singapore Press, 2004 and 2009)
  • Co-editor (with Boreth Ly), Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, An Anthology (Cornell University Press, SEAP, 2012)
  • Co-editor (with Gisèle Bousquet), Le Vietnam au Feminin (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005)
  • Editor, Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O'Connor (Cornell University Press, SEAP, 2000)
  • Recent Articles (can be downloaded from academia.edu)
  • 2018 Co-editor with Karin Zitzewitz, “History as Figure of Thought in Contemporary Art in South and Southeast Asia,” Art Journal, Winter
  • 2020 Forthcoming Co-editor with Lucy Davis and Kevin Chua, “Uncontainable Natures: Southeast Asian Ecologies and Visual Culture,” Antennae, Winter

Publications

Peer Reviewed

  • 2022 with Natalia Kraevskaia, “Moscow’s Outreach to Hanoi: Artistic Ties Between the Soviet Union and Vietnam,” Art History, Vol. 45:5, November
  • 2022 “Sedimented Acts: Performing History and Historicizing Performance in Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore,” Southeast of Now, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 13-31, March
  • 2022 “The Spectacle of History: Nikhil Chopra at the Met,” Performing Arts Journal, 130 (2022) pp.79-88
  • 2021 “Hunter-Gatherer or the Other Ethnographer? The Artist in the Age of Historical Reproduction” Journal of Material Studies, December
  • 2019 “(Tran)scribed History: Phan Thao Nguyen’s Palimpsest Visions of Colonialism and Conversion” Afterall, Winter 2019, 72-83
  • 2019 “Đổi Mới and the Globalization of Vietnamese Art,” co-authored with Pamela Nguyen Corey, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 14, No. 1, 1-34, March
  • 2018 “The Document as Event: Vietnamese Artists’ Engagements with History,” Art Journal, Winter
  • 2016 “Re-Authoring Images of the Vietnam War: Dinh Q Lê’s ‘Light and Belief’ Installation at dOCUMENTA (13) and the Role of the Artist as Historian.” South East Asia Research 25, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 47–61

Personal Statement

My research centers of contemporary art from Southeast Asia, in particular, Vietnam and Singapore. I lived for a total of nearly a decade in Vietnam and Singapore and have been traveling to Asia for over 30 years. I am interested in the art historiography of contemporary Asian art, performance art in Asia and artists' engagements with historical and archival material. Recently, I have been working closely with the Danish Vietnamese artist Danh Vo. I teach contemporary Asian art, Buddhist Art, Colonialism, Vietnam and India. I want students to learn from artists who challenge stereotypes and cultural assumptions of Asia in order to question biases toward artists outside of Euro-America.

Recent MA Thesis Supervision

  • 2024 Samhita Sonti, “Looking at Zarina’s Work about Home, Displacement, and Longing Through a Queer Lens.”
  • 2024 Paula Yahaira Lopez, “The Cultural is Poltical: Lukas Avendaño’s Interventions in Post-Revolutionary Imagery & Sites of Cultural Heritage.”
  • 2023 Clayton Reed Kennedy, “Presence and Placement: Applications of Digital 3D Objects in Museums.”
  • 2022 Celine Wang, “Tehching Hsieh: Autonomy and Surveillance in One Year Performances.”
  • 2021 Aleksandra Matic, “Screaming Silence: Reconfigured Mythologies in the Photographs of Chitra Ganesh.”

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Can we imagine a world without war? How many nations divided by religion and political ideology have fought for unity and lost? With the ongoing violence and widening conflict in the Middle East, three years after Russia declared war on Ukraine and 50 years since the end of the war in Vietnam, we still open our newspapers to images of the aftermath of violence and bloodshed. Cinema has a long history of depicting the drama of war. Rather than focusing on the battlefield, on which Hollywood has spawned plenty of movies, this series will examine the impact of war on the human psyche and feature films that tell stories of divided families, friends and lovers, human resilience and solidarity when confronting oppression, resistance to occupation and ultimately unity in the face of tragedy. The lectures will look at the impact of partitions, divided borders, territorial conflicts, violent uprisings and civil war as they are played out in historical dramas in an attempt to reflect critically yet objectively on current divisions around the globe.

Warning: The films shown in this class contain scenes of war, violence and trauma. Please understand that the content might be disturbing to some students.

Class Number

2195

Credits

3

Description

Contemporary Art in India has evolved rapidly over the past 30 years but artists have never lost sight of the nation¿s complex and layered regional history. While the urban centers of Delhi and Mumbai house international galleries, museums and art fairs, there are local communities that have created alternative hubs for art making. This class will explore the contemporary art worlds of India, starting in Mumbai, the site of India¿s first modernist movement, the Bombay Progressives, and visit world class galleries and museums in the former colonial district of Colaba. We will then tour the 8th-12th century cave temples of Elephanta, and even older caves of Ellora and Ajanta, which inspired post-independence artists to look back at their local sculptural traditions. We will then visit the former Portuguese colony of Goa where the critically acclaimed performance artist Nikhil Chopra (b. 1974) runs an art space, residency and performance collective, HH Arts Foundation. The trip will culminate in Varanasi, the spiritual heart of India, where students will be given the opportunity to occupy a studio space at the Kriti art residency and spend several days making art with local materials. At each site, students will participate in hands-on workshops, walking tours, studio visits, scholarly lectures and meet people engaged in making contemporary art outside of white cube spaces. Special emphasis will be given on artists who work on issues of individual and collective identities, and work on art and ecology, sustainability, and historically marginalized voices and narratives. The idea of a portable studio will be the way that each participant engages the trip on a daily basis in journaling, documentation, research, drawing, or collage. Mapping the experience of our travel and articulating a point of view through personal recording in a chosen medium will come together in a gallery exhibition/presentation in Varanasi where students will be artist-in-residence in an internationally known residency and art center.

