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CAA Affiliated Societies and CAA Professional Committee


HERSTORY: Digital Innovations
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: New Media Caucus
Janine Fron, Allegheny College and Ellen Sandor, Allegheny College
Email Address(s):
janine@artn.com
ellen@artn.com

Since the inception of this seminal oral history project, our goal has been to reveal
infrequently told stories of women active in the arts during the digital revolution from the 1970s through
the 1990s. Although cultural revolutions are rarely isolated, undeniable midwestern events gave rise
to artistic innovations that played a major role in the birth of New Media Arts. Social developments,
including the emergence of civic leadership in education and the arts, aligned with the merits of
Chicago’s women’s movement and shaped the milieu from which the intersecting narratives presented
in New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts unfold. The University of Illinois and the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago provided a foundational framework for the Chicago arts
community that supported synergistic cultural environments in which the creativity and careers of the
women featured in this book could flourish.


From late 2008 through 2012, we recorded interviews of twenty-two women whose contributions
focused on 1985 as a pivotal point for a set of questions. We personally know many of these vibrant,
creative women, and in the process of editing the book we discovered many more. This selection
represents a breadth of generations and approaches that serve as exemplars from influential years in
the twentieth century’s digital revolution.



Learning to Look: Matisse in the Art Institute of Chicago
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
Rebecca Anne Rushfield, Independent Scholar
Email Address(s):
wittert@juno.com

First held in conjunction with the 2002 meeting of the College Art Association in Philadelphia, the American Institute for Conservation Affiliated Society “Learning to Look” Workshops, bring together art historians, curators, artists, and conservators for a focused study of the material properties of one group or type of object in the physical presence of those objects. Workshop topics have ranged from Greek sculptures to African masks to Winslow Homer watercolors to the use of oil paint in Renaissance paintings. Workshops are held off site in the galleries or study rooms of a local museum and are led by one or more senior conservators and senior curators from that museum. Attendance is limited to 15 participants and pre-registration is required. Send registration requests to wittert@juno.com.

The 2020 “Leaning to Look” workshop will take place on Wednesday February 1, 2020 from 1:30- 2:30pm. It will focus on new findings about the materials and techniques used by Henri Matisse. It will be held at the Art Institute of Chicago and will focus on Matisse’s works in the permanent collection. The workshop leaders will include Allison Langley, Head of Paintings Conservation, Kristi Dahm, Paper Conservator, and Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of International Modern Art.



African Visual Culture, Colonial Intersections
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Arts Council of the African Studies Association
Victoria L. Rovine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Email Address(s):
vrovine@unc.edu

This session will address Africa’s colonial-era visual culture. The four papers will explore objects and images that were produced by—and often in spite of—the asymmetrical power dynamics of European colonialism in Africa, using examples from a variety of geographic regions and colonial regimes. The research presented here approaches colonial contexts through a wide variety of media: architecture and photography, weavings and patronage, headrests and mass media, textiles and technology. The authors also address an array of colonial intersections: France in West Africa; North Africa in France, Belgium in Congo, and the Apartheid system’s colonization of majority South Africa from within. In order to account for the reach of imperial structures, the panel expands the field of Africa’s colonial visual culture beyond objects produced in Africa and beyond the conventional temporal limits of modern colonial empires. Our papers take up the challenge of elucidating not just African visual culture produced incolonial settings, but the nuances of visual culture produced throughthe asymmetrical power structures of European imperialism in Africa. Several of the papers address the unexamined creativity of African actors in colonial contexts, who responded to the cultural transformations imposed by administrators, military officials, and others with innovations, adaptations, and subtle forms of resistance.


