Leora Maltz-Leca teaches and writes about contemporary art. She is particularly interested in how artists from the postcolonies and the global south are reshaping late modernism by refusing its most cherished assumptions, its hierarchies and its dogmas.
At RISD Maltz-Leca teaches large lecture courses on global modernism and contemporary art and leads focused seminars on materiality, process, race, critical theory and the artist’s lecture. Her MFA seminar, The Gradual Contemporary, brings a range of artists, art historians, and critics to RISD to share with students their divergent takes on the contemporary.
Maltz-Leca has written—especially on contemporary African art—for publications such as Artforum, Frieze, African Arts, Art South Africa, ArteEast as well as Art Bulletin, where she is a member of the journal’s editorial board. Before turning to art history, she worked in corporate law and in the international sales and design sectors of the fashion industry. For some recent writing, see her remembrance of David Goldblatt and a short consideration of Pascale Marthine Tayou’s chocolate abstractions.
Maltz-Leca holds undergraduate degrees in painting and in philosophy, a background that continues to shape her interest in the stakes of studio materials and processes: both the pragmatics of making and unmaking, and the metaphorics of artistic process as a form of mental processing. Her book on William Kentridge, Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises (University of California Press, 2018), explores how the South African artist renders the physical processes of the studio—cutting, pasting and projecting light—as metaphors for the way we think and live. Her second book (also an upcoming exhibition) titled Material Politics: Matter and Meaning In and Out of the Postcolonies continues to explore the politics embedded in material choices, addressing how a range of contemporary artists plumb the histories and associations of specific substances to materialize the political through their formal.
Maltz-Leca’s curatorial and public projects have been funded by the Ford Foundation (2018), the VIA Foundation (2018), and the Robert Lehmann Foundation (2017). Her writing has been supported by a 2016 CAA Millard Mess publication award, a 2011 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s book award, a 2011/12 Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship and a 2010 Library of Congress Swann fellowship for animation.
In 2017 Maltz-Leca founded the Redwood Contemporary Arts Initiative at Newport’s Redwood Library & Athenaeum, the oldest subscription library and the first public Neoclassical building in the US, and the original American multidisciplinary think-space. Renewing the premise that art and text depend on one another—and that what artists read remains central to what they make—the RCAI organizes lectures, symposia and exhibitions, and partners with other Newport organizations, such as Art & Newport. In June 2018, to launch the Material Politics initiative, the RCAI commissioned Newport’s first slavery memorial from Pascale Marthine Tayou. (See Artdaily for selected 2017 press coverage.)
Recent essays include “The Politics of Collaboration: Drowning the Piano and Other Southern Tales” in the 2016 Routledge volume Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century and “The Politics of Excess” for Worldshare, Pascale Martine Tayou’s 2016 exhibition at the Fowler Museum, UCLA. “Grounding Robin Rhode” explored the artist’s ambivalent relationship to ground—both formal and geographic—on the occasion of his 2014 retrospective at the Neuberger Museum, NY, and “Specters of the Original and the Liberties of Repetition,” African Arts (winter 2013) treats the politics of nude female resistance in postcolonial Africa.
GRAD 148G-01 - PROCESSING THE CONTEMPORARY: CONVERSATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY ART
LevelGraduate
UnitTheory + History of Art + Design
Subject Graduate Studies
Period Fall 2024
Credits 3
FormatSeminar
Mode In-Person
Start date
End date
GRAD 148G-01
PROCESSING THE CONTEMPORARY: CONVERSATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY ART
LevelGraduate
UnitTheory + History of Art + Design
Subject Graduate Studies
PeriodFall 2024
Credits3
FormatSeminar
ModeIn-Person
Start and End2024-09-04 to 2024-12-11
Times: T | 1:10 PM - 4:10 PMInstructor(s): Leora Maltz-LecaLocation(s): College Building, Room 410Enrolled / Capacity: 15Status: Open
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course frames contemporary art as a set of conversations, arguments and counterarguments that have been proposed in key exhibitions, works of art, and critical writings produced across multiple continents over the past three decades. We will identify and critique the ideas that have shaped contemporary art, discuss their impetus, and examine their assumptions. Through such conversations, the course presents contemporary art as a form of processing a present and a past in which the artwork is indivisible from the dialogues and conversations that create, define and continue to change it. The title of the class alludes not only to the idea of making and reading contemporary art as cognitive, rhetorical and dialogic activities, but also to the art world as a series of geographically dispersed and temporally promiscuous processes, deeply resistant to modernist systems of order, periodization and mapping. The course combines lectures by the instructor, as well as by visiting critics and art historians, which outline some of the key issues and historical pressures of contemporary art, alongside seminar-type discussions where we process the lectures and select readings as a group.
