Asia Society vice president will give annual Findley Lecture, today

Vishakha N. Desai, senior vice president of Asia Society in New York and director of its galleries and cultural programs, will deliver the Cornell Department of the History of Art's annual Findley Distinguished Lecture today, April 4, in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art on campus.

Desai's lecture, titled "Beyond 'East' and 'West': Art Making in the Age of Globalization," will be on the museum's 6th floor at 5 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

The annual lecture series is named for its donors, Ruth Woolsey Findley and William Nichols Findley, who endowed the program to bring distinguished visiting scholars to the Cornell campus annually to give presentations on current art history issues and interact with faculty and students.

"Dr. Vishakha N. Desai is one of the most appropriate and foremost scholar to contribute to the series, bringing new ideas and a fresh perspective to art history," said Salah Hassan, chairman of the Department of History of Art and associate professor of Africana studies. "As a formidable scholar, Desai has articulated the need for studying modernity and modernism from global and comparative perspectives. In her writings and curatorial projects, Desai combines a strong background in traditional Indian art and awareness of issues in contemporary Asian art in global contexts."

In the past, the Findley Lecture Series has brought to Cornell world renowned art historians such as Steven Melville of Ohio State University and Jonathan Crary of Columbia University.

In her position with Asia Society, a nonprofit educational institution in New York City, Desai is responsible for the development of special exhibitions, performances, film and lecture programs and conferences about all aspects of Asian arts and culture. Under her direction, the society has inaugurated an ambitious and diverse program to present contemporary art by Asian and Asian-American artists, while continuing to organize projects with new contextual foci.

Prior to assuming her current position, Desai was curator of Indian, Southeast Asian and Islamic art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as head of the museum's public programs and academic affairs. She also has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston University and Columbia University. Desai received her B.A. from Bombay University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. In 1996, Susquehanna University awarded her an honorary doctorate in arts.

She has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She has published extensively on traditional Indian art and on issues in contemporary Asian art.

Desai has served on the board of directors for the College Art Association, the American Association of Museum Directors and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. During 1998-99, she served as the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and on the boards of the South Asian Council of the Association of Asian Studies, ArtTable and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.