Architecture, Urbanism, and "Progress" in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: National Committee for History of Art
Jesús Escobar, Northwestern University and Edward J. Sullivan, New York University
Email Address(s):
j-escobar@northwestern.edu
edward.sullivan@nyu.edu

In anticipation of the CIHA 2020 conference in São Paulo, this session explores architecture, urban development, and the challenges associated with the twentieth-century transformation of Brazil’s traditional capital, Rio de Janeiro, as well as its so-called industry city, São Paulo, into modern metropolises. Until the 1930s Rio retained the basic structure of a colonial capital and São Paulo was a modern, yet mainly horizontally oriented city. The 1940s and 50s witnessed dramatic changes to both. São Paulo developed along the lines of a concept of “verticalization.” Its 34-story Martinelli Building remained the highest structure there for many years, but when it was eclipsed, São Paulo rapidly took on the image of a skyscraper city. In the case of Rio, plans for creating a new federal capital in Brazil’s central plains that had been discussed for decades became a reality in 1957 when Lúcio Costa won a national competition for Brasília. Meanwhile, Rio’s coastline and inner city were vastly transformed. A prominent hill, Morro Santo Antônio, was flattened displacing thousands from across the city’s social strata. Also, the coastline of Guanabara Bay stretching from the modernist Santos Dumont airport through Copacabana was expanded with landfill giving rise to a large-scale park that became of an iconic symbol of the city’s urban renewal. With these changes to the urban fabric of Rio and São Paulo, local histories as well as identities were inevitably altered. This panel assesses both the architectural and human contingencies associated with “progress” in Brazil’s two largest municipalities.


Hands-On to Eyes-On: From Material Collections to Digital Exhibitions
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Visual Resources Association (VRA)
Bridget Madden, University of Chicago
Email Address(s):
bridgetm@uchicago.edu

Many visual resources collections are expanding their purview of managing image collections to added responsibilities for a variety of materials or partnerships with other like-minded resource collections. The hands-on use of materials and museum collections allows students to experience authentic learning by applying knowledge in real-life contexts. This session focuses on specific examples of these types of partnerships and learning situations in two art and design colleges and a university museum. The presenters will discuss: the use of a materials collection in teaching art history survey courses to studio art and design students; fashion and textile resources transitioning from physical to digital collections for enhanced access; and a two-term curatorial practice course sequenced to design and install a museum exhibition. In all cases, the collections used in teaching are prioritized and sustained, not treated as occasional visits or demonstrations, and staff are embedded into the experience to support faculty instruction. The presenters will discuss pedagogical strategies, such as open-ended inquiry, discourse, and social learning, along with the issues of collection development, maintenance, description, access, and usage, while exploring how access to such physical and digital collections as primary sources for pedagogy and student assignments allows for the integration of practical experience into coursework. The role of professional staff supporting these collections and facilitating their use by faculty and students is integral. It will be shown how effective these collaborations can be, including how they can lead to more engaging, active learning experiences in the classroom.


From Cloaca Maxima to America: Italy's 'History of Shit'"
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Italian Art Society
Pamela O. Long, Independent Scholar
Email Address(s):
pamlong@pamelaolong.com

Dominique Laporte’s 1978 History of Shit argues that modern subjectivity should be seen as developing in direct relation to the history of human waste management, offering a theoretical grounding for the adage ‘you are what you eat.’ An Italian ‘history of shit’ reaches back to the Ancient Romans, who established a legacy of excellence in waste engineering with the Cloaca Maxima, one of the world’s first sewer systems. While in the past, human waste remained a topic of architectural and urban interventions due to its association with disease and the formation of ‘corrupt airs,’ immersing the theme in environmental and public health histories, engagement with the scatological has persisted in Italian art making, exemplified recently by Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016). Considering its impact on all levels of society, a history of artistic commentaries on and social interventions into the presence of human waste remains critical to cultural ideas—often revealing attempts to control bodies, buildings, and the environment. Yet, despite the current infrastructural and ecological ‘turns’ in the humanities, art and architectural histories of Italy have tended to shy away from discussions of human waste. This panel includes papers that examine Italian engagement with and uses of human waste as a material, method, or impetus for artistic and architectural invention. Topics include architectural and urban infrastructures of waste management; waste as a signifier of humanistic production and consumption and artistic uses of fecal matter.


Taking up the Mantle: Lineages and Genealogies in Japanese Art History
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Japan Art History Forum
Sonia Coman, Smithsonian Institution and Harrison Schley, University of Pennsylvania
Email Address(s):
coman.sonia@gmail.com
hschley@sas.upenn.edu

Genealogies have a deep history in Japan as tools for establishing political legitimacy and social standing. Japan’s political and military elite built patrilineal households, and familial continuity was valued such that heirless households regularly adopted sons to continue on their name. By the seventeenth century, if not earlier, Japanese artists, too, began organizing their workshops as households and created their own patrilineal genealogies in order to shore up their positions in elite art circles. Studies have shown how establishing multi-generational workshops or ex-post-facto genealogies added to the prestige of artistic traditions such as the Kanō school of painting and the Raku ceramics workshop.