Elective
THAD H101-03 - THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
LevelUndergraduate
UnitTheory + History of Art + Design
Subject Theory & History of Art & Design
Period Fall 2024
Credits 3
FormatLecture
Mode In-Person
Start date
End date
THAD H101-03
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
LevelUndergraduate
UnitTheory + History of Art + Design
Subject Theory & History of Art & Design
PeriodFall 2024
Credits3
FormatLecture
ModeIn-Person
Start and End2024-09-04 to 2024-12-11
Times: T | 11:20 AM - 12:50 PM; TTH | 8:00 AM - 9:00 AMInstructor(s): Leora Maltz-LecaLocation(s): Design Center, Room 901; Auditorium, Room 132Enrolled / Capacity: 20Status: Closed
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
A Master's Thesis is a substantive, research-based scholarly essay of at least 60 double-spaced pages that involves original research and makes an original intervention in the field. The culmination of the Master's Degree, the Master's Thesis is of publishable quality. This course supports the completion of the Master's Thesis. Students are required to work independently, in conversation with peers, and in individual consultation with their MA Thesis Committee to develop, complete, revise, and finalize the Master's Thesis. The Master's Thesis will be housed in the RISD Library in both print and electronic forms. Students are also expected to present work related to the Master's Thesis at the GAC MA Symposium. Please see the GAC MA Thesis Timeline for a clear sequence of required deadlines. Please see the GAC MA Thesis Guidelines and Policies for clarification of the goals and expectations of the GAC MA.
Prerequisite: Successful completion of GAC-798G and approval of the prospectus are required for enrollment.
Enrollment is limited to Global Arts and Cultures Students.
A Master's Thesis is a substantive, research-based scholarly essay of at least 60 double-spaced pages that involves original research and makes an original intervention in the field. The culmination of the Master's Degree, the Master's Thesis is of publishable quality. This course supports the completion of the Master's Thesis. Students are required to work independently, in conversation with peers, and in individual consultation with their MA Thesis Committee to develop, complete, revise, and finalize the Master's Thesis. The Master's Thesis will be housed in the RISD Library in both print and electronic forms. Students are also expected to present work related to the Master's Thesis at the GAC MA Symposium. Please see the GAC MA Thesis Timeline for a clear sequence of required deadlines. Please see the GAC MA Thesis Guidelines and Policies for clarification of the goals and expectations of the GAC MA.
Prerequisite: Successful completion of GAC-798G and approval of the prospectus are required for enrollment.
Enrollment is limited to Global Arts and Cultures Students.
A Master's Thesis is a substantive, research-based scholarly essay of at least 60 double-spaced pages that involves original research and makes an original intervention in the field. The culmination of the Master's Degree, the Master's Thesis is of publishable quality. This course supports the completion of the Master's Thesis. Students are required to work independently, in conversation with peers, and in individual consultation with their MA Thesis Committee to develop, complete, revise, and finalize the Master's Thesis. The Master's Thesis will be housed in the RISD Library in both print and electronic forms. Students are also expected to present work related to the Master's Thesis at the GAC MA Symposium. Please see the GAC MA Thesis Timeline for a clear sequence of required deadlines. Please see the GAC MA Thesis Guidelines and Policies for clarification of the goals and expectations of the GAC MA.
Prerequisite: Successful completion of GAC-798G and approval of the prospectus are required for enrollment.
Enrollment is limited to Global Arts and Cultures Students.
Major Requirement | MA Global Arts and Cultures
Spring 2025 Courses
THAD H234-01 - PERFORMANCE AS SUSTAINABALE PRACTICE: CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE LIVING LANDSCAPE
LevelUndergraduate
UnitTheory + History of Art + Design
Subject Theory & History of Art & Design
Period Spring 2025
Credits 3
FormatWorkshop
Mode In-Person
Start date
End date
THAD H234-01
PERFORMANCE AS SUSTAINABALE PRACTICE: CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE LIVING LANDSCAPE
This course grounds contemporary eco-art in histories of performance, exploring how global contemporary artists, from Asuncion Molinos Gordo and Otobang Nkanga to Hiwa K, use restorative interventions in the environment, and extended experiments with farming as urgent modes of artistic practice. In so doing, they blur the performative with the lived, aesthetic protest with agricultural interventions. They also build on the legacy of earlier artists (like Ana Mendieta and Anna Halprin, Richard Long and Hamish Fulton) whose work grew out of the environmental movement of the 1960s. Whereas earlier performances in the landscape and its fragile ecologies were fleeting gestures, contemporary artists have embraced prolonged, often permanent, projects in agriculture and subsistence which provocatively erase the line between art and life. In refusing this age-old metaphor – which lies at the heart of Western representation – numerous contemporary artists draw on the transgressive potential of performance to elucidate the urgency of making art amidst rapid global warming.
The transdisciplinary course will be a confluence of artistic output and ecological investigation, an experiment in learning from the land in order to develop and foster a performative art practice deeply rooted in reciprocity, sustainability, and ecological repair. With a conceptual focus on stewardship, observational skill, and practiced craft, coupled with critical thinking around sustainable farming and social and ecological justice, students will draw from the lineage of performative eco-art to explore the possibilities of performance as a restorative practice. We will also consider kinship, regenerative agriculture, the histories and philosophies of gardens, and models of collective and cooperative living. Students will investigate restorative interventions as artistic practice, make site-responsive, on-farm work, and create hybrid artistic/agricultural projects in order to foster a deeper consciousness about our interconnectedness with the earth, contemplate artistic methods of ecological repair, and envision art as a means for sustainable living. We will reflect on our engagement with the physical and social environment; what we value and why; and learn to document and record our physical interventions within the landscape. The class is based at RISD, though some sessions will take place on the instructor’s farm; in other sessions, the class will visit permacultural farms, gardens, parks and arboretums.
