Negar Azimi delivers the tenth annual AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture, presented in a partnership between AICA/USA and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Entitled “Nice One: The Wages of Tokenism,” the talk by Bidoun editor Azimi walks through several vignettes hovering in and around the vexed question of token gestures: How do critics make sense of cultural difference? How to grapple with variance in language, experience, form, and format? What role does taste play? What of political histories hovering in the background? Finally, Azimi asks about the cost of arts criticism that “makes nice.”

Negar Azimi is a writer and Senior Editor of Bidoun, an award-winning publishing and curatorial initiative with a focus on the Middle East and its diasporas. She is a member of the team of advisors helping curators Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks shape the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She studied International Relations and Biology at Stanford, Politics at Harvard, and Anthropology at Columbia.

Azimi’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine among other publications. Azimi was a 2014-2015 Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and is a past winner of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant. She sits on the boards of Artists Space in New York and Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. As a member of the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, she is at work on a long-term exhibition project around the late Armenian-Egyptian photographer Van Leo. She is also writing a book about Iran in the 1960s and 70s.

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