This panel will contrast artistic legacies based on having been born, adopted, or trained within an artistic family or school with a different kind, namely self-created legacies wherein artists independently claimed to be formal inheritors of an earlier tradition, sometimes even after multi-generational gaps. Though this latter practice permeates Japanese art history, the phenomenon of non-related artists bestowing an art historical inheritance upon themselves or others is relatively understudied. Through case studies, the panelists will consider such practices as they existed in Japan in the eighteenth through early-twentieth centuries, with the aim of adding to the greater conversation around the role of tradition, inheritance, and branding in East Asian art and beyond.



Who Wants to be an Arts Administrator?
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: National Council of Art Administrators
Charles Kanwischer, Bowling Green State University and Sarah A. Meyer, California State Polytechnic, University Pomona
Email Address(s):
ckanwis@bgsu.edu
sameyer@cpp.edu

This panel will explore the mechanics of Arts administration. Presenters will offer concrete initiatives they’ve taken, with evidence of measurable results and improvements. This might be an event that caused them to think they might be effective as an administrator, and topics might include: Financial Concerns and Fundraising; Advocacy (how do we better tell our story); Diversity and Inclusion; and Leadership Strategies (for new and veteran leaders).


Nature in Art: Horticulture of Beauty, Love, and Poetry
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History
Maureen Pelta, Moore College of Art and Design
Email Address(s):
mpelta@moore.edu

The session on Horticulture of Beauty, Love, and Poetry presents quests about the interpretation of Nature in Art. Physical and metaphysical representations of landscapes, plants, flowers, gardens explore aesthetic and creative expressions as well as conveying alchemical, philosophical, and symbolic meanings. Since the topic is so vast in art, the focus will be in this visualization created by painters and poets during the Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, and Symbolist movements.


Early Modern Animation: Mascarades, Ballet, Automata
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Renaissance Society of America
Bronwen M. Wilson, University of East Anglia
Email Address(s):
bwilson@humnet.ucla.edu

Exploring diverse forms of bodily animation, this session highlights the dynamics of mobility and the spaces it activated. The movement of bodies remediated artistic mediums and personages in the château; it set things in motion across geographies in performances at court; and it conjoined nature and machines in gardens. Papers highlight some of the potential and transformative dimensions—political and scientific—of animation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.


Mining the Colonial Imaginary: Art, Materiality and Ecological Critique in Contemporary Oceania
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Pacific Art Association
Henry Francis Skerritt, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia
Email Address(s):
hfs4f@virginia.edu

The global climate emergency has led to numerous artistic attempts to reconsider the agency of objects and human relationships to them. In turning to Indigenous cultures, numerous thinkers have attempted to drawn on Indigenous ontologies in order to suggest alternate and mores sustainable models of object-subject relations. While movements such as new-materialism and object-oriented-ontology have yielded significant and self-reflexive insights into the ways in which subject/object dualism operates as a prerequisite for both neoliberal subjecthood and commodity capitalism, they have often served to mystify and homogenize Indigenous cultures. The papers in this panel present three diverse case studies that examine the ways in which contemporary artists in Oceania have engaged with the material and environmental incursions of colonialism. These papers explore the ways in which artists use the altered landscape as a site for the reconsideration of our relationship to the material world, revealing the fissures in an imperial project that sought to cast the colonies as sites of material and human exploitation.


The Symbolist Roots of the 20th and 21st Centuries Culture
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Art, Literature, and Music in Symbolism and Decadence
Rosina Neginsky, University of Illinois at Springfield
Email Address(s):
rnegi1@uis.edu

The purpose of the meeting is to explore the Symbolist features that affected in positive or negative ways artistic movements and phenomena, and to examine the works of specific artists, who consciously or unconsciously adapted the Symbolist spirit and its philosophy in their works.

