CAA 2020 ANNUAL CONFERENCE: Session Soliciting Contributors

Architecture in Disguise: Soft Power and the Masterplan at Mid-Century, 1945-75

Joss Kiely, University of Cincinnati, DAAP and Michael Abrahamson, University of Utah
Email Address(s):
jossk@umich.edu
mtabraha@umich.edu

In the postwar period, masterplan proposals designed by architects committed to the ideals of CIAM reimagined cities as orderly and aesthetically pleasing agglomerations. These master plans were used as a means to channel growth and development, and were often associated with fundraising and capital campaigns for corporate, institutional, and governmental agencies who asserted American soft power at home and abroad. This panel will consider masterplans prepared by architecture firms before urban design became a distinct practice with its own expertise and techniques. In some cases, a close connection between industry and architecture may be of particular note. Alcoa, for example, funded masterplans from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, as a way to encourage developers and architects to demonstrate the use of aluminium in their buildings. And although many architects engaging in master planning were based in the US, their firms designed masterplans for cities across the globe as a central part of the post-war, global architectural project.

With economic, social, and cultural issues in mind, we contend that today—when master plans remain an integral part of planning for growth at multiple scales—is the ideal time to reconsider these mid-century proposals by architecture firms. Why was it assumed that those trained to design buildings were also capable of effectively designing in the aggregate? How did they market their expertise in this area of practice? And how was work on such prestigious projects delegated or distributed within large offices?

Decolonizing Modern Craft

Julie D Hollenbach, NSCAD University
Email Address(s):
jhollenbach@nscad.ca

Within current western craft discourses and display logics, a modernist framework remains prevalent in structuring the terms by which craft is situated and considered. Modern craft often places an emphasis on the craftsperson as a singular genius where the notion of the master is inherited from Enlightenment logics that valued individualism over collaboration and collective production. Modernism, in its exaltation of purity and authenticity—the authenticity of materials, the refined purity of design—divorced the crafted object from its geographic specificity, community significance, and social use in order to present it as a finite, fixed, and finished objet d’art. Responding to the drive for innovation and novelty, many professional and amateur craftspeople in the west look to the cultural practices and products of the non-western ‘other’ as a source for inspiration. This is in line with a colonial logic where non-western cultural objects and practices are treated as a resource that western craftspeople feel entitled to extract and exploit by adding them to their ‘tool box’ of designs and techniques.

This round table brings together the current research of three scholars engaged in critically assessing craft production, reception, and discourse spanning the nineteenth century through to the present. Each of the presenters critically interrogates the contemporary discourse of craft where a Modernist framework is often employed as the default. Through a post-colonial critique, the presenters trouble modern craft’s colonial logic of individualism, commodification, and cultural theft and begin to lay the groundwork for a decolonial critique of modern craft.

Expanding Dialogues of Diaspora: Examining Manifestations of Middle Eastern Art, Architecture and Patronage in the Americas

Caroline Olivia Wolf, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Email Address(s):
oliviawolf1979@gmail.com

This panel examines diasporic Middle Eastern art and architectural traditions from a transregional, multi-faith, and multi-cultural perspective with emphasis on its diverse manifestations in the Americas– defined broadly to encompass not only the Northern Hemisphere, but also Central and South America. Art historical studies examining the visual culture of the Middle East through a global lens have only recently began to expand beyond traditional frameworks of Islamic art centered on the Near East and Central Asia into regions of Africa and Southeast Asia. Yet the diasporic creative production and patronage tied to Middle Eastern traditions extends far beyond these carefully delineated borders of faith and geography. This session features papers that delve into the less-researched global intersections of Middle Eastern art and architecture in the Americas, with particular interest in the manifold traveling forms, and histories associated with this visual legacy in places such as – but not limited to– Mexico, the United States, Brazil, Chile and Argentina. Seeking to engage with a broad range of media, patronage networks and artistic agents, we aim to unpack issues such as migration and translation that are of critical salience in an endeavor to re-think and re-route the conventional borders and boundaries that prevalently define diasporic art of Middle East in the field today.

Latin American Art from/in Canada: Challenging and Expanding Narratives and Territories
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies

Alena L. Robin, The University of Western Ontario and Analays Alvarez Hernandez, Universite de Montreal
Email Address(s):
arobin82@uwo.ca
analays.alvarez@umontreal.ca

In search of an accurate comprehension of Latin American art and artists operating outside of their traditional geographical edges, this session solicits presentations delving into the presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the emergence of a Latino Canadian art scene. We understand Latin America, in a broad sense, including Mexico, Central and South America and Caribbean countries having experienced a colonization process driven by Spain and Portugal.

According to art critics and curators such as Gerardo Mosquera, Mari Carmen Ramirez, and Benjamin Genocchio, the term “Latino” seems to encompass the populations of North Americans of Latin American origin. Yet, Canada is often excluded from the discourse, as if North America did not include any territories north of the United States.

We intend to challenge the traditional geographical territories of the Latino, Latin American and Ibero-American art history to encourage the inclusion of the Canadian art scene. This shall allow us to grasp what it means today to define something as Latin American art or someone as a Latin American or Latinx artist beyond solely the latter’s birthplace or origin.

This session invites contributions on the following topics: Art initiatives that foster exchange between Latin America, the United States, and Canada; Exhibitions and curatorial and collecting strategies across Canada focusing on Latin American and Latino (Canadian) arts and artists; Latino Canadian arts’ features and aesthetics; Teaching Latino, Latin American or Ibero-American art history in Canada: major challenges and future avenues.

The Politics and Opacities of Grievability

Jamie DiSarno, University at Buffalo and Conor Moynihan, University at Buffalo
Email Address(s):
jamiedis@buffalo.edu
conor.g.moynihan@gmail.com

The question of who constitutes the properly “grievable” subject has never been more important. With the racially and ethnically motivated attacks at the Christchurch Mosque in New Zealand and bombings in Sri Lanka, worldwide refugee crises, along with the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements in the United States, the global politics of violence is increasingly visible and an important area of intervention. These tragic events remind us that to be regarded as a living being that matters, or what Judith Butler terms a “grievable” life, is predicated on an uneven valuation of victims. For forms of suffering to be recognized, other non-emergent forms are left in abeyance. This panel considers the politics and opacities of grievability, especially how they connect to issues of visibility and representation. We are focused on art practices that seek to acknowledge various forms of violence, suffering, and tragedy that as of yet have remained beyond recognition. We aim to theorize and problematize the role of representation in the valuation of various forms of inflicted violence and anguish. We endeavor to address how artistic practice considers, navigates, and challenges the (in)visibility, legitimacy, and recognition of global violence. In particular, emphasis is placed on topics related to the Global South and parallel spaces of inequity. The panel considers broader ways of understanding the pain of others in an intersectional manner through critical re-evaluations of the grievable and ungrievable subjects of feminism, decoloniality, queer theory, disability studies, and other similar modes of inquiry.

Toward the Practice of Freedom: Equity and Inclusion in the Classroom
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: SECAC

Augusta Rose Toppins, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Email Address(s):
augusta-toppins@utc.edu

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks positioned the classroom as a place of possibility, where we “demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries.” To hooks, education is “the practice of freedom.”

Academic programs committed to equity and inclusion create opportunities for historically underrepresented students while cultivating learning communities in which diverse people imagine the world of tomorrow. Commitment to equity and inclusion is an intentional and continually active process in which faculty and administration take responsibility for accommodating social differences including race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, nationality, and religion. Inclusive programs in art and design represent broad perspectives in contemporary practice, historical understandings, and critical discourse while encouraging respectful dialogue and collaboration. Equity and inclusion are not discretionary aspects of an arts education but intrinsic to excellence. According to AAC&U, it is necessary for equity-minded programs to recognize inequities in student success and build organic practices that lead to sustained change.

This session welcomes papers that offer innovative strategies for integrating equity and inclusion in the classroom. How might our teaching practices in art, art history, or design contribute to an inclusive learning environment that moves education closer to a true practice of freedom? How do we merge the transferable skills of empathy and compassion with training in the visual arts through curricular or extra-curricular activities? How do we reflect on our work and measure success?

“My Kind of Town”: Chicago, Civics, and the Built Environment

Lindsay E. Shannon, North Central College and Mary Ruth Springer, Jacksonville State University
Email Address(s):
leshannon@noctrl.edu
mspringer@jsu.edu

“My Kind of Town”: Chicago, Civics, and the Built Environment

Since the Great Fire of 1871, Chicagoans have contributed to their city’s vast urban development from the commercial downtown to the city’s beloved neighborhoods. By the time Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett completed the Plan of Chicago for the Commercial Club in 1909, civic leaders, elected officials, and philanthropic and charitable organizations were already shaping the city’s built environment. Whether elite clubs or self-made Chicagoans, civic-minded people have played an influential role in mediating the forces that have contributed to the city’s urban development. Such entrepreneurs, activists, philanthropists, and politicians as William Ogden, Jane Addams, Marshall Field, Martin Ryerson, Charles Wacker, Angeline Jackson, and the Daley family have contributed to Chicago’s built environment alongside community groups, for better or worse. From Ogden’s railroads to Addams’s Hull House to Yerkes’s “L” to Weinert’s Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument to Burnham’s lakefront to the OBAC’s Wall of Respect to Millennium Park, the city’s continual transformation has been substantially shaped by its citizens. From “hog butcher of the world” to “the city that works,” Chicago’s urban biography challenges historians, artists, architects, and preservationists to read the city as a product of capitalism, philanthropy, social reform, tourism, and sustainability. This session invites a wide range of papers on how Chicago’s built environment is shaped by civic debate, political involvement, environmental factors, philanthropic patronage, and more. Topics may range from the historical to the contemporary, including buildings, monuments, public art, parks, housing developments, and urban renewal projects.

A Foreign Eye: Photography, Women, and Global Encounters in the Twentieth Century
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art and Architecture

Jordan Troeller, University of Graz, Austria and Hyewon Yoon, University of New Hampshire
Email Address(s):
jordantroeller@gmail.com
hyewon.hyewon@gmail.com

In the decades after the First World War, shaped by changing conceptions of gender and by the institutions and discourses of interwar photography, women such as Lotte Errell, Anne Fischer, Lucia Moholy, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach traveled and worked around the world, producing travel reportages for illustrated magazines, experiencing emigration and exile, and responding to political upheavals. This session seeks papers that employ the methods of feminism and critical race studies to examine how the subject position of these and other remarkable German and Central European women shaped their work outside Europe as their careers in journalism, publishing, advertising, and studio photography unfolded in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Papers might address techniques of picturing difference, the relationship between representations of race and ethnicity abroad and struggles with discrimination and marginalization at home, the move beyond the exoticism of travel reportages and tourist photography, and the capacity of the visual languages of the New Objectivity and the New Vision to speak to the possibilities and problems of the new global era after the Second World War. In considering such questions, we wish to extend the history of modern European photography geographically and to illuminate its role in shaping discourses of race, ethnicity, gender, and cultural difference.

Aesthetics of the Spiritual in Contemporary Art

Mary McGuire, Mt. San Antonio College
Email Address(s):
mcguiremct@gmail.com

Through an embrace of ritual, religion, and theological perspectives, contemporary artists use ancestral practices, traditional materials, and affective genealogies of the past to make sense of contemporary life. Scholars such as Eleanor Heartney, Leesa Fanning, James Elkins, Laura E. Pérez, and many others have argued for the significance of spirituality and religion in art from the 1980s to the present. Looking to the interconnectedness of art and spirituality in works of art that contain both overt and latent religious references, this session moves beyond a defensive argument for the presence of religion and spirituality in contemporary art. Instead, it examines the ways in which the line between secular and religious in contemporary art is always already destabilized by artistic practices that challenge postmodernist legacies of the ahistorical and irreverent.

Presentations include discussions of the work of Francis Alÿs, Rummana Hussain, Theaster Gates, Danh Vo, and Veronique d’Entremont. Themes include elisions between the religious and the secular, ritualistic practices in contemporary art, institutions of religion and art, sacred spaces and sites of worship that double as sites for artistic production, and aesthetics of spirituality.

Afterlives and Different Futures for Latin American Art

George F. Flaherty, University of Texas at Austin and Adele E. Nelson, University of Texas at Austin
Email Address(s):
gflaherty@gmail.com
adele.nelson@nyu.edu

In 1975, the University of Texas hosted an early international conference on Latin American art, Speak Out! Charla! Bate-Papo! Participants asked: Does Latin American art exist as a distinct form of expression from Modernism? Answers and retorts, in person and later in print, point to a field that was neither homogenous nor settled. Aracy Amaral, the pioneering Brazilian art historian, argued that there was no such thing, but a lack of coherence and propensity for contradiction were nothing to fear. This was hardly a field that is the product of Cold War area studies or Pan-Americanism articulated from the U.S. Rather than return to shopworn question of whether “Latin American art” exists, we propose examining and building upon the unresolved status of the field. As suggested by the symposium’s title, scholarly analyses of new and undefinable fields necessarily maneuver through the conviviality of charla, chatter of bate-papo, and the possible political implications of speaking out. What might come of reconsidering Latin American art’s beginnings in multi-disciplinary investigation, especially the insights of literature, criticism, and literary studies? What theoretical and political exigencies framed these and other continental discussions in the 1970s, and what are the afterlives of those formations in today’s scholarship? In light of the hypervisibility of some Latin American artistic histories in emerging global modern and contemporary canons, what fissures and elisions require novel critical methods? For example, how might we readdress the colonial relations reproduced through the field’s myopia regarding African diaspora, indigenous, and Latinx art?

