Center for Humanities Research Summer Fellow Research Talk: PhD Candidate Amy Zhang (Cultural Studies), "Contested Legitimacy: Art Museums in the Arabian Peninsula"

Wednesday, August 23, 2023 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Horizon Hall 6325

Amy Zhang is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies. Her dissertation is titled "Contested Legitimacy: Art Museums in the Arabian Peninsula." It studies the development of art museums in the Arabian Peninsula during the 21st century as examples of how legitimacy is constructed and maintained by art institutions in the non-West. It locates the establishment of art museums in Qatar and the U.A.E. within the context of an intensely conflicted art world where ideas about the universality and autonomy of art that were formerly axiomatic to the field have become challenged but not fully unsettled. It shows how the counterintuitive forms that 21st-century Arabian Peninsula art museums take, and their ambivalent Western media reception demonstrate that the contemporary art world remains structured to exclude, despite how desires for the globalization of art and presumptions about the universal value of art remain motivating principles within the art world. It argues that art museums in Qatar and the U.A.E. fully embody the institutional contradictions of the contemporary fine art world. As a result, new Arabian Peninsula art museums, as much as established ones, inhabit an unsustainable position. 

Please join us in person in Horizon Hall 6325 or on zoom for a presentation and discussion. Zoom link will be provided through CHR's newsletter which you can sign up for HERE.