Kaira M. Cabañas

Lecturer and Director of MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies (MODA)

Modern and Contemporary Art, Europe and the Americas 
Ph.D., Princeton University, 2007

Contact Information

Phone: (212) 854-5676 

Office: 908 Schermerhorn
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 4-5:30 and by appointment

Biography

Kaira M. Cabañas received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2007 and is currently completing her first book manuscript, The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and Performative Language in France. The work examines the group of artists commonly known under the banner of Nouveau Réalisme, including Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, and Jean Tinguely, and describes how their reformulations of avant-garde strategies (i.e., monochrome, collage, readymade) were developed in relation to the conventions of language and institutions.

Cabañas has engaged extensively with modern and contemporary art in international contexts, including as a contributor to Gego 1957–1988: Thinking the Line (2006); as an outside reader for Parachute's issue on Havana (2007); as author in the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona's presentation of its collection (2009) and in the forthcoming Il mondo è già stato filmato, si tratta ora di trasformarlo. Guy Debord e il cinema. At present she is at work on a book-length study of Lettrist cinema in the years 1951–52.

Cabañas's writings have appeared in Grey Room, Les Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne, Parachute, and Oxford Art Journal, as well as in various museum catalogues such as Yves Klein: Corps, couleur, immatériel (Centre Georges Pompidou, 2006), Gil J Wolman: I am Immortal and Alive (MACBA/Serralves, 2010), and Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers (Walker/Hirshhorn, 2010).

Cabañas is guest curator, together with Frédéric Acquaviva, of the exhibition Specters of Artaud. Language and the Arts in the 1950s, which opens at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in fall 2012.

Selected Publications

Common Love, Aesthetics of Becoming: Columbia University MFA Alumni (ed. and introduction). New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, 2011. Essays by A.E. Benenson, Kristen Chappa, Donald Johnson-Montenegro, Tomoko Kanamitsu, and a roundtable discussion with Michael Hardt (Duke University).

Seven Circles / Seven Sounds: Lothar Baumgarten (ed. and preface). Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2009. Essays by Thomas Bartscherer, Craig Buckley, John Curley, Christian Rattemeyer (interview), and Amy Rosenblum-Martín.

Jacques Villeglé. Text, Kaira Cabañas; interview with the artist, Nicolas Bourriaud; essay, François Bon. Paris: Flammarion, 2006.