Analogue Rebellion: The Relevance of Mail Art in the 21st Century

Lucinda Bliss, Massachusetts College of Art & Design
Email Address(s):
lucebliss@gmail.com

The Mail Art movement--what came to be known through the artist Ray Johnson as “Correspondance Art”--began in the early 1960s when artists began sharing artwork and collaborating using the postal service. The work and process suited the time period. New York City was still buzzing from the post-WWII shift in focus from Europe to the United States, and from the explosion of Abstract Expressionism. The subsequent sociocultural reforms of 1960s and 70s created a space for radical shifts in art practice as well, and an opportunity to claim a new set of precedents. Dada served as a primary influence, both for its aesthetics and its bold irreverence. The ephemeral, egalitarian, and collaborative processes of Mail Art overlapped with the Fluxus artists of the 1960s, and in the 1970s, these approaches were adopted in the zines and posters of the punk rebellion. The focus of this panel is to consider the relevance of mail art as a contemporary model for activism, non-violent protest, subversion of the marketplace, and the creation of community. In spite of its egalitarian claims, the original Mail Art movement was not consistently inclusive in regard to gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual identity. This panel shines a light on global and inclusive practices and perspectives.

Back to Antiquity : the heuristic potentials of provenance studies of archaeological artifacts

Cécile Colonna, INHA
Email Address(s):
cecile.colonna@inha.fr

Collecting and Provenance Studies have become a major field of Art History and Cultural History, as well as an important issue for museums. However working on the trajectory of ancient artifacts bears some specific challenges. Recent researches about the modern history of ancient objects, especially those excavated during the 18th and 19th centuries, has brought to light new problematics especially through the exploitation of unpublished and hitherto underestimated sources (archives, drawings, contemporary publications, etc). These sources make it possible to re-evaluate site specific material, to better understand the selection at work during excavations (what was discard and what was pushed forward), to reconsider radically the notions of fake and authenticity. The projects introducing digital methods also lead to new orientations by exploring large (or complex) sets of data; by developing new tools that not only illustrate but produce knowledge; by offering to put together data from different sources and by proposing visualizations for new public.

This panel seeks contributions that explore the different ways the studies on modern lives of ancient objects can produce new knowledge and new perspectives. We encourage submissions focusing on projects that shed new light on understudied topics, that link modern and ancient history and that use new sources and/or new methodological tools (especially digital). By bringing together scholars working in various fields, we hope to initiate conversations about innovative methodologies, theoretical models, and complementary approaches for the study of antiquities.

Between Making and Knowing: Kits in the Learning of Craft and Art

Anne Hilker, Bard Graduate Center and Catherine L. Whalen, Bard Graduate Center
Email Address(s):
anne.hilker@bgc.bard.edu
whalen@bgc.bard.edu

The role of commercially produced and distributed kits for the learning of painting, embroidery, and other applications by hand of substance to surface assumed new prominence in the United States in the 1950s through the 1980s, leaving a legacy of self-teaching that continues to thrive in online communities of knowledge. Kits of all kinds made directly available to consumers skills once taught only in dedicated schools or by family members, while at the same time smartly produced magazines, books, and television shows provided instructional resources and enticing visuals of finished items. An exhibition at the Winterthur Museum in the fall of 2020 will feature such kits as part of a showcase of the work of Erica Wilson, widely known also as author of how-to books and a pioneering public television series. This session examines the relationship of kits to artistic and craft production. How did the kit bridge the gap between knowing “about” and knowing “how to”? To apply terms coined by David Pye (The Nature and Art of Workmanship, 1968), how did the kit mediate the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty? How did it disrupt traditional knowledge transmission processes? Did it only mimic skills it purported to teach? More broadly, what is the relationship between the pedagogy of the kit and artistic expression? Papers may consider any aspect of kits that have taught any skill set in artistic or craft production. Comparative analyses, as well as case studies, are welcome.

Collaborative Art in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia

Atteqa Ali, Zayed University
Email Address(s):
Atteqa.Ali@zu.ac.ae

According to the Macmillan dictionary, public service is “a service that helps people without charging them any money.” Is art and design about serving the public? Many artists have elected to formulate situations in which an extended community can potentially benefit from the outcomes of a work of art. This discursive approach that is sometimes labeled “social practice art,” “social engagement art,” or “participatory art” is gaining prominence in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (MENASA) region and beyond. The approach is particularly apt for the postcolonial age during which practitioners seek out ways to confront the shared social and historical context in the MENASA region (and elsewhere), including colonial legacy and how it continues to impact life for formerly colonized nations. Utilizing collaborative processes in artistic production, artists aim to uncover and shed light on concerns affecting these societies.

Instead of usual paper presentations, the panel will be a participatory think tank to initiate an analysis of such practices in the region. Being a relatively new method, the roundtable discussion format for the panel will allow the group of participating artists and scholars to begin to understand what its presence means in these locales. It will also generate new avenues of research and other activities. To highlight the collaborative nature of artistic practices, the panel will be a participatory event during which the audience members will be encouraged to take part in thinking through the attendant ideas and debates.

Documenting Community Change

Danielle Jean Stewart, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Email Address(s):
daniellejeanne@gmail.com

Second session following abstract from "Documenting Urban Change"

Open Session in honor of Sarah Jordan Lippert (1975-2019), founder of the Society for Paragone Studies
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society for Paragone Studies

Liana De Girolami Cheney, Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History
Email Address(s):
lianacheney@earthlink.net

Paper topics might include, but are not limited to, intra or inter-arts rivalries or those associated with aesthetic theory, art criticism, patronage, digital culture, material culture, arts institutions, individual artists, nationalism, etc. Practicing artists are also welcome to apply. Please include in your abstract, a title, affiliation, CAA membership number, short bio of 150 words, and a complete cv. The abstract should not be more than 200 words.

For questions contact: Prof. Liana De Girolami, UMASS Lowell (emerita) Liana_Cheney@uml.edu

Re-Working Labor: Art, Work, and Working Art

Joshua Rios, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Email Address(s):
jrios1@saic.edu

Labor and ideas about labor continue to play a formative role in the structuring of social and political life, particularly as work has undergone relentless and wide-reaching transformation driven by the incessant demands of a late-capitalist globalized society. Whether performing the unpaid work of social reproduction, the fragmented work of independent contracting, or the perilous work of assembly manufacturing, laborers of all types find themselves perpetually overworked, underemployed, and vulnerable to the brutal configurations of contemporary neoliberal labor practices. What can art say about the various worlds of labor and life we find ourselves inextricably defined by and embedded within?

In Fall 2018, Faculty Research Fellows for Curatorial Research and Practice, Daniel Eisenberg and Ellen Rothenberg, organized the Re-Working Labor Symposium at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The conference, which featured lectures by prominent historians, artists, cultural critics, and curators, culminated in a day-long gathering of working groups that exchanged ideas about labor and labor-based art practices.

This panel seeks to extend the ideas and themes explored in the Re-Working Labor Symposium by calling for academic and experimental presentations that create scholarship around the shifting nature of work and the relationship between labor and art. Guiding questions for contributors to this session include: how have artists and researchers envisioned new images and critiques of labor; what role does race, sexual orientation, gender, and able-bodiedness play when conceptualizing the intersection of labor and art; and, can we imagine a world where alternatives to capitalist definitions of work thrive?

The Negotiated Spaces of Zoning

Christopher M. Ketcham, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Deepa Ramaswamy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Email Address(s):
cketcham5@gmail.com
deepa.ramaswamy@me.com

Zoning is an administrative apparatus that controls the use of urban space. Since its enactment in early 20^th century New York and subsequent global spread, zoning law has served as a potent bureaucratic structure through which public and private space is delimited, the social and economic identity of the city is codified, and the body politics of race and gender are managed. Zoning has had an instrumental impact on modern architecture and, since the 1960s, has increasingly served as a framework for artists who engage urban space and its underlying networks of control. Yet zoning barely registers in histories of modern architecture and art.

The space of zoning is a negotiated space of art, architecture, and municipal power. Zoning laws have been adopted, revised, and manipulated to consolidate urban authority and harden the boundaries of social and racial stratification. Architectural and aesthetic programming promotes new meanings, uses, and publics, and, in turn, defines and excludes those that do not conform to the authorized image of the city. This programming ranges from percent-for-art policies to counter-hegemonic practices that resist official mechanisms of control. How do communities marginalized by zoning oppose its bureaucratic authority? In what ways has postwar zoning promoted an abstraction of labor from urban space and reconfigured the city as a site of global economy? We seek papers that assess zoning’s global impact on the social, material, and economic life of the city, with particular attention to ways that art and architecture have both solidified and contested spatial authority.

African Artists and Colonial Collecting, Revisited

Theresa Sims, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African Art
Email Address(s):
sims.tes@gmail.com

Recent years have seen renewed public discourse about the colonial origins of many historical African art collections. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western collectors’ access to African artworks was often directly facilitated by European colonial interventions across the African continent. This history continues to pose major ethical and methodological questions for art historians, not least of which is the discursive erasure of individual African artists. By attributing authorship to entire ethnic groups rather than specific, named artists, colonial collectors perpetuated an essentialist view of “traditional” African art, as both anonymous and ahistorical. By the same token, European modernists famously celebrated African sculptures while refusing to truly credit the people who made them, in ways that foreshadow ongoing dynamics of cultural appropriation today. In light of these historical legacies, this panel asks how we might revisit the story of Western collection of African art under colonialism: specifically, how might this narrative be revised to more fully acknowledge the agency and creativity of African artists within this historical exchange? This panel welcomes papers that engage any facet of this overarching question. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: historical relationships between African artists and European colonial patrons; historical African artists’ responses to the commodification of African sculpture during the colonial era; works by contemporary African artists that propose fresh modes of engagement with colonial collections and archives; or contemporary African and diasporic artists’ engagement with ongoing conversations about repatriation and cultural heritage.

African Diasporic Art from Latin America in the Twentieth Century

Abigail Lapin Dardashti, CUNY Graduate Center
Email Address(s):
ael319@nyu.edu

Twentieth-century Latin American art history has grown significantly over the last four decades, expanding on diverse themes such as the avant-garde, indigenism, identity politics, and modernism. However, artists of African descent have largely been written out of this narrative, which privileges artwork made by elite, white artists. The few existing studies focusing on African diasporic art in Latin America prior to the 1990s take primarily a formal approach, detaching artworks and their makers from the region’s broad range of artistic production and specific socio-political environments.

This panel aims to position artists of African descent and/or works depicting African heritage in relationship to mainstream histories of Latin American art during the twentieth century. We hope to showcase the importance of black art in the region and rethink the ways in which we have constructed the field’s conventional narratives. Contextualizing art and artists through a diasporic lens, we seek papers that investigate issues such as the impact of politics on racial identities; mobilization and resistance; racism and the erasure of blackness; and blackness and modernism, abstraction, performance, or the neo-Baroque. We welcome papers examining case studies that consider either a single geographical area or transnational exchanges with other diasporic communities. As Caribbean art history has uniquely addressed racial and identity politics while remaining sidelined from the broader field, we are also interested in studies that position art from this region in relationship to the rest of the continent.

Ca. 1942

Angela L. Miller, and Elizabeth Welch,
Email Address(s):
almiller@wustl.edu
ewelch00@gmail.com

In 1942, the Museum of Modern Art acquired the just completed painting Hide-and-Seek (Cache-Cache) by Pavel Tchelitchew. The work became one of that institution’s most popular—and the measure of an aesthetic and philosophical commitment to figuration, even as abstraction took hold in the New York scene. As the United States entered World War II, art makers grappled with cultural and political landscapes in flux through a broad range of responses to intensifying global conflict. Turning to enigmatic narrative, symbolic and mythic landscapes, and local variants of surrealism, artists explored new forms of world-making in the face of war, across a range of media from painting to prints, photography, film, and performance. Drawing from modern physics and premodern epistemologies, artists across a geographical span turned away from the formal fragmentation associated with much modernist practice and toward an integration of human and natural worlds. Using 1942 as a pivot, along with the years leading up to and after World War II, this session seeks to expand our understanding of a time when figure, myth, and symbol acquired new force beyond the older languages of social realism and in the shadow of Abstract Expressionism. We welcome papers exploring transnational artistic networks connecting the U.S. to Mexico, South America, North Africa, and beyond.