Symbolist movement had an effect on the artistic and literary/theatrical movements and phenomena that followed and evolved in the 20thand the 21stcenturies. As an example it is possible to mention Surrealism, Abstract Art, atonal music, avant-garde theater, the relationship between the text and the music, the relationship between art, music, literature and philosophy. Symbolism also had an impact on movements that in appearance had nothing in common with Symbolism, but were partially born as a reaction to Symbolism, such as Acmeism, Constructivism, and Futurism. Symbolism had an influence on specific visual artists, writers, musicians of the 20thand early part of the 21stcenturies, just to cite a few from the 20thcentury: Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Malevich, and many others.



Amplifying Inclusion: Intersectional Feminism in Contemporary Curatorial Practice
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Women's Caucus for Art
Sawyer Rose, Northern California Women's Caucus for Art
Email Address(s):
sawyer@sawyerrose.com

Over 12 months, from May 2018 to April 2019, the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art curatorial
collective organized F213, an exhibition in San Francisco that spotlighted bold artistic expressions of
contemporary feminist protest. This national exhibition included approximately 40 visual artists paired with
writers whose written responses varied from art historical contextualization to experimental flash fiction.
The curatorial collective members developed aesthetic principles and selection criteria in order to create
an inclusive and intersectional feminist art platform for increasing awareness about social issues. For
example, they chose artwork without exercising censorship and without regard to controversial subject
matter. The selected works in F213 emphasize the importance of intersectionality for feminist protest and
activism today. In this panel curators and participants will discuss the theoretical frameworks,
collaborative processes, and inevitable challenges involved to put on an inclusive and intersectional
feminist protest show during the Trump administration.


Technologies of Drag: South Asians Queering American Art Through Craft and Design
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Diasporic Asian Art Network
Anuradha Vikram, UCLA Department of Art
Email Address(s):
anu@curativeprojects.net

The image of South Asian diaspora in North America, Africa, and Europe is faded by historically undocumented status, as immigrant laborers made to disappear into permissible, if segregated, ethnic communities, or as bodies designated Other and criminalized for maintaining a culture characterized by authorities as implicitly deviant or queer. The late 1960s was the beginning of South Asian and LGBTQ legalization in the United States with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. This panel explores intersections between contemporary artists of South Asian background working in the United States, with respect to how they utilize non-traditional skills, references, and practices within the context of contemporary art as a methodology that has been described as “queer,” probing both historic and present day divisions, and potentially unifying frames of reference that South Asian American artists bring to the discussion of American art. Hasan Elahi makes use of engineering, visualization, and surveillance technologies and “the poor image”: the democratically liberated effigy of the formerly commoditized image that was, but is no longer, subject to social control. Brendan Fernandes uses his training in western classical and modern dance to create performances and art objects that infuse white aesthetics with African energies. Discussant scholars Santhi Kavuri-Bauer and Alpesh Kantilal Patel will address the panelists on the subject of South Asian American artists’ place and relationships within the fields of American culture and art worlds, and on the queer, anti-racist, and transnational approaches that the artists bring to their work, respectively.


What is a Field? And Do We Want to Work in It?
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Publications Committee
Leora R. Maltz-Leca, RISD
Email Address(s):
lmaltzle@risd.edu

TO BE CONFIRMED IN OCTOBER

The word "field-work" was coined in the mid 18th-c to name the activity of collecting statistics or conducting research out of doors. By the early 19th century, the term had migrated from activities we now associate with the cadastrization of the land and beaurocratization of the nation state to refer specifically to military fortifications built by soldiers in the battlefield. As we come to understand how the formation of modernism is embedded in colonialism and the rise of the nation state, and how the discipline of art history, too, is a product of modernist systems of knowledge and classifications of culture framed by imperialist assumptions, might we now pause to ponder the military, imperial roots of the way we continue to frame our discipline and to carve it into fields? What do these categories enable, and what do they repress? Whose systems of knowledge do they continue to empower, and whose voices do they forcibly silence? As we begin to decolonize our institutions, and to question literalist demands for evidence, positivist norms and classificatory exclusions, might we seek to probe our disciplinary structures, and to question what and whom they are seeking to discipline?



