Art Lecture Series: Leah Modigliani

Leah Modigliani is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She is an artist and scholar with transdisciplinary engagements in fine arts, art history, critical geography, urban studies, and politics. Modigliani’s work represents the liberatory potential (right to the city) and neoliberal revanchism (displacement, punitive laws) of urban experience. She has dwelled upon eviction (“How long can we tolerate this? An incomplete record from 1933-1999,” 2016-17); cities destroyed by war (“The City in Her Desolation,” 2017) and natural disasters (“Cities of God” series 2021-22), and protests against injustices enacted in cities (“Washington D.C., 1939; Basel, 1957; Berkeley, 1969; Chicago, 1969; London, 1969; Windsor, 1982...,” 2015-2018). While often sculptural, her work increasingly cites the form and history of photography, especially photography’s role in constituting and deconstructing historical narratives online and in physical archives. Modigliani's visual artworks are complemented and informed by her academic writing about photography and landscape.
Modigliani's visual work has been exhibited at many galleries and museums including Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum (Philadelphia), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Colby College Museum of Art (Waterville, ME), the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto). Her critical writing can be found in academic journals and contemporary art magazines such as Mapping Meaning the Journal, Anarchist Studies, Prefix Photo, Art Criticism and C Magazine. Her book, Engendering an avant garde: the unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism was published by Manchester University press in 2018), and her book Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action was published by Routledge in 2023.