Documenting Urban Change

Danielle Jean Stewart, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Email Address(s):
daniellejeanne@gmail.com

Many early photographic archives preserve images of traditional architecture that continue to exert ideological and aesthetic influence into the present, even as cities’ physical infrastructures shift. Nineteenth-century photographers like Charles Marville in Paris and Marc Ferrez in Rio de Janeiro were both contracted by their municipal governments to photographically document rapidly transforming local landscapes in order to preserve their architectural heritage in the face of modernization. In the wake of the fire in Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, photographic archives like these were quickly enlisted to aid in the reconstruction effort. In addition to preserving architectural histories, photographs are also employed to mold and/or censor a city’s visual image. This is especially evident in the case of mid-twentieth-century photo books like Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York (1939) or Horacio Coppola’s Buenos Aires (1936). More than mere travelogues, these volumes sought to understand the civic identities of cities flux. In the contemporary period, urban photography has also been used by minority communities in the United States to protest injustice and promote tangible social change. Along these lines, this panel seeks to understand the relationship between photography and the urban environment—is it documentary? symbiotic? passing?—and welcomes submissions that explore how this relationship has been framed across various geopolitical contexts and how it has shifted over time.

Holographic Art and the Animated Image: Histories and Conservation

Zsofia Valyi-Nagy, University of Chicago and Solveig Nelson, PhD, Art Institute of Chicago
Email Address(s):
zsvn@uchicago.edu
snelso4@artic.edu

Holography has had a rich and widely popular history that spanned Cold War divisions, but as an art form it has not been taken seriously, even if figures as various as Louise Bourgeois and James Turrell continued to experiment with it long after the novelty wore off. In the 1960s and ’70s, critics largely dismissed holograms as gimmicks, denigrating their “special effects” as kitsch. In a 1975 New York Times review, Hilton Kramer compared their “rainbow hues” to the “cheapest kinds of picture postcards,” with their “combination of peep‐show realism and juke‐box color.”

Artists themselves, however, have built a rich alternative history of holography, serving as their own critics and archivists. Museums have recently begun acquiring works such as Bruce Nauman’s 1960s pulse-laser holographic portraits and Simone Forti’s integral holograms made with Lloyd Cross in the 1970s (recently displayed at LACMA and the Art Institute of Chicago), yet there has been little conservation research on preserving holograms. Aside from Sean Johnston’s pioneering scholarship, the history of early women innovators such as Margaret Benyon and Harriet Casdin-Silver and the international scope of holography have been largely neglected. The methodological challenges these static-yet-animated images pose to art history, too, have been sidestepped rather than tackled head-on.

Moving beyond a simplistic celebration of holography as art, this panel seeks a rich set of case studies on particular holographic histories and the stakes of holography as a medium, including recent questions of conservation and intersections between holography and video, photography, sculpture, virtual reality, etc.

Ideology of Art History, Theory and Criticism

Hammam Aldouri,
Email Address(s):
hammamaldouri@yahoo.co.uk

In 1970 the philosopher Louis Althusser published his influential essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation)” in the journal La Pensée. This panel will mark the fifty-year anniversary of this essay (and the writings that came after it) by taking Althusser’s reflections and concepts as its theoretical point of departure. The panel solicits presentations that explore what the ideology of the academic discipline of art history, theory and criticism consists of and how it functions not only at the level of the external ensemble of symbolic and real conditions, but also at the very level of the development of the form and content of art historical scholarship. For this reason, the panel is especially interested in presentations that explore the following questions: How do individuals become interested in art and its history? Can one produce a genealogy of such formation? Can we speak of academia as an apparatus that interpellates individuals in such a way that they recognize themselves as “academic subjects”? If so, how does this affect scholarly work, interests and commitments? Who is permitted to contemplate, critically analyze and construct theories and histories of art and who is not? Who does the art historian, theoretician and critic write for? How does this affect their work? And what is the social and political responsibility of scholarship on art within academia? Finally, how does the dominating force of the capitalist mode of production and the ideology of academic knowledge production relate at the level of scholarly work?

Is that Unprofessional? When Artists Curate
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Professional Practices Committee

Meredith Lynn, Florida State University and Carolyn W. Butler-Palmer, University of Victoria
Email Address(s):
meredithlaura@gmail.com
cbpalmer@uvic.ca

The relationship between artist and curator is often carefully guided by a set of professional and personal codes. Although the distinct roles of artist and curator feel firmly entrenched, they are a modern invention. Prior to the mid-twentieth century when the work of the curator was professionalized, artists served as their own promoters and organized and interpreted many of the most influential exhibitions and collections of post-industrial Europe and the United States. From the artist-organized exhibitions of the French Impressionists to the Society of Independent Artists, founded by Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ran, artists contributed significantly to a modern understanding of curatorial work.

But the relatively new division between the two roles has created a professional murkiness for the artist curator. Under what circumstances can an artist serve as curator? When someone is fulfilling both jobs, how should their work be understood or critiqued? How can an artist curator address their own subjectivity, authorship, or place within a project? Should we articulate a separate set of professional standards and guidelines for the artist curator?

As the popularity of curatorial studies programs increases, the codified divisions between the two professions are only becoming better defined, making these questions more pressing. In this panel, we will discuss the professional concerns of the artist curator and the historical contexts and contemporary models for a practice that does not fit into one category easily.

Is this Sparta?: Reception of the Ancient World in Contemporary Media

Kira Jones, and Steven Matthew Burges, Boston University
Email Address(s):
kkjone3@emory.edu
sburges@bu.edu

In early 2017, Berkeley, CA was witness to a series of demonstrations by right-wing protestors over the cancellation of a talk by Milo Yiannopoulous, some of whom incorporated Spartan-style armor into their outfits. Likewise, the Plutarch quotation “μολὼν λαβέ” has been adopted by the American gun rights community as a rallying call for Second Amendment defense. Scholars have increasingly recognized the power of contemporary reception to color modern views of the ancient world. In this case, Zack Snyder’s 2006 film 300 has become a cultural monolith that promotes a hyper-militaristic version of Sparta that is inconsistent with current scholarship. Gillen Kelly’s and Bellaire Cowles’ graphic novel Three is a notable step towards accuracy, along with Ubisoft’s 2018 video game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, yet both are indebted to the long train of reception that brought Snyder’s film into being. With such dissonance between public and academic “fact,” what, then, is Sparta?

This panel will address how the reception of classical antiquity in modern media (broadly defined as visual arts post-1800) either counteracts or informs public opinion and knowledge. To that end papers explore how reception can spawn self-reinforcing narrative traditions, be leveraged in teaching, inspire public interest or, at worst, advance harmful and exclusionary modern agendas. We hope to spur discussion on how to engage with this inter- and multidisciplinary phenomenon in teaching, publication, and scholarship, and what our responsibility is as scholars to the larger public conversation.

Join the discussion: #IsThisSparta

Taking a New Look: Creating Change in the Studio and Art History Classrooms
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Community College Professors of Art and Art History

Susan M. Altman, Middlesex County College and Monica Anke Hahn, Community College of Philadelphia
Email Address(s):
saltman@middlesexcc.edu
mhahn@ccp.edu

Increasingly, pressing academic and administrative issues demand attention both in and out of the classroom, impacting community colleges and especially their art programs. Diminishing enrollments, lack of student preparedness, constant assessment, retention difficulties, and more all affect teaching and learning for our students. These issues challenge how we teach and how we prepare students for transfer and for their careers as artists and art historians. What new ideas, methods, approaches, can we bring to our classes and programs? What changes do we need to implement? How can we attract new students to make our studio and art history classes more relevant? What successful changes have you put into effect? This session invites "best practices," and a range of new ideas to help promote successful change in our classes and to revitalize an interest in the arts on our campuses.

The Art and Design of Mid-Century Modern Architecture
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society of Architectural Historians

Marin R Sullivan, Harry Bertoia Foundation and Andrew Wasserman,
Email Address(s):
marinsullivan@gmail.com
wasserman.andrew@gmail.com

Recent demolitions and radical modifications of mid-century modern public buildings have raised the hackles of architectural and art historians, preservationists, and the public alike. The advance of time has exposed these structures, erected to project economic, political, and social achievement, to complaints of insufficiency and irrelevancy, not to mention to wrecking balls and excavators. If, as Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs have recently argued, it is inevitable that buildings must die, what of the works of art and design commissioned for and integral to the experience of these now imperiled buildings? Rather than gallery-based works acquired for corporate, civic, and university collections and then subsequently housed within these buildings, what of the painted and sculptural facades, sculptural elements, designed ceilings and floors, fixtures and appliances in trafficked spaces, and promotional murals installed behind reception desks or in conference rooms? Often commissioned to enhance the architecture, yet maintaining some status as independent artworks or design elements in their own right, these works were the result of new networks of patronage and commercially available materials.

This session invites papers that examine the issues surrounding commissioned works embattled in advanced stages of deterioration, renovation, or demolition. Presenters are invited to submit proposals for projects that think through the connections between art, design, and architecture, especially as they relate to the commission, destruction, or preservation of works. How can such artworks and design elements be understood as more than decoration for the architectural structures for which they were created? How do we approach the assessment, conservation, preservation, and documentation of works that, like the buildings upon, within, or around which they reside, have in recent years been deemed retrograde, awkward in functionality, or, in some cases, potentially harmful in their neglected state? This panel seeks to bring architectural historians together in conversation with art historians, design historians, and historic preservationists to construct a more integrative telling of the history of the mid-century built environment both at mid-century and today. While case studies of, advocacy proposals for, or theoretical models relevant to the United States and Europe are welcomed, papers addressing the global reach of these issues are particularly encouraged.

The Changing Same: New Diaspora Aesthetics in the Americas

Joseph Lamar Underwood, Kent State University and Allison K. Young, Louisiana State University
Email Address(s):
jlunderwood12@gmail.com
akyoung87@gmail.com

Amiri Baraka coins the phrase “the changing same” in his 1963 book Blues People: Negro Music in White America to describe the loose connections between contemporary jazz and African music. Teasing out the ramifications of a people being relocated, experiencing acculturation, or fighting appropriation, Baraka positions Black art and music as vehicles for safeguarding memory and combatting universalism.

Following these concerns, this panel asks how today’s artists navigate phenomena of (im)migration, acculturation, and appropriation in the United States of post-1980, as narratives surrounding American identity, history, and diversity have come to vary, often dramatically, between national, regional, and local discourses in recent years. Of particular interest are the changing social, artistic and visual cultures of locales along not only the East and West coasts, but also the Great Lakes, Mississippi River, and Gulf Coast. Emerging as new spaces of diaspora—from Detroit’s growing Muslim population to Central American immigration to the Gulf South following Hurricane Katrina—such locales have assumed an increasingly assertive role in American social politics. At the same time, Americans have reassessed and revised narratives surrounding the nation’s defining historical events, from the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to the Civil War and Jim Crow Era.

What are the impacts of Diaspora aesthetics for indigenous, majority, and/or other minority populations in today’s America? How have exchanges, movements and displacements wrought by recent waves of (im)migration to these cities impacted “American” aesthetics and cultural production in new ways since 1980? What are contemporary artists’ strategies in addressing “the changing same”?

African American Quilts in the Wake of Gee’s Bend

Elaine Y. Yau, University of California, Berkeley
Email Address(s):
eyau@berkeley.edu

Since 2002, quilts made by women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, have been exhibited, acquired, and hailed by art museums across the United States as “American masterpieces” that tell equally potent stories about slavery’s afterlives, feminine resilience, and beauty transmitted through African American craft traditions. Simultaneously, their rising visibility has sparked critiques of the quilts’ elision with abstract painting and cultural biases underpinning their transvaluation as “art.” Coursing through these conversations is an oppositionality sited at the intersection of craft, gender, and race that challenges inequities of Western cultural and aesthetic hierarchies.

This panel seeks papers that advance critical discussions catalyzed by the Gee’s Bend phenomenon in order to connect quilts’ textile politics with broader discourses of blackness and feminism. Some topics might discuss the economic and social responses undertaken by the Gee’s Bends Collective following their national acclaim; others might complicate the historical representation of African American quilts—their debated status as code-carriers along the Underground Railroad or material retentions from Africa—to Christina Sharpe’s urgent call to “attend to physical, social, and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life” (In the Wake, 2016). Perspectives on traditional quilts made by individuals of African descent from the nineteenth century to the present, as well as case studies in contemporary art and craft, that center on quilts within black lived experience are welcome. They may situate quilts as vehicles of memory or affect; extensions of the body and mind; components of sensory cultures; or objects of care, among other positionalities.