Recent Medieval Acquisitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Midwest Art History Society
Dena M. Woodall, Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Heidi J. Hornik, Baylor University
Email Address(s):
dwoodall@mfah.org
heidi_hornik@baylor.edu

This panel will explore three little-known new acquisitions—a French architectural drawing, an ornate Flemish chasuble, and a Jewish prayer book. Established in 1900, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is the largest cultural institution in the southwest United States. Objects were only first acquired for the Museum in 1924 and the relatively small holdings of medieval and Renaissance objects were mainly given by philanthropists Annette Finnigan and Edith A. and Percy S. Straus between 1934 and 1944. Recently, through dedicated MFAH acquisition endowments, the Museum has been making a concerted effort to add significant acquisitions for a newly conceived presentation of medieval art. These acquisitions are in tandem with the Museum’s growing holdings from Asia and the Islamic worlds that will enhance the Museum’s ability to recount the early global story of art and culture across varied societies.


Negotiating Change in the Arts: Emerging and Established Voices in Dialogue
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Student and Emerging Professionals Committee
Jonathan Odden, High Museum of Art and Rachel P. Kreiter,
Email Address(s):
odden.jonathan@gmail.com
rkreiter@gmail.com

Negotiating Change in the Arts: Emerging and Established Voices brings multigenerational voices together in an open discussion around topics concerning the historiography and methods of art history, both as a discipline and as a career. Structured as a dialogue, this session generates conversation between emerging and established scholars to share their perspectives on the changing fields of art history, criticism, and design, with a robust audience-driven Q&A. This year SEPC is honored to welcome Michael Ann Holly as our distinguished scholar.


Languages of Art History
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: International Committee
Sonal Khullar, University of Washington
Email Address(s):
sonal_khullar@hotmail.com

Art historians have long wrestled with the use of verbal language in analyzing visual images, or finding “words for pictures,” as Michael Baxandall put it. This session considers the historical and contemporary role of ekphrasis, epistle, poetry, and criticism in the discipline. These genres are often considered passé, improper, or ineffectual as modes of art historical analysis, though they serve as valuable archives and resources for academic writing. Spanning the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, papers in this session rethink the value and efficacy of these genres in light of what critics and scholars have termed the ‘global turn’ in art history. Drawing on materials from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas, they address the objecthood of words, the temporality of writing, and geographies of art. They construe language broadly to include questions of form and style, affect and presence, adaptation and appropriation, multilingualism and intermediality, aesthetics and politics. In so doing, these papers revisit the complex relationship between language, vision, and translation in art history, and present new models of art-writing.


Unlearning Art History: Anti-Racist Work in PreModern Fields
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Critical Race Art History
Maggie M. Williams, William Paterson University and Camara D. Holloway, Association for Critical Race Art History
Email Address(s):
williamsm11@wpunj.edu
camara.holloway@icloud.com

Pre-modern fields of art history are often viewed as operating anterior to, or even outside of, considerations of race, racism, diversity, and inclusion. The classical and medieval worlds in particular have long been taken (by both specialists and those working in other areas) as primarily European, in which unexamined whiteness is too often the default position for understanding patrons, artists, and subjects. This neglect of racialized histories has allowed many art historians (especially white scholars) to occupy a privileged position of ignorance, choosing to avoid the contemporary impact of their scholarship and (even passively) upholding biased and racist narratives in publications and curricula. But the recent uptick in hate crimes and white supremacist terrorism across the globe -- including many instances in which the assumed “whiteness” of the past has been weaponized against people of color in the modern world -- makes the project of contending with our approaches to historical race especially urgent right now.

This roundtable brings together art historians who work across pre-modern and early cultures for a conversation about the study of race in art, the role of museums in promoting inclusive views of the pre-modern world, and recent anti-racist writing in art history. Topics for discussion include: case studies about projects of anti-racist art history, especially public scholarship; issues in recruitment, mentoring, and hiring historians of diverse ethno-racial backgrounds; creating inclusive and anti-racist curricula; and debates in the museum world about race, curation, and audience.


