Postdoctoral Fellow, Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Meghan Forbes is a postdoctoral fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Previously, she was the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Fellow for Central and Eastern Europe at The Museum of Modern Art and was an editor of post.
Dr. Forbes holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, having completed her dissertation “In the Middle of It All: Prague, Brno, and the Avant-Garde Networks of Interwar Europe” in 2016. She is currently at work to complete her first book manuscript from this research, which documents historical correspondence, travel accounts, and periodical publications related to previously overlooked networks of exchange between the Czech avant-garde and peers to the East and West. She has received numerous fellowships and grants for this project, including an IIE Fulbright for archival research in Berlin for the 2014-2015 academic year. At the Bauhaus-Archiv there, she researched the connections between the school’s leading figures and those of the Czech avant-garde, and her scholarly writing on this subject has been published in the magazine Umění/Art, the journal of the Institute for Art History in Prague. Dr. Forbes has several other peer-reviewed articles forthcoming, and is the sole editor of International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019). A second book project on the photographer Lucia Moholy is also in the early stages.
Elsewhere, Dr. Forbes’s reviews, essays, and translations have appeared in Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, Music & Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and, of course, on post. Meghan is also the creator and coeditor of harlequin creature, an arts & literary journal that aims to engage the public in creative production through community workshops, conducted at such public institutions as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Dia:Beacon, and 826. Select issues are available to researchers in The MoMA Library.
The move to diversify art historical narratives is often accompanied by a search for commonalities. Instead addressing a need to acknowledge radical difference and untranslatability, each presenter in this panel approached the question of the incommensurable, interrogating tensions between a global approach and site-specific study.
In the keynote lecture, Zdenka Badovinac introduces her concept of the “sustainable museum,” and explores possible translocal approaches to exhibition practice from the so-called periphery, nevertheless situated within the neoliberal global network of art museums and biennials.
This essay is a rare glimpse into the alternative publications of East Germany in the 1980s. Through an overview of the magazines of the period, and a close reading of various images, advertisements, and visual poetry within them, this essay underscores the vibrancy of the underground print scene in the last decade of the GDR.
A major new publication, Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology, presents key voices of this period that have been reevaluating the significance of the socialist legacy, making it an indispensable read on modern and contemporary art and theory. The following dialogue belongs to a series of conversations between artists and members of the C-MAP research group for Central and Eastern Europe at MoMA.
This essay argues that the Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS operated independently of each other, with choice moments of mutual exchange, focusing on the site of the avant-garde magazine as evidence of this.
The Polish artist Władysław Strzemiński completed the manuscript for Theory of Vision in 1947, though it was not published until 1958. Nearly fifty years later, a critical re-edition was put out in 2016 by the Museum Sztuki in Łódź.
Meghan Forbes examines the ways interwar periodicals blurred the boundaries between art and advertisement, creating international networks of exchange.
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