Companion or Competing Disciplines: Histories of Art History and Archaeology

Peter R. Kalb, Brandeis University and Carolyn White, University of Nevada Reno
Email Address(s):
pkalb@brandeis.edu
clwhite@unr.edu

Art history and archaeology have a long history as companion disciplines extending from Vasari’s accounts of Michelangelo’s excavations through the creation of the modern iterations of each discipline. In the late 1960s Michel Foucault reinvented the activities of the archaeologist in his early histories and then theorized a practice that he named archaeology. Art historians, eager to reinvent their discipline as one open to theoretical and political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, invoked the post-structuralist deconstruction laid out by Foucault, and expanded his brand of archaeology into the present. Today, the challenge posed is that archaeology as Foucault described it had little, if anything, to do with archaeology as practiced, thus leading to a chasm between what art historians were coming to think archaeology was, and archaeologists, including peers in art history departments, were actually practicing.

This session seeks to understand the historical relationship between archaeology and art history as well as the valences of the disciplines today with particular concern for how the two fields might collaborate. What do art historians mean when they use the term archaeology? How is archaeology deployed in art history as a concept, as a method, as a practice? To what extent is Foucault’s use of the term archaeology adopted in the field and what is meant by it? What do archaeologists gain from the art historical approach?

Embodied perception in a time of war

Angela Miller, Washington University in St. Louis and Elizabeth Welch,
Email Address(s):
almiller@wustl.edu
ewelch00@gmail.com

Second session following abstract from "Ca. 1942"

Fixing and Fading: the material photograph over time

chitra ramalingam, and Laurel Waycott, Vanderbilt University
Email Address(s):
cr274@cam.ac.uk
laurel.j.waycott@vanderbilt.edu

What kind of object is a faded photograph? When what was pictured in it has become unrecognizable, is it actually a photograph anymore, or does it operate within a different regime of meaning? This panel invites conceptual explorations of the role of fading in a medium known for fixing. The tendency of images to decay was an essential element of the science and the aesthetics of the early photographic surface, and it remains a central concern in the care, display, and preservation of photographs in museums and archives today. Yet our most prominent photographic histories implicitly center upon the “display worthy” print—or in some famous cases, carefully manipulated reproductions of a faded relic—rather than upon the much broader archive of faded, decayed, damaged, and illegible photographs that remain in storage in collections across the world. What kind of histories can be told from the faded photograph, its trajectory of change and transformation, or the decaying photographic archive? What, and whom, are we saving such objects for? What would it look like to cultivate a curatorial or scholarly approach to photography that accepts and embraces the ongoing decay of the image as an essential part of its chemical nature, its aesthetics, and its cultural life as an object? This panel invites submissions from those working on photography from multi-disciplinary perspectives, including history of art, social and cultural history, history of science, anthropology, conservation, or critical heritage studies.

Interactions between Judaism and Christianity in the History of Art
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art

Jonathan Anderson, King's College London and Aaron M Rosen, King's College London
Email Address(s):
jonathan.a.anderson@biola.edu
aaronmatthewrosen@googlemail.com

In recent decades, a significant body of scholarship has begun to reexamine the interaction and interrelation between Judaism and Christianity in the history of art, from the third century to the twenty-first. For our 2020 CAA session, the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art (ASCHA) invites proposals for papers that further develop this scholarship by exploring moments of significant exchange between Jewish and Christian thought, practice, and/or material culture in the history of art. We welcome proposals from a variety of different approaches and foci, including instances of artists working with Jewish themes or concepts in Christian contexts or using Christian imagery; artists working with Christian themes or concepts in Jewish contexts or using Jewish imagery; instances of collaborative partnerships; instances of generative borrowings and adaptations; or any other instances in which aspects of these traditions mutually influence, inform, challenge, and enrich each other. Proposals can focus on any time period or geographical region, and we encourage proposals focusing on underrepresented artists or underrepresented aspects of familiar artists’ work.

S%@t Happens: Happy and Less Happy Accidents
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Services to Artists Committee

Julie Christine Hughes, De Anza College and Jacquelyn Lee Strycker, School of Visual Arts
Email Address(s):
hughesjulie@fhda.edu
thestrycker@gmail.com

Creative and scholarly practice does not occur in a vacuum. What happens when major life events—job changes, diagnoses, births, deaths—shape one’s practice? In what ways can they make us more innovative? How do we identify when emotional labor adjacent to such life events and circumstances is gendered, and when intersectional issues of race, class, ethnicity, further complicate the narrative? What strategies and coping mechanisms exist or can be developed to shift potential negative impacts to positive forces?

We seek submissions from artists, designers, and academics who would like to share their stories and insights on how events transform one’s work. We hope that these stories will lead to discussion with those in attendance.

The Curatorial Turn: Reimagining the Disciplinary Boundaries Between Artists and Art Historians

Carolyn W. Butler-Palmer, University of Victoria and Meredith Lynn, Florida State University
Email Address(s):
cbpalmer@uvic.ca
meredithlaura@gmail.com

Second session following abstract from "Is that Unprofessional? When Artists Curate"

The Midwest May Be Having a Moment

Christine Young-Kyung Hahn, Kalamazoo College
Email Address(s):
chahn@kzoo.edu

Bruce Graham, one of the principal architects for Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, once declared, “The Middle West, as I told you before, is America. That is the power of this country.” Although Graham was referring to the power of the Midwest’s industry and natural resources, politically we have seen that to be the case, with Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania routinely determining the outcome of presidential elections. And while Architectural Digest declared as recently as 2017 that “Midwestern Residential Architecture is the Country’s Most Exciting,” the Midwest has long been a center for architectural innovation and patronage throughout the late 19^th, 20^th, and now 21^st century. Yet historically, the Midwest is also a space marked by the memory of the violent removal of its indigenous and religious communities. This panel seeks papers that examine the complexity of Midwest regional identity as expressed in its built environment. Drawing from LeFebvre, how and in what ways are Midwestern identities shaped, produced, circulated and provoked by its visual environment? This session is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches that explore connections in visual and material culture, architecture, and design theory.

Un-making Architecture

Jason Nguyen, Getty Research Institute and Elizabeth J. Petcu, University of Edinburgh
Email Address(s):
jenguyen@fas.harvard.edu
ejpetcu@icoud.com

Architecture is enduringly conceived as an additive, building-oriented phenomenon. Nevertheless, the prelude to construction—as well as architecture’s emergence and aftermath—nearly always involve elements of destruction. The razing of built and natural landscapes, planned obsolescence, cycles of dismantling, iconoclasm, spoliation, and other forms of un-making condition architectural cultures across time and geographies. Destruction, in other words, undergirds architecture’s creative processes. This session seeks papers that investigate ways of un-making in architecture across any period or region. It asks how acts of destruction, whether deliberate, accidental, or caused by natural forces, produce architectural knowledge and inform the built environment in theory and practice. Although recent scholarship has privileged the making process, the acts of “un-making” that inform most architectural projects work in profound but often overlooked ways. These include the demolition of monuments and heritage sites, the flattening of settlements ensuing human displacement, the obliteration of natural and built landscapes due to environmental disaster, and the dismantling of buildings for renewal and restoration. Processes of architectural un-making also operate in architectural theory, as in Piranesi’s sublime depictions of ruination, or, more recently, Forensic Architecture’s analyses of urban and environmental devastation. How have acts, events, and theories of destruction altered our conceptions of architecture? What productive consequences have emerged from the rubble of architecture’s un-making? And how has the physical and theoretical disassembling of architecture prompted shifts in artistic thought and practice? We welcome histories of architecture that confront the materials, conditions, environments, things, and ideas that building practice and architectural theory un-make.

Unsettling Visual Culture

Jordan Reznick, University of California Santa Cruz
Email Address(s):
jreznick@ucsc.edu

The recently established field of settler colonial studies seeks to describe phenomena unique to settler colonialism as a mode of domination distinct from colonialism. Working to build a corollary branch of visual studies, this session seeks to describe histories of visual culture integral to establishing and resisting colonial settlements. Like colonialism, settler colonialism depends upon unequal relationships between subjects. Unlike colonialism, settlers seek to permanently replace indigenous peoples and never return “home.” This session contends that art and visual culture have been central to many aspects of settlement ideologies connected to land occupation and genocide, including erasing indigenous presence and histories, visualizing settler subjectivity, naturalizing social hierarchies, creating usable pasts, and fantasizing about the settler's special relationship to the land. Visuality is also critical to decolonial resistance movements and the cultivation of indigenous cultures in the face of near annihilation. Speakers investigate settler colonial and indigenous visual cultures of North America, South Africa, and Palestine, unsettling visual studies by countering the amnesia and invisibility characteristic of settler colonial art history.

Art and Corporate Ethics: Historical Perspectives

Caroline Riley, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Alex Taylor, University of California
Email Address(s):
caroline.riley@purchase.edu
carolinemriley@gmail.com

In recent years, artists and museums have repeatedly grappled with the ethical and ideological dilemmas posed by sponsorship from oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and other multinational corporations. But even before the rise of museum sponsorship in the 1970s, the intersections between cultural, political and corporate power represented sites of persistent volatility. This panel seeks papers that provide a historical perspective on these issues, exploring how artists and museums navigated the challenges posed by earlier forms of corporate art collecting and patronage. How did the investment of prominent pre-war companies such as Abbott Laboratories and Standard Oil engage the public relations challenges of their business practices? How did such businesses shape the meanings of artworks they supported? To what extent did artists understand these imperatives, and incorporate varied degrees of critique and/or compliance within the works they contributed to commercial settings? Such questions illustrate the complex entanglements of artistic aspiration, business strategy, and the construction of the public good. These histories reveal the contributions of agents beyond the artist to the making and meaning of corporate art, including art directors, advertising creatives, and public relations advisors. This panel will endeavor to reconstruct how the ideological and ethical dilemmas of corporate art projects are manifest both in the artworks themselves, and in the advertisements and exhibitions into which they were so often incorporated. We therefore seek papers on works of art, exhibitions, or material and visual culture that will illuminate the rich and contested histories of corporate collecting and patronage before 1970.

Art in Asia and South America during the Cold War: Comparative Analyses

Kanwal Syed, Concordia University and Diogo Rodrigues de Barros, Université de Montréal
Email Address(s):
kanwal.raza@gmail.com
diogo.rodrigues.de.barros@umontreal.ca

In the related sequence of military coups during the Cold War in Iran (1953), Brazil (1964), Uruguay (1973), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976), Pakistan (1977) – all driven by an alleged “fear of communism” – it may be surprising to see Iran and Pakistan in a list dominated by South American countries. Despite the global nature of the Cold War, historical narratives inadequately stress the connections between different “souths” of the Asian and American continents. Similarly, the impact of the Cold War in both contexts have been addressed separately, receiving considerable scholarly attention in recent years: propaganda and resistance art in Pakistan, and conceptualisms in South America. However, efforts towards a comparative transregional study have yet to be explored. This panel invites contributions from specialists on Asian and South American art to collectively discuss how art in both regions were affected by the Cold War. Scholars specialising at the same time in both Asia and South America are rare. Comparative analysis, a model favorizing the production of connected global art histories, becomes in this case necessarily collective in nature. This panel seeks to further South-South dialogue and encourage collaborative efforts in addressing art historical narratives. The Bandung (1955) and the Tricontinental (Havana, 1966) Conferences constituted the starting points of the so-called third-world solidarity movement. Economic alliances such as the BRICS and cultural projects regarding the Global South seem to suggest the need for new forms of solidarity among peoples historically affected by Western hegemony. Collective comparative studies respond to that need.

Barriers, Borders, and Boundaries in the Early Modern World

Luis J. Gordo-Pelaez, California State University, Fresno and Charles C. Barteet, University of Western Ontario
Email Address(s):
luisgordopelaez@csufresno.edu
cbarteet@uwo.ca

Barriers are an ever present reality of human creation and they have often been used as a signifier of cultural evolution. From the creation of symbolic embankments that served as foundations for early structures or to demarcate socially encoded spaces, barriers have served many purposes. In United States and Europe walls are used to establish clear binaries between the privileged “us” and the demonized “other.” In both locations, thousands of miles of barriers have been built, or have been proposed, to define literally and symbolically boundaries that in turn are transforming the landscape of their borders.

Whether ancient or contemporary, walls have contributed to create barriers and borders through the redefinition of spaces, creating a sense of place and identity, demarcating physical boundaries, and imposing socio-economic hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. In the context of early modern cities, borders and boundaries emerged as a consequence of expanding empires and colonizing efforts, the development of warfare technology and new systems of fortification, and the implementation of directives regarding the use of urban space.Whether materialized or not, barriers were a common occurrence in designs proposed by urban planners, and an instrument for defining borders and boundaries in the political and socio-economic plans of powerful regimes.

This session aims to examine the relationship between barriers, borders and boundaries in the early modern era from a global comparative perspective. Papers that address this interplay in any of its manifestations (conceptualization and building, notions of agency and perception, narrative and representation, materiality) are particularly welcome.

