Hybrid Event – Roundtable Book Launch for Sarah-Neel Smith's "Metrics of Modernity" – September 28

Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey

A Book Launch Roundtable with:

Sarah-Neel Smith

Maryland Institute College of Art

Wednesday, September 28, 2022 | 2:30 PM ET

In person at Hahne 421, and on Zoom

Rutgers University-Newark

54 Halsey St, Newark, NJ

In this vivid portrait of the art world of 1950s Turkey, Sarah-Neel Smith offers a new framework for analyzing global modernisms of the twentieth century: economic development.

After World War II, a cohort of influential Turkish modernists built a new art scene in Istanbul and Ankara. The entrepreneurial female gallerist Adalet Cimcoz, the art critic (and future prime minister) Bülent Ecevit, and artists like Aliye Berger, Füreya Koral, and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu were not only focused on aesthetics. On the canvas, in criticism, and in the gallery, these cultural pioneers also grappled with economic questions—attempting to transform their country from a “developing nation” into a major player in the global markets of the postwar period.

Smith’s book publishes landmark works of Turkish modernism for the first time, along with an innovative array of sources—from gossip columns to economic theory—to reveal the art world as a key site for the articulation of Turkish nationhood at midcentury.

Respondents:

Sonal Khullar, W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Alex Dika Seggerman, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University-Newark

Moderated by:

Amir Moosavi, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University-Newark

Register in advance to receive the Zoom link: 

https://rutgers.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jUICfSSCTCSg_shgzuqoXg

Order the book:

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520383418/metrics-of-modernity