Creative Practice as Pedagogical Practice
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: National Art Education Association
Amy Pfeiler-Wunder, NAEA and Daniel T Barney, Brigham Young University
Email Address(s):
wunder@kutztown.edu
danielbarney@gmail.com

How does creative practice using artistic inquiry, artist methodologies, and interdisciplinary collaborations inform pedagogical practices? We explore the essence of personal art practice as research—creative inquiry— and its link to pedagogical practices. How does theory, practice, research and artmaking blur boundaries with pedagogical practices? Drawing from narrative inquiry to deeply understand one’s experience (Clandinin, 2013) our narrative stories interplay with art-based practice using multiple forms of artistic inquiry. Collage pedagogy illuminates the range of disparate images individuals are bombarded with daily reinscribing images in artmaking to provided multiple perspectives necessary for critical engagement (Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008). Our practice as artists blends our work as theorist and practitioner where we theorize about our subject while also exploring and experimenting with how to frame our work conceptually (Marshall, 2014; Sullivan, 2005). We provide tools to foster creative thinking and conceptual skills inherent in art-based inquiry.

Clandinin D. J. (2013). Engaging in narrative inquiry. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.

Garoian, C. & Gaudelius, Y. (2008). Spectacle pedagogy: Art, politics and visual culture.

Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Marshall, J. (2014). Art practice as research in the classroom: Creative inquiry for understanding

oneself and the world, The International Journal of the Arts,13-24.



Art Criticism Between and Around the Coasts
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: International Association of Art Critics
Lee Ann Norman, AICA-USA and Susan Noyes Platt,
Email Address(s):
norman.ann.lee@gmail.com
susplatt@gmail.com

AICA-USA Affiliated Society Proposal

Co Chairs

Susan Noyes Platt

Lee Ann Norman

“Art Criticism Between and Around the Coasts”

The democratization of culture, facilitated by broader access to the internet in rural areas and the proliferation of digital networking and social platforms, has greatly shifted the visual arts landscape. While regional styles of art making remain important, increased connectivity has produced the effect of flattened or more generic aesthetics, creating a more formulaic approach to criticism in some cases. An artist may not live in New York City—the center of the artworld and market in the U.S.—but still feel compelled to create work that appeals to those sensibilities to receive critical reception and career opportunities.

This panel intends to call attention to the ways that critics can expand perceptions of contemporary art through coverage of artists whose artwork and practice function or resonate differently outside of New York, which for many artists and critics alike is synonymous with the market context. For example, there is a flourishing contemporary Native Art scene in the Northwest that explodes canonical aesthetics and media and addresses common issues that we all share, such as climate change, in new ways.

Topics also can include the ways geography, culture, and politics in various contexts influence an artwork’s reception and interpretation and how those factors may benefit an artist participating in the market context or be a detriment.

Critics from the Midwest, South, Northwest, and California will be invited to give their perspective and describe their approach.



Embodied Beauties: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Moving Body
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: American Society for Aesthetics
Andrea Baldini, Nanjing University
Email Address(s):
baldini_and@hotmail.com

The body has become a key interest in virtually all contemporary traditions of philosophical inquiry. By focusing on the embodied nature of our lives, philosophers have developed novel and more comprehensive ways of understanding the fundamental features – among other things – of human thought, action, and culture. Across those traditions, many have been pointing out that acknowledging the centrality of the body can prove instrumental in correcting well-known limitations of traditional models especially in Western philosophies.

In aesthetics, the body offers a rich field of philosophical investigations, cutting across disciplines and schools. At a fundamental level, the body is a locus where we find intuitively realized a unity between the aesthetic subject and object. Individuals appreciate their bodies, acting both as observers and observed. This in turn profoundly challenges the long-standing dualism of Western aesthetics, possibly building bridges with other philosophical traditions such as those from the East. Reflections on the body seem to come with a promise of a new theoretical unity, so crucial in our globalized world.

Philosophical discussions of the body also shake aesthetics in other ways that are no less interesting and potentially innovative. Recently, we have seen a growing number of works by aestheticians expanding the range of objects and practices beyond the study of nature and the arts. Thinking about the body brings to the disciplinary foreground a wide range of social and cultural phenomena historically neglected. This panel explores cutting-edge trends in body aesthetics; we aim at stimulating an interdisciplinary dialogue and approach which can bring together art historians, aestheticians, artists, and activists interested in exploring the body as a crucial source of everyday aesthetic as well as artistic enjoyment.