Beyond the Bauhaus: Histories of American Design Education

Gretchen Alana Von Koenig, Parsons, The New School and Colin Fanning, Bard Graduate Center
Email Address(s):
gvonkoenig@gmail.com
colin.e.fanning@gmail.com

Histories of design education in the United States are often situated within the paradigm of the Bauhaus diaspora, and by extension, its adjacency to architectural education. While émigré designers from Europe exerted significant influence in the formation of design education in the mid-twentieth-century U.S., this session aims to highlight scholarship that takes other actors, networks, and institutions as its primary subjects, elucidating lesser-known episodes in the training and professionalization of American designers. We invite submissions that provide case studies or historiographic analyses of themes that might include (but are not limited to): What are the uniquely American conditions that have shaped the definitions and structures of design education? How did early industrial-art vocational training, immigrant craft-based education, and applied arts training for a manufacturing nation play a role in the political, social and cultural spheres of American life and identity? What are the formative relationships between industry, business, and education? What ideas animated the pedagogical discourse among educators and influential makers in the latter half of the 20th century? Beyond the biographical, what modes of analysis are best-suited to trace the dispersal and diffusion of ideologies and practices of design education through networks of institutions or individual educators? And how might the specific material conditions and methods of student work offer insights into the shifting conceptual and technological bases of American design? Papers in this this session will help recover the historical contexts and intellectual development of design education beyond the well-trod territory of European modernist influences.

Carolee's Communities

Reva J. Wolf, State University of New York at New Paltz and Ellen K. Levy, Independent Artist and Scholar
Email Address(s):
wolfr@newpaltz.edu
levy@nyc.rr.com

Carolee Schneemann’s 1994-95 multi-media installation, Mortal Coils, is a solemn reflection about mourning and memory, dedicated to friends who had died recently—among them, John Cage, Peter Moore, Charlotte Moorman, David Rattray, and Hannah Wilke. As we now reflect on the loss of Schneemann, who died in March 2019, we turn to Mortal Coils as an expression of the centrality of artistic and intellectual communities in her art and life. Artists, writers, and performers of later generations have benefited from her generous community-forming spirit, which is affectionately symbolized in the title of a painting of 2017 by Angela Dufresne: The Carolee Schneemann Reading Club. This panel explores the power and importance of community in Schneemann’s work, and its significance for those with whom she came into contact, in celebration of her life and influence.

Open Session for Emerging Scholars of Latin American Art
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Latin American Art

Ray Hernández-Durán, University of New Mexico and Ana Maria Reyes, Boston University
Email Address(s):
rhernand@unm.edu
amreyes@bu.edu

The aim of the ALAA-sponsored open session is to provide a platform at the annual conference to highlight work produced by advanced graduate students and recent Ph.D.’s, who concentrate on the histories of Latin American and U.S. Latinx arts and/or visual and material cultures. Papers may focus on any region, period, or theme related to the Latin American and Latinx experience, including, Pre-Hispanic/Ancient American art, colonial/viceregal art, art of the nineteenth century, modern art, and contemporary art, including folk/popular art and craft studies, from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. In reviewing submissions and selecting the papers for the session, the co-chairs will be looking for strong proposals that cover a range of subjects across each of the noted areas.

Subject Areas: Latin America, U.S., Mesoamerica, Andes, New Spain, Peru, Caribbean, Central America, South America, ancient art, indigenous art, colonial art, nineteenth-century art, modern art, contemporary art, Latinx art, innovative methodologies, historiography.

Association for Latin American Art (ALAA) membership is not required when submitting a paper proposal; however, all speakers must be active members at the time of the annual meeting.

Presidential Look: Art and POTUS/FLOTUS

Peter Han-Chih Wang, Butler University
Email Address(s):
pwang1@butler.edu

The term “Presidential Look” is aroused when then candidate Donald Trump questions whether his opponent, the former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, looks presidential during the 2016 Presidential Election. This panel aims to provide critical perspectives on art and visual culture related to the President of the United States (POTUS) and the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS). We try to re-conceptualize the ways in which the POTUS/FLOTUS is visualized, documented, and embodied. How does an image or an object related to the POTUS/FLOTUS reflects the artistic value of the time or represents the nation? What roles does the POTUS/FLOTUS play in shaping the public taste or making a social change through the involvement of art?

The session offers four intriguing case studies that range over time and across media. The panel first reexamines Thomas Jefferson’s role in patronage of the arts and as a collector and curator, especially through the life-portrait of George Washington sculpted by Jean-Antoine Houdon. Secondly, we will have a closer look at Ralph E. W. Earl’s portrait of Andrew Jackson, which retraces the tradition of the presidential portraiture exemplified by Gilbert Stuart's depiction of George Washington. Moving forward, we will reevaluate the White House photographs from multiple perspectives, as both archival document and political propaganda, especially those from the Bush 43 and Obama administrations. Last but not least, the panel contextualizes various representations of the former FLOTUS Michelle Obama in art and fashion after being featured on more than 150 US magazines.

“The Marketplace of the Flesh”: Coordinates for an Art History of Black Women’s Labor

C.C. McKee, Bryn Mawr College and Natalia Angeles Vieyra, Temple University
Email Address(s):
cmckee1@brynmawr.edu
nataliavieyra@gmail.com

Theorist Hortense Spillers contends that black women’s enslavement “relegated them to the market place of the flesh, an act of commodification so thoroughgoing that the daughters labor even now under the outcome.” For Spillers, black femininity is an ontological position that constitutes “the principal point of passage between the human and non-human world.” Moreover, this commodification of the flesh did not end with emancipation, its vestiges live on in black women’s labor in the present.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists working in the Atlantic World mobilized the picturesque to obfuscate the realities of chattel slavery and the work of black women in particular. The fungibility that conditioned black femininity under slavery and in its wake has all-too-often been elided in art historical scholarship. Taking Spillers’s provocation as our starting point, this panel asks: Where can black women’s labor be located in the visual record? How do black women’s artistic practices continue to interrogate the visual and material histories of labor at the violent nexus of the human and non-human?

We welcome proposals that take up the visual and material conditions of black labor and women’s work in the Atlantic World. This includes, but is by no means limited to: the intersecting histories of gender and race as they relate to the representation of labor or its objects; contemporary artistic, visual and material cultural treatments of black women’s labor; and capacious approaches to black femininity and labor untethered to binary gender, encompassing trans* and queer identities.

Architectural Representation and Medieval Art

Jenny H. Shaffer, New York University - School of Professional Studies
Email Address(s):
jshaffer@nyc.rr.com

Images of architecture are ubiquitous in the art of the Middle Ages, and the consistent centrality of such imagery throughout this thousand-year time span raises a wide variety of questions. Medieval architectural representations may be emblematic, represent only an architectural fragment, be fanciful in form, or show structures from multiple viewpoints; they are often in disparate scale with relation to other figures. As isolated images, they are discussed in terms of formal types and stylistic categories and mined for information about actual structures, yet these representations are most remarkable for the ways in which they participate in and contribute to the systems of signification of which they are a part. They invite – and even insist on – open-ended and overlapping interpretations and associations, communicating purposely diffuse meanings in an age that well understood the value of evocative visual worlds. This session welcomes papers on any aspect of or approach to architectural representation in medieval art – whether, for example, questions of production, dissemination, use, and reception or issues of composition, style, and subject matter – in order to explore the myriad ways in which buildings are implicated in the broader field of the production of meaning for this millennium characterized by movement and change played out in a space stretching from Scandinavia into the Middle East.

Becoming Animal and the Olfactory Unconscious

Debra Parr,
Email Address(s):
dparr@colum.edu

The smell of things is at once overlooked, repressed, and resolutely part of everyday life. Olfactory experience can be evocative, troubling: an unarticulated, unrecognized, unanalyzed unconscious. The sense of smell in the writing of Kant is aligned with the animalic, dismissed as too proximate to be valuable in the formation of knowledge or as a basis for aesthetic experience. Unlike sight, the sense of smell is categorized as suspect and fugitive, not at all a reliable source of information beyond being a most basic alert system to danger: the smell of rotten food, the smell of natural gas or fire. Drawing on the theories of Deleuze and Guattari (becoming animal), Walter Benjamin (the optical unconscious), and Laura Marks (the olfactory unconscious), this panel proposes to think through the contemporary situation of environmental urgency. Contemporary artists as diverse as Sissel Tolaas, Rashid Johnson, Matt Morris, Sean Raspet, Gwenn-Aël Lynn, among others investigate the power of scent to open up understandings of identity, gender, race, and planetary collapse. Their work raises several questions: what is the smell of the urban landscape; are there descriptors that could frame the smell of climate change; could scent draw humans together in resistance to regimes of oppression; what comes of experiencing the most elemental smells of the body and the earth? This session welcomes papers, research, speculations, and analysis of contemporary art and the sense of smell, its capacities and its discontents. Is the sense of smell a critical skill for the 21^st century?

Between Truth and Persuasion: Images and Historical Narration from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century

Alessandra Di Croce, Columbia University and Federica Soletta, Princeton University
Email Address(s):
ad2516@columbia.edu
fsoletta@princeton.edu

While images have often been used in Western art as effective storytelling tools, from religious paintings to photographic portfolios, their documentary value has always been far more ambiguous. On the one hand, images have been recognized as reliable historical evidence - along with material documents - since at least the middle of the sixteenth century. Additionally, the detailed vividness of a visual description was often perceived as more effective than a text. On the other hand, however, images could be simply dismissed as undecipherable records, relics of the past completely useless if not paired with written words. Moreover, images could be easily manipulated, through the use of specific visual and rhetorical strategies, and become instrumental in constructing and negotiating ideas of truth, ultimately shaping people’s beliefs. The uncanny power of images to create a tangible truth, or a convincing history has been always widely recognized - whether with fear (iconoclasm) or admiration (as in Plutarch’s admission that “the most effective historian is he who (...) makes his narration like a painting”).

With the religious controversy and political disputations of the sixteenth century, the question of images as both historical evidence and powerful tool of narrative persuasions became intimately related with broader questions of historical method and historical narrative.

This session welcomes papers that explore the agency of images and engage with the notions of truth, fiction and persuasion in the construction of historical narration and visual history (or histories), from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

Beyond the Algorithm: Art Historians, Librarians, and Archivists in Collaboration on Digital Humanities Initiatives
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Art Libraries Society of North America

Maggie Joe Mustard, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Amye McCarther, New Museum
Email Address(s):
mmustard@newmuseum.org
amccarther@newmuseum.org

Global tech companies first began to make serious moves into the business of mining cultural resources for their data potential nearly a decade ago. Today, some of the world’s top fine art collections have been aggregated and made searchable and dynamically malleable online thanks, in part, to the investment of museums and academic institutions in building accessible digital collections. Taking into account the resources afforded to the world’s biggest tech giants, and the implications of their extraction and mobilization of personal or institutional data, this panel is instead interested in exploring how individual non-profit institutions devoted to the preservation and interpretation of the visual arts are tackling innovative projects using emerging technologies that are scaled to their respective audiences and missions.

This panel's presentations feature museum, library, and/or academic initiatives seeking to develop new knowledge resources that harness the structure, content, and affordances of robust digital collections to contextualize, narrativize, or otherwise activate a collection’s assets. How might we determine and measure the pedagogical and public benefits of bridging the sometimes overdetermined boundaries of the archive and its potential interpretations? What are the infrastructural and technological challenges to these projects, and how do we critically design solutions to address the divisions and disparities they reinforce? Where is the deep knowledge of art historians, curators, art librarians, and archivists engaging with emerging technologies to create new knowledge, new access, and new resources, and how do these projects potentially highlight or obscure the often invisible labor performed in the archive?

Carolee Schneemann’s Art and Legacy: New Perspectives (Memorial Session)
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Women in the Arts

Kalliopi Minioudaki, Independent Scholar and Curator and Rachel Middleman, California State University, Chico
Email Address(s):
minioudaki@aol.com
rmiddleman@csuchico.edu

Carolee Schneemann’s death last March marked the annals of American art history with the loss of an artist and thinker whose diverse and revolutionizing multimedia practices have left an indelible imprint on contemporary art. It also marked the loss of a feminist artist whose radical sexual politics helped initiate an influential discourse for women-identified artists that both critiqued and resisted the suppression of the feminine in Western culture. The challenges that the aesthetics and body politics of her work presented to art criticism and patriarchy, but also to feminism, are evidenced in the contradictions of her reception since the 1960s. Only in the last few years before her death, Schneemann saw an intensification of her work’s scholarly and curatorial appreciation, and witnessed her overdue embrace by the art establishment with a solo retrospective at MoMA (alas through Salzburg and PS1) and the Venice Biennale Golden Lion Award in 2017. The Committee on Women in the Arts honors Schneemann’s pioneering contribution to postwar avant-garde with a session that focuses on different aspects of her multifaceted and polysemous oeuvre. With her wish for rigorous research and scholarship underpinning its memorial contours, we seek papers that advance new perspectives on the art, writing, politics, legacy, and reception of Carolee Schneemann, within and beyond the poetics of her radical voice. In doing so, this session carries forward her protest of the easy slippage of female production into invisibility and reductive posthumous acknowledgement, which she herself sought to defy with writings that have shaped her work’s understanding.