Class Number

1039

Credits

0

Description

This study trip will take us to Vienna (Austria), Brno (Czech Republic with a day trip to visit Mies van der Rohe¿s Villa Tugendhat, 1929), and Ljubljana (Slovenia), with a focus on transcultural territories from the 19th century to today. The goal of this study trip is to gain an understanding of the cultural production of an area that has been shaped by migration and shifting borders for centuries, from the Reformation to the Cold War and today¿s new nationalist and ecological challenges. How is cultural space negotiated and how does art intervene into the world?

Since the end of Communism in 1989, the region that used to be on the cusp of both Western and Eastern Europe has undergone enormous shifts, particularly in the art world. Vienna, Brno, and Ljubljana, bound closely under the Austrian Empire for centuries, then disconnected for half a century by the Iron Curtain, share complex historical interactions even as they have internationalized their art scenes through the opening of new museums, artist residencies, and the emergence of avant-garde scenes. Starting with world-famous cultural exchange around 1900 (such as Ljubljana¿s city plan by Plecnik, Vienna¿s Secession, Brno¿s Villa Tugendhat), after World War II these countries developed independent practices in performance, film, installations, and video, with Yugoslavia acting as a major player in the development of computer art, Czechoslovakia at the forefront of performance, and Austria pioneering body art, Actionism, expanded media, and social practices.

Today, these cities are vibrant, international, and idiosyncratic: the 1980s and `90s saw a crossover between music and art, while questions of the history of multi-culturalism shape a political intersectional art practice. The Austrian Empire consisted of many languages, religions, and ethnicities, while today¿s region again shows a vibrant Jewish community, and a new generation of residents from Turkey, Serbia, Syria, Afghanistan, but also Asia and Africa. The city of Vienna is at the forefront of tackling issues of climate change, with architectural and ecological projects at the intersection of community engagement and infrastructural reform. This, of course, is not without tensions and challenges, in particular the question of which (shared) histories remain to be told. Comparable topics such as immigration, resettlement, architectural expansions, the legacy of the Cold War, and new urban master plans, will be the perfect lens to understand the relevance of contemporary art in opening up the discourse, pushing back against racism and marginalization of immigrant groups, and discussing projects that deal with belonging and the future of an ecological being-in-the-world.

Class Number

1333

Credits

0

Description

Class Number

1042

Credits

3 - 6

Description

Class Number

1043

Credits

3

Description

This study trip will take us to Vienna (Austria), Brno (Czech Republic with a day trip to visit Mies van der Rohe¿s Villa Tugendhat, 1929), and Ljubljana (Slovenia), with a focus on transcultural territories from the 19th century to today. The goal of this study trip is to gain an understanding of the cultural production of an area that has been shaped by migration and shifting borders for centuries, from the Reformation to the Cold War and today¿s new nationalist and ecological challenges. How is cultural space negotiated and how does art intervene into the world?

Since the end of Communism in 1989, the region that used to be on the cusp of both Western and Eastern Europe has undergone enormous shifts, particularly in the art world. Vienna, Brno, and Ljubljana, bound closely under the Austrian Empire for centuries, then disconnected for half a century by the Iron Curtain, share complex historical interactions even as they have internationalized their art scenes through the opening of new museums, artist residencies, and the emergence of avant-garde scenes. Starting with world-famous cultural exchange around 1900 (such as Ljubljana¿s city plan by Plecnik, Vienna¿s Secession, Brno¿s Villa Tugendhat), after World War II these countries developed independent practices in performance, film, installations, and video, with Yugoslavia acting as a major player in the development of computer art, Czechoslovakia at the forefront of performance, and Austria pioneering body art, Actionism, expanded media, and social practices.

Today, these cities are vibrant, international, and idiosyncratic: the 1980s and `90s saw a crossover between music and art, while questions of the history of multi-culturalism shape a political intersectional art practice. The Austrian Empire consisted of many languages, religions, and ethnicities, while today¿s region again shows a vibrant Jewish community, and a new generation of residents from Turkey, Serbia, Syria, Afghanistan, but also Asia and Africa. The city of Vienna is at the forefront of tackling issues of climate change, with architectural and ecological projects at the intersection of community engagement and infrastructural reform. This, of course, is not without tensions and challenges, in particular the question of which (shared) histories remain to be told. Comparable topics such as immigration, resettlement, architectural expansions, the legacy of the Cold War, and new urban master plans, will be the perfect lens to understand the relevance of contemporary art in opening up the discourse, pushing back against racism and marginalization of immigrant groups, and discussing projects that deal with belonging and the future of an ecological being-in-the-world.

Class Number

1336

Credits

3

Description

The thesis, as the final requirement to be fulfilled for the Masters of Art degree in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism, demonstrates the student's ability to present a lucid, sustained work of scholarly research and critical thinking on a specific topic in the field of 19th, 20th and 21st-century art. The thesis indicates the student's thorough command of the available documentation and scholarly research on the subject and suggests clearly-defined objectives and a methodologically-sound approach to a fresh assessment of the topic. This seminar assists the student in selecting, researching, analyzing, designing, organizing, and writing the Art History thesis. Students learn how to select and narrow their topic by organizing materials; preparing an outline, abstract, and bibliography; and defending their proposal before a faculty panel. During this semester, they select their thesis committee and complete most of the research. This seminar is required for the Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism and is taken in the second or third semester of course work.

Class Number

1931

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

2440

Credits

3 - 6

Description

This independent study program for Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism candidates is taken in the final term of coursework.

Class Number

2434

Credits

3