Getting Beyond the Canon and Beyond the Lecture: Design History Pedagogy Pro-Tools

Victoria Rose Pass, Design Studies Forum
Email Address(s):
vpass81@gmail.com

Teaching design history is different from teaching art history; design history relies on multiple intersecting histories of social change, technology, science, engineering, aesthetics, manufacturing, materials, labor, and consumer culture. In the US, design history is still a developing field. Compared to art history, there are few publications, textbooks, or even museum collections available to synthesize this history. The explosive growth of design degree programs in the US has increased class sizes. How can innovative pedagogical tools meet these challenges? How can design history teachers create a curriculum that is dynamic and inclusive? Since most students taking design history classes in the US are designers themselves, finding ways to teach research skills is critical, but challenging because of the lack of publications and collections. This panel seeks presentations that highlight solutions to these challenges. What strategies do you use to deal with large class sizes, to get out of traditional lecture models, or to create discussion? How do you get students working with objects, particularly without local collections, or when large class size precludes conventional field trips? How do you get students engaged with primary sources, and teach students to find them on their own? What strategies do you use to teach research practices? We envision a panel in which participants share an instrumental group of tools that can be used by others. Paper proposals should highlight one pedagogical tool or approach, the problems it sought to address, its learning outcomes, and how you know it was successful.

Mediating Drawing

Lauren M. Lake, University of North Texas
Email Address(s):
lauren.lake@unt.edu

This panel will share and discuss ways in which drawing is situated as visual language. Participants will discuss the contemporary space and conversations around drawing which include mediating (the space between drawing and other forms of practice), mediator (the artist or curator), media (tools and agency), methods (making and presenting), and medium (influences and environment).

Misunderstood: Between Civic Practice and Community Engagement

Jose G Villalobos,
Email Address(s):
jvillalobos@saic.edu

With the increasing emergence of roles such as “Community Engagement Liaison” and institutional departments in “Civic Practice,” this panel seeks to explore and highlight the potential fractures between definitions in this increasingly popular practice. What are the critical ligatures between these practices, and also, how have they been usurped by institutions as development and philanthropic streams shift interest? Are new foci and terms such as “radical care,” “emergent strategies,” and “community outreach” mistranslated terms between the institution and the practice? Or the practice and the practitioners?

This conversation between practitioners in the field takes on three areas of focus, first, tracing the history of socially engaged art practice into the moment that this enters the institution. The rise of the "civic engagement/community engagement liaison" as an institutionalized role, and their alignment with missing driven values versus the care of a community. And lastly, how the ethics of these projects are developed through communal care versus the preservation of an institution. As institutions and philanthropic organizations shift towards racial equity in the field, the work produced by the participants in this panel may serve as an entry point into the work that currently in development.

Rethinking Late Style: New Approaches to Old Age in Art History

Julia Louise Langbein, and Jack McGrath,
Email Address(s):
julialangbein@gmail.com
jack.mcgrath@gmail.com

In “Temporality and the Necessity of Dialectic,” literary theorist Charles Altieri called age “the missing dimension of contemporary [postmodern] theory.” If following thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, art history has, in the past generation, been revolutionized by an understanding of identity as constructed, it has given little consideration to the ways identity changes over time.

Art History possesses a category of critical literature dedicated to late-life: The "late style" or “late career” study, which emerged along with the discipline of art history in the 19th century. These studies tend to contrast the artist’s late work with his/her overall oeuvre; “late style” can be assessed in a formalist void without recourse to the biological, social, and historical situation of the aging artist, or it can rely too heavily on biographical or medical readings of the aged body.

This panel seeks to reinvigorate the study of advanced age or late-life production in art and visual culture as a historical, theoretical problem, and not merely as subject or theme. How does the study of old age advance/challenge our understanding of raced, classed or gendered identities? What methods might we use to study late-life output as part of a complex social and historical fabric? How have concepts like “originality” or “de-skilling” shaped and been shaped by conceptions of the aging mind? How have artists sited biological aging in their own work? We welcome papers from a wide range of area specialties.

Votes for Women: American Women Artists and Strategies for Inclusion
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Historians of American Art

Annelise K. Madsen, Art Institute of Chicago
Email Address(s):
amadsen@artic.edu

On the one-hundredth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, this session examines the place of women artists in inclusive histories of American art. It aims to reevaluate the various strategies that we as scholars, academics, and curators have employed to expand the canon, alter existing narratives, and conceive new structures for understanding who matters and why in the field. The separatist approach—telling women’s histories—has long fomented debate over whether such work is essential or essentializing. Moreover, separatist and recuperative discourses have often served to further marginalize women artists of color. As a corrective, recent scholarly studies on an underrepresented “sisterhood” of artists have modeled inclusive visions of historical American art, giving due consideration to individuals, communities, and the various contexts—political, racial, economic, and cultural—that shaped female artists’ practices and the reception of their works. Other projects have shifted or disrupted accepted narratives so that women artists regain their integral roles. This session seeks papers that examine the defining contributions of women artists in inclusive histories of American art. Papers that address the relationship between historical and ongoing mechanisms of exclusion, and that consider practical questions—such as how we write scholarship, frame exhibitions, make museum acquisitions, and teach courses—through the lens of a particular artist or case study are encouraged. AHAA seeks to include diverse perspectives and voices and we invite paper topics that explore underrepresented artists.

Women and Experimental Art Education in Latin America

Giulia Lamoni, Instituto de Historia da Arte Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Email Address(s):
giulialamoni@hotmail.com

This panel explores the intervention of women artists in the field of experimental art education in Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s, a period characterized by shifting gender roles, growing demands for female liberation and the development of feminist struggles. Conceived as a radical site of individual and collective emancipation at a time of political oppression in many Latin American countries, the creation of pedagogical projects by artists, often founded on a symbolic break with the institutional space of the classroom or the museum, developed in multiple and heterogeneous directions.

The panel, therefore, aims to discuss individual and collective educational experiences that blurred the boundaries between artistic practices and teaching, between individual and collective work, while often claiming a wider, more democratic definition of creativity and the capacity of art to intervene in social, political and psychological processes.

The presentations engage, from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, with the triangulation between artistic experimentation, art education and radical pedagogies in Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s, with a specific focus on women´s contribution in this area.

Working with Decolonial Theory in the Early Modern Period

Natalia Vargas Márquez, University of Minnesota and Leslie Elise Todd,
Email Address(s):
varga066@umn.edu
leslie.e.todd@gmail.com

Decolonial theory developed in the early 1990s as a renewed theoretical framework associated to critical theory that focuses on the concept of coloniality, a term that encompasses the expansion of colonial domination and its effects today. Scholars who have primarily written on and contributed to the development of the theory were and continue to be social scientists such as Aníbal Quijano and thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, as well as anthropologists and scholars of literature, philosophy, religion, and languages. Recently, art historians have explicitly drawn decolonial theory more directly into their work including Ananda Cohen-Aponte’s 2017 award-winning chapter “Decolonizing the Global Renaissance: A View from the Andes” in which she outlines a decolonial model of early modern art history, and Paul Niell’s preface to the 2018 exhibition catalogue “Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié” in which he outlines a curatorial approach to decolonialism.

This panel invites art historians of the early modern period to continue the conversation opened by Cohen-Aponte and Niell on decolonial models in art history. We seek to explore on a global scale how decolonial theory shapes our work, and in turn, what we can contribute to the theory. What is the applicability of this theoretical framework to art history of the early modern period? What are its blind spots? How do ideas and terms such as hybridity, mestizaje, and syncretism fold into or contrast against decolonial theory? We encourage papers that focus on historiographical, curatorial, and/or art historical ideas and questions.

“New Perspectives in Black Art”—Excavating the Black Arts Movement

Jo-Ann Morgan,
Email Address(s):
j-morgan@wiu.edu

In 1968 the recently opened Oakland Museum mounted an exhibition called “New Perspectives in Black Art.” Organized by E. J. Montgomery, then a student at nearby California College of the Arts, the show was pivotal in the art careers of many African Americans. This was but one among a wave of artistic activity throughout the country during the Black Power era in which African American artists took to heart Black Arts Movement goals to “launch a cultural revolution” as Malcolm X had challenged. The presentations in this session ask what it meant to make “Black Art” during the Black Arts Movement, generally considered to span from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. How did visual artists reconcile being fine art painters, printmakers, and sculptors, plying trades perceived as Eurocentric, with being African American? Was there a regional aspect to how artists conceived of Black art? What can be learned from lesser known artists and events of the Black Power era? How was Black art political? “New Perspectives in Black Art”—Excavating the Black Arts Movement aspires to broaden the lens on what is known about visual art of the Black Arts Movement.

Addressing the Challenges of the Promotion and Tenure Process in Design

Carma R. Gorman, University of Texas at Austin
Email Address(s):
carmagorman@gmail.com

Design faculty, promotion and tenure (P&T) committees, chairs, and deans at American institutions of higher learning have often struggled to articulate, much less agree upon, what should “count” toward promotion and tenure in design. Designers who publish in peer-reviewed journals are often chastised for not being “makers,” yet designers with active professional practices are frequently faulted for not having enough peer reviewed work, or for failing to make a scholarly contribution to the field. Faculty without grant-funded projects are often told they must secure them, yet designers who work collaboratively with faculty from other programs on grant-funded projects are often told that the nature and significance of their own contribution is unclear.

For design faculty, then, the P&T process can feel like a game of Whack-A-Mole: the target is seldom clearly visible, and it always seems to be moving. For those evaluating designers’ dossiers, the P&T process is also an exercise in frustration: the expectations for promotion are seldom made clear to evaluators, either, and many understandably struggle to grasp the significance of the minimalist entries on designers’ elegantly formatted CVs.

Surely these challenges are surmountable. But since the devil is always in the details, this session showcases short (ten- to twelve-minute) presentations that describe practices and policies—no matter how modest—that the speakers or their institutions have successfully adopted to address challenges that design faculty—and their well meaning colleagues—routinely face during the P&T process.

Assembling a Mexican Past

Delia A. Cosentino, DePaul University and Barbara E. Mundy,
Email Address(s):
dcosent1@depaul.edu
mundy@fordham.edu

More than any other nation in the Americas, Mexico has confronted the enduring artistic legacy of past eras--be they Zapotec sculptures unearthed in Oaxaca, sorrowing Virgins in side chapels of Baroque churches, or Porfirian-era public monuments--and from this has built narratives about the past. The selection and sequence takes on particular pressure during anniversaries--favored opportunities to think about the shape of time past. Given that the year 2020 marks a set of Mexican anniversaries-- the years 1520 (Spanish-Aztec War), 1820 (Independence), and 1920 (Revolution), we invite papers that examine how Greater Mexico's past has been configured and reconfigured over time through specific assemblages of and/or within objects and artworks. In seeking papers that address a diversity of subject matters and moments across time, we invite reflection on these questions: How do choices of such assemblages by artists, scholars, leaders, and/or patrons reflect and reshape the politics of a given moment? What is the relation between archeological assemblage and art historical narrative? What is the role of the context [or frame]--be it tomb, church, home, or museum--on Mexico's assembled past?

Beyond the Tropics: Art and Visual Culture to and from the Caribbean

Maite Barragan, Albright College and Vanesa Rodriguez-Galindo, Florida International University
Email Address(s):
maitebarragan@gmail.com
vanesa.rodriguezgalindo@sasalumni.net

Since the fifteenth century, the Caribbean has been a site of confluence, exchange and circulation. As debates regarding the independence of Spanish, French, British, and Dutch territories spread throughout the nineteenth century, it became increasingly important for locals to consider the ways in which the autochthonous and new national cultures contested, assimilated, or related to that of the metropole. Fine art and exhibitions, along with mass media including magazines, photographs, cinema, and other printed images were central to the formation of divergent definitions of the nascent independent and regional identities.

This panel seeks papers that examine the visual culture of the Caribbean as a nexus point within transnational networks of communication during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are especially interested in papers that address the role of images in the intersections between the global and local, or ‘glocal,’ and that explore the new ways of looking generated at the juncture of metropole and Caribbean. We welcome presentations that respond to an array of questions, including: How did images represent the local and transnational Caribbean identities or contest ideas of national boundaries, of both colonial and of recently created nations? How did the visual culture challenge or renegotiate the dichotomies of colonized/colonizer, resistance/assimilation, periphery/center? How were notions of the local, national, and cosmopolitan renegotiated in light of the mass-produced image? What meanings did reproduced images from capitals or from the peripheries acquire in local contexts, unofficial networks, or private spaces?

Black Artists in the Early Modern Americas

Rachel A Zimmerman, Colorado State University - Pueblo
Email Address(s):
rachelz@udel.edu

People of African descent played a significant role in artistic production in the Americas in the early modern period. Their work ranged from personal creations to public commissions; their positions ranged from enslaved assistants in artists’ workshops to celebrated master artists. Despite their contributions to visual and material culture, black artists working in the Americas in this period have received relatively little scholarly attention. Furthermore, the few individuals to whom monographs and exhibitions have been dedicated are scarcely known outside the regions where they worked.

This panel explores art-making by individuals of African descent throughout North and South America. Defining artistic production broadly and considering a wide geographic expanse elucidates parallels and divergences in these artists’ experiences. The artists had varying relationships with African cultures, indigenous peoples, religious, political, and commercial institutions, and lived in regions subject to distinct European cultures. Within these diverse contexts, black artists needed to navigate the complexities of creating within dominant cultures that viewed them as biologically destined for manual labor but largely incapable of intellectual labor. Even when born free, legal and social norms often restricted access to education, resources, and patronage. As a result, the herculean efforts necessary to acquire materials, develop skills, and produce art objects in the face of such obstacles were rarely acknowledged in their lifetimes.

Buildings in Bloom: Foliage and Architecture in the Global Middle Ages
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: International Center of Medieval Art

Meg Bernstein, University of California, Los Angeles and Emogene Cataldo, Columbia University
Email Address(s):
megbernstein@ucla.edu
emogene.cataldo@gmail.com

This panel seeks to explore foliate forms in a cross-cultural context across geographies and cultural traditions from roughly 300 to 1500 CE. Foliate forms can be found in many types of buildings from the medieval period, displayed in prominent locations or hidden from the casual viewer’s gaze. From the Gothic cathedrals of western Europe to the Hindu temples of south Asia, builders and artisans filled their structures with flowers, leaves, fruits, and vines. These organic interventions took many forms and adorned architectonic elements in sometimes unexpected ways. They were also executed in a variety of media: sculpture, glass, mosaic, ceramics, and painting. The study of foliate forms has the potential to enliven discussions of artistic production and authorship in medieval architecture. A generation of new scholarship has richly re-integrated the decorative into architectural discourse; vegetal forms need not be filed neatly under “architecture” or “decoration,” as foliage often occupies a liminal space that defies such categorization. Furthermore, the ecological turn has reinvigorated debates concerning liveliness, between-ness, and nature in art, and this research presents a promising opportunity to apply new thinking to previously overlooked aspects of medieval monuments on a global scale while examining one of the most fundamental relationships in the history of architecture, that of nature and the built environment.

Critical and Liberatory Pedagogies in African American Art

Melanee C Harvey, Howard University and Julia Elizabeth Neal,
Email Address(s):
melcharv@gmail.com
jeneal@utexas.edu

On the thirtieth anniversary of bell hooks’s Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990), a significant text on cultural criticism and the visual arts, this panel explores the role of critical and liberatory pedagogy within ongoing interdisciplinary reassessments of Black artistic practices. According to hooks, critical and liberatory pedagogies concern “habits of being” for decolonizing knowledge and promoting “the insurrection of subjugated knowledge.” In light of vast intellectual and curatorial work since 1990, in what ways do pedagogies of African American art participate in, problematize, or reaffirm, the space for independent thought? Drawing upon the field’s heterogeneity, we seek papers that address this question by probing ways of teaching and learning African American Art.

The goal is to examine how critical and liberatory pedagogies perform important epistemological work for students and scholars. How do archives and the digital humanities enrich coursework and object study? How might deconstructive analysis produce additional modes of criticality in the wake of recent publications and museum surveys? Although Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey have described teaching as perfunctorily “performing the work of the university” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013), these scholarly investigations will illuminate pedagogical strategies for resistance, liberation, or even self-critique.

Hidden Realities: Abstract Art from Latin American Women Artists

Mariola V. Alvarez, Temple University and Ana M. Franco, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota Colombia
Email Address(s):
mariolavalvarez@gmail.com
anfranco@uniandes.edu.co

Women artists from Latin America have recently received a great deal of attention as a result of exhibitions across the hemisphere. A notable example is Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 originally held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2017). The exhibition and its catalogue encompass a wide range of contemporary artistic practices among Latin American women artists, focusing on the ‘politics of the body’ and conceptualist approaches to art. Female abstract artists, however, did not occupy a significant place within this narrative. This panel aims to broaden our understanding of the contribution and role of women artists from Latin America to the development of abstract art in the twentieth century. Though current scholarship has emphasized the years after the Second World War, this panel examines the production of art across the twentieth-century and into the contemporary moment. Despite the inclusion of a few women abstract artists in recent Latin American art history we seek to study the full breadth of the experience of self-identified women within a largely masculine art world and the ways they carved out their creative practices. Moreover, we are looking for papers that address the way gender and sexuality, along with multiple intersecting identities, intervened in the production of abstract art by women artists, as well as with its critical reception and analysis. Abstraction offers a formalist freedom from social conventions therefore hiding possibly radical ways to be a woman artist.

Market Data: Beyond Prices and Provenance
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: International Art Market Studies

Diana Seave Greenwald, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Kim Oosterlinck, Université libre de Bruxelles
Email Address(s):
dsgreenwald@gmail.com
koosterl@ulb.ac.be

When studying the art market or provenance, scholars consult numerous data sources: auction catalogues, historic exhibition catalogues, museum inventories, etc. Often, the end-goal of this consultation is to trace a single artwork’s history or track price movements for a given group of works. This session will feature the work of scholars who use these same data sources in order to answer questions beyond determining prices or provenance. Data culled from the same catalogs and inventories can also be used to examine art historical trends over the long run. For example, can we trace the mix of genres shown in different exhibition venues during the nineteenth century? Is it possible to graph museums’ accession and deaccession patterns or measure the number of women artists or artists of color in public collections? Ultimately, the aim of this session is to demonstrate that the data integral to the study of price patterns or provenance can also provide useful quantitative insights into a wide range of research questions in the history of art.

Materiality & Mediums in 19th century Art: Matters of Substance

Katherine E. Manthorne, City University of New York
Email Address(s):
kmanthorne@gc.cuny.edu

The 19^th century witnessed an explosion of mediums and materials with which artists could creatively engage. The age was bracketed by the emergence of the new media of photography near the beginning of the century and moving pictures at its end. There was a heightened interest in paper as the stratum for artworks. Pastels, watercolors and a variety of printmaking techniques began to occupy a more prominent place in exhibitions and the marketplace. Alongside marble or bronze sculpture new substances proliferated, from plaster or parian (bisque porcelain) for inexpensive multiples to photosculpture, a process using photography to produce a small statuette. Paint technology was being revolutionized, as tube paints and a vast range of new colors become available, while Japanese paper, carved wood from India and beads from Africa were appropriated by artists in the West. As artworks became increasingly mobile, how did the their materials -- oil paint, shells, paper or stone – shift in meaning as their migrate between contexts? What does the increased popularity of trompe l’oeil painting -- in which the artist deploys one material pretending to be another – tell us about cultural values? Papers might also address cross-disciplinary questions including art history’s relation to material culture, or insights an art historian can gain from collaboration with conservationists. Ultimately we are pondering whether, by turning our attention to the materiality of the art object, we can gain new insights into their meaning(s).

Past & Present: Britain and the Social History of Art
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of British Art

Meredith J. Gamer, Columbia University and Esther Alice Chadwick, Courtauld Institute of Art
Email Address(s):
mg3704@columbia.edu
esther.chadwick@courtauld.ac.uk

What’s British about the social history of art? This panel joins ongoing conversations about what the social history of art is and what its stakes might be for us today. Specifically, it takes a “localized” approach to this model of art history as it developed in and out of Britain and its former colonial territories. Whether of an “activist” Marxist or more general “art and society” cast (Clunas 1996), it is striking that key protagonists of the social history of art—from Hauser, Antal, and Klingender to Baxandall, Clark, and Pollock—were born, trained, or based in the UK. At the same time, the social history of art has been a dominant frame adopted by historians of British art itself, beginning with field-defining studies of landscape painting by John Barrell, David Solkin, and Ann Bermingham. How do we account for the strength of this distinctive art historical mode in Britain? Has it received peculiarly “British” inflections? What impact has it had on the study of British art and on the writing of art history more broadly, in Britain and elsewhere? What possibilities has it generated? What others has it foreclosed? Topics could include, but are not limited to: histories of émigré and expatriate scholars; institutional, public, and popular histories; the relationship with feminist, postcolonial, and/or visual studies approaches; the social history of art in and after recent turns to empire and the global.

The Form of the Sketch/The Sketch in All Its Forms
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Historians of 19th-Century Art

Nancy E. Locke, Pennsylvania State University
Email Address(s):
nel3@psu.edu

From the Romantics to the Impressionists, nineteenth-century artists increasingly valued the sketch, or the qualities of the sketch. What was the nature of the sketch, however? Was it revealed in the connection it held to the artist’s hand and to some elusive interiority or authentic self? Was its essence temporal—having to do with quickness or instantaneity—or spatial, having to do with its verification of eyewitness realism, especially in locales far removed from art world centers? Was the sketch primarily material or performative?

This session will explore the range of possibilities in and around the sketch in the nineteenth century: the preparatory sketch, the académie, amateur drawing, various kinds of sketches such as the ébauche, the étude, the croquis, the pochade, or the sculptural maquette; the materiality of the sketch; the origins or aesthetics of the sketch (the picturesque; plein-air landscape; studio practice); translations of the sketch into other media such as lithography and photography; the sketch in the academic concours; the condition of the sketch as a new ideal for oil painting. The sketch could be the form of painting or drawing most engaged with the artist’s surroundings; alternatively, it could be the key to what Baudelaire called “an intense effort of memory that evokes and calls back to life.” In addition to presenting case studies, papers might explore the extent to which the sketch always pointed outside itself—to a finished work or series—or became an ideal or an end in itself.

The Legacy of Jack Burnham on Video Game Art and Emerging New Media

Tiffany Funk, University of Illinois at Chicago and Charles S Evans, DePauw University
Email Address(s):
tiffany.a.funk@gmail.com
chazevans@depauw.edu

As a tribute to the life and legacy of Jack Burnham, who passed away in 2019, this panel will focus on the proposals found in Burnham's theory that are currently exercised and expanded upon by contemporary new media artists and curators. Originally proposed in 1968, the Burnham's concept of "systems esthetics" remains a highly instructive model for technology-enabled artwork that considers the cybernetic relationship between objects and their viewer/users, as well as a widely applicable framework for understanding late-capitalist techno-culture more generally. Currently, practitioners of interactive, digital art and artists engaging in video game production as a part of their studio practice function as a 21st Century illustration of Burnham's theory of systems esthetics. In addition, Burnham's radical, systems-based curatorial practices find parallels in the current mainstreaming of incorporating interactive art and video games into gallery contexts; whether it is established cultural intuitions who are experimenting with collecting video games or new organizations built around the idea of supporting video game art specifically, the notion of exhibiting in a way that attends to a system dynamically relating viewer and artwork is becoming more commonplace across gallery practices. The comparison between new curatorial proposals centered around video game art and Burnham’s notorious, yet landmark 1970 Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York is clarifying to determine what challenges have been solved in fitting interactive artwork into gallery spaces, and what challenges remain intact fifty years after.

What Can Art Say about Extinction?

Lily Woodruff, Michigan State University and Brianne Cohen, University of Colorado, Boulder
Email Address(s):
woodru56@msu.edu
brianne.cohen@colorado.edu

Extinction of plant and animal species was discovered at the end of the 1700s even as its causes continued to be debated for centuries. Today, we are in the midst of a massive loss of biodiversity caused by human activities that include global warming, the destruction of habitats, and the slaughter of animals for reasons ranging from convenience to the market in exotic species. Not all groups are equally responsible, however, as extinction is driven by the development and consumer activities of the wealthy, while traditional ways of life are alternatively scapegoated and jeopardized. Emerging from the animal turn, recent publications on extinction have taken interdisciplinary approaches that multiply the stories that can be told in the face of great loss. This panel seeks to address this topic from across its history, and from diverse cultural perspectives. We aim to understand the ways that art and visual culture have reflected on and processed species loss in forms ranging from scientific illustration, to eco art, video, and protest. How does visual production allow us to understand the cultural, political, and economic causes of extinction, and conversely of conservation? Can it remediate the harm done by colonial exploitation? Do artistic practices provide an opportunity to conceptualize animal and plant subjectivity in a way that promotes human understanding of our ecological interdependence? How do they provide models for envisioning temporal scales of generational loss, the traumas of cataclysm and of slow violence, or investments in long-term sustainability?

Whose Public? Addressing the Gender Imbalance in Public Art

Sierra Rooney, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Email Address(s):
r.sierra.rooney@gmail.com

Public art has long been the province of men, as its creators, its patrons, and, most visibly, its subjects. When women did appear in public art, they were most often represented as symbolic, allegorical characters rather than real-life women. However, the recent movement to remove Confederate Monuments and the rise of the #MeToo movement have led to a widespread reconsideration of who is and is not represented in our public landscapes. These social movements have begun to tip the balance back in favor of women, by engaging governments, public art organizations, and artists in imagining new ways of ameliorating the gender imbalance. They have begun to draw upon a diversity of practices, ranging from street art and public performances to traditional portrait statuary. This session considers the historical dearth of women in public art, and also past and current efforts to rebalance that gender representation, by inviting papers addressing innovative approaches to the subject through case studies, historicized investigations and theoretical arguments. Transnational and intersectional perspectives are highly encouraged, as are proposals from public art practitioners, commissioners, artists, and curators. This panel aims to advance the intersecting discourses of public art and gender by highlighting the evolving ways in which visual representations of women have been incorporated into our increasingly contested public sphere.

Women and Voter Suppression: A Roundtable Discussion
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Women in the Arts

Sally Deskins, West Virginia University and Liz Kim, Texas Woman's University
Email Address(s):
sbdeskins@mail.wvu.edu
e27kim@gmail.com

This session will consider how artists and scholars have explored voter suppression as a subject matter across historical and cultural boundaries with a view toward examining the present. In the US, voter suppression targets particularly women who are black, immigrant, elderly, young, low-income and disabled, keeping them from the polls. Since 2010, 25 states have placed new restrictions that make the exercise of fundamental voting rights harder. This change has been exacerbated by the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a key provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act enabling states to institute discriminatory voting laws. The legacy of Jim Crow laws persists through these recent shifts in policy, while disproportionally affecting growing voter groups such as Latino/a voters in the US. In these political times, historical lessons can be drawn from the past, in the ways women have collectively fought against political silencing. Our roundtable panelists will address and illuminate how artists and activists work and have worked creatively to resist and fight voter suppression for women, as well as reflect on broader political suppression issues for women voters. From the Chicana feminist art of the 1970s, to the imagery of the revolutionary women of the Black Power Movement, to public art interventions in the Trump era, this session aims to take a broad and reflective approach to this politically urgent topic.

Notes on Drag: from Subculture to Pop culture, Drag and the Politics of Performance

Leah Werier, Columbia University
Email Address(s):
lw2547@columbia.edu

In recent decades, drag has transformed from a queer subcultural practice into a mainstream pop culture phenomenon. Drag queens shante and sashay on mainstream reality TV shows, and have captivated curators, inspiring the 2018 exhibition, Drag: Self Portrait and the Body Politic at the Hayward Gallery. Camp, a word long tied to queer subculture, and especially to drag, is the theme for the MET’s 2019 exhibition and accompanying gala, Camp: Notes on Fashion, paying homage to Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (1964).

What happens when drag moves from the margins to the mainstream? As contemporary drag performance venues shift from gay nightclubs and bars, into sold-out theaters, this session seeks to mine queer histories to elucidate the multiple and contradictory impulses and meanings of performative acts of gender impersonation. This panel surveys how drag kings, queens, and other artists have engaged with performative acts of gender deviance as a form of resistance, and in particular explores how drag, and camp aesthetics, can function as a site for subversion and critique of gender norms, a challenge to racial discrimination, and as an anti-colonial practice. This session welcomes artists as well as art historians to submit proposals. This session invites research which considers the intersections of gender, queerness, class, race, and dis/ability.

Appreciating Creativity in Art History Instruction

Alysha Friesen Meloche, Drexel University and Jen Katz,
Email Address(s):
albrfrie@yahoo.com
jlk333@drexel.edu

Creativity is an essential feature of making art by producing novel iterations of established forms of art. At a time when the field of art history is trying to determine what it wants students to gain from classes, creativity should be key. This session seeks to bring together examples of teaching Creativity Integrated Art History (Cr-IAH). In Cri-IAH design thinking activities “students are taught about creativity and are given opportunities to foster everyday creative skills and practices” (Meloche & Katz-Buonincontro, 2018). Proposals are sought that feature examples of teaching creativity and design thinking in an art history classroom through activities. Proposed lesson examples may also use principles of Cr-IAH as a framework for understanding how a particular artwork was created. For example, lessons can explain how eminently famous creative individuals became part of art history, or lessons may challenge how that primacy has typically favored Western perspectives or neglected female artists and/or artists of color. Additionally, proposed lessons may shift the discussion of eminent Big-C creativity to one that explains pragmatically how an artwork was created. Everyday, Little-C approaches to creativity include skills such as collaboration and complex problem solving skills like those found in design thinking, such as empathy, ideation, prototyping, and iteration. The session will help advance dialogue on how to amplify creativity in art history instruction and allow for the sharing of examples.

Defining Open Access
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Intellectual Property

Anne Collins Goodyear,
Email Address(s):
agoodyear@bowdoin.edu

With the rapid proliferation of digital resources, the question of what is meant by “open access” has become increasingly pressing. “Open source” software has helped to encourage the development of new digital resources, particularly among academics and members of the creative community. But do hidden pitfalls exist given the very flexibility of the infrastructure such software is intended to facilitate? To what degree does “open access” correlate to material that has entered the public domain? And to what degree can it be conferred by licenses, such as those provided by Creative Commons, and especially a “CC0” license? The release of images by museums has served scholars and the general public well, but just how “open” is access to reproductions, and what restrictions (including legal, professional, and ethical standards) may persist concerning use and adaptation of those reproductions? What steps are appropriate to take to describe and inform users of such limitations and where does or should responsibility for such notification lie? This panel seeks to address how “openness” is defined and enabled with an eye to identifying best practices and informational resources for those seeking to navigate this complex terrain. The panel welcomes papers on open access, APIs, publishing, compatibility across platforms, and other applications of fair use in digital image “openness.” We welcome papers across geographic context and from different perspectives, including that of artists, archivists, designers, technologists, lawyers, librarians, scholars, publishers, and museum professionals.

Lost in Translation: Early Modern Global Art History and the Digital Humanities
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Digital Art History Society

Meredith J. Gill, University of Maryland and Paul B. Jaskot, Duke University
Email Address(s):
mgill@umd.edu
paul.jaskot@duke.edu

This session seeks to draw on two current art historical issues: 1) that many leading digital art historical projects are centered on examples from the early modern world; and 2) that there is a widespread need across art historical fields to look to strong exemplars to help model the inevitable acts of translation between and across humanistic and computational scholarship. This panel seeks papers that address any aspect of digital humanities work on an early modern topic. From Latin America to East Asia, from the Mediterranean basin to the Black Atlantic, outstanding work has been done in bringing data-driven methods to bear on art historical evidence. How have art historians negotiated the intellectual world of “technologists,” and do we have successful examples of new “languages” and other outcomes collaboratively forged by art historians and technologists? What have computational scholars found interesting or challenging in working with art historical datasets and questions? And, more broadly, why is the early modern world such a fecund area for art historical and computational discovery? In proposing these questions, we particularly encourage submissions from collaborative presenters and/or about collaborative projects that represent both digital and humanities’ perspectives. Our goal is to invite papers engaging crucial questions in early modern art histories—thus appealing to a large area of CAA interest—and papers that, in the process, also address the incorporation of computational methods. Proposals that emphasize the communication (or failure of communication) between digital and humanities’ approaches are especially welcome.

Radical women: the construction of Latin American women artists through exhibitions

Elize Mazadiego, University of Amsterdam and Eve Kalyva,
Email Address(s):
emmazadiego@gmail.com
e.m.kalyva@gmail.com

In 2017, the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 opened at the Hammer Museum as part of Getty’s PST initiative: LA/LA. It presented works by 120 women artists active in Latin America and the United States, claiming to be the "first survey of radical and feminist art practices in Latin America and among Latina artists in the United States."

Working back from this exhibition, this panel seeks to examine the representation and construction of “Latin America”, “Latin American art” and more specifically “Latin American women” through exhibition histories. In the case of Radical Women, curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta focused on the heterogeneity of postwar feminist artistic practices, adding specificity to the topic of global feminisms in art while countering the dominant narrative of Western and of particularly U.S. feminism.

This panel invites discussion on how the framework of feminism can help explore, counter, complicate and (re)construct Latin American identities and art histories. What particular gaps in knowledge and access to it do shows that focus on women artists aim to fill, and how do they upset canonical readings of (Western) art history? What nuances arise from using the framework of feminism, and what alternative frames of reference and readings of Latin American women have become available? Since new perspectives should ideally avoid the pitfalls of the past, how can exhibitions negotiate and resist the objectification of genders and identities? How is critical dialogue reflected in exhibition design and public engagement, and how does curatorial research inform scholarship?

The Institution as Collector
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society for the History of Collecting

Elizabeth A. Pergam, Society for the History of Collecting and Adriana Turpin, Society for the History of Collecting
Email Address(s):
eapergam@gmail.com
adrianaturpin@gmail.com

Both the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrate their 150^th anniversaries in 2020. Yet these two institutions began in very different ways. While the Boston museum was an outgrowth of that city’s Athenaeum, with an already extensive collection of works of art, New York’s museum was founded without a single object in its collection. These examples are a starting point to consider the ways in which museums act as collectors. The history of collecting is more usually positioned as driven by individuals or families. While house museums have garnered attention as expressions of their founders’ biographies and interests, municipal or encyclopedic museums have not in a comprehensive way. The papers in our session explore the means by which a museum's identity is formed and expanded through its collections, as well as how that identity is understood and responded to by donors and dealers alike.

The Modernist Myth of the Original Object

Sophia Maxine Farmer, The Getty Research Institute and Giovanni Casini, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Email Address(s):
sophia2118@gmail.com
giovanni.casini@metmuseum.org

Since Rosalind Krauss published her seminal essay “The originality of the avant-garde” in 1986, the cult-like veneration of the supposed original object has been increasingly exposed as a myth. Created by a famous artistic personality, a so-called genius, the original object’s mythological quality is centered on the idea of cherished uniqueness. Modern artists who challenge or subvert this concept through seriality, reproduction, and repetition often struggle to find a place in the historical narrative. Take for example, the case of Giorgio de Chirico. Even as a renowned modernist, de Chirico’s later work was rejected by the avant-garde. In the 1920s, de Chirico began to create verifalsi (true-fakes), copying and backdating his later paintings to his famed Metaphysical period (1910-1919). These works—imitating the style and subject of his earlier paintings—complicate how de Chirico’s oeuvre is viewed. De Chirico’s story reminds us that the original constitutes more than mere materiality, because its power lies in its context. Our understanding and valuation of the original object is not just predicated on the significance of its creator but its rarity and distinctiveness. This session seeks to address the modernist myth of the original object, with topics including but not limited to: the relationship between materiality and concept; the production of forgeries; the use of reproduction and seriality; the art market and economics; the politics of the originality/repetition dichotomy; the demystification of the artist as romantic genius; the redefinition of the concept of avant-garde; and broader issues about the nature of objects.

Women in a World Designed by Men
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Design

Chelsea Bruner, Ringling College of Art + Design
Email Address(s):
chelsea.bruner@gmail.com

Architecture's “woman problem” has received increased attention over the past few years. While other historically male-dominated professions like law, medicine, and finance have made progress towards diversity in the profession and in leadership positions, architectural practice largely remains a man’s world. This has been examined in popular and industry publications, on the TED talk circuit—architect John Cary’s “How Architecture Can Create Dignity for All” given at TEDWomen 2017 has been viewed more than one million times—and in a 2016 study put out by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), which highlighted the "challenges" faced by both women and people of color in the profession. The AIA study noted consensus on the under-representation of minorities in the field, but a lack of agreement on gender: “Women strongly believe that there is not gender equity in the industry, but men are divided on the issue.” Clearly, much still needs to be done to change perceptions of the real and well-documented inequities within the design professions, including and beyond architecture.

Taking the under-representation of women in professional practice as a starting point, this session seeks papers that focus on the structure of design as a profession, including educational institutions and offices, and particularly on how the gender makeup of the profession is then reflected in designed-in sexism of the objects and spaces that comprise the built environment. Papers that propose feminist alternatives to the masculinist framework will also be considered.

knowledges: artistic practice as method
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities

Joey Orr, University of Kansas
Email Address(s):
joeyorr@ku.edu

This panel explores artistic practice as a method of knowledge production. The panel’s title, “knowledges,” is lowercase and plural to underscore that knowledge is produced on multiple registers, from seminar spaces to post-studio practices and the daily negotiations and politics of everyday life. When forms of knowledge go unexamined, however, their historical and political perspectives can get smuggled in and naturalized. Academic forms are not neutral vessels and should, therefore, be the subject of critical evaluation as much as content. Since artists are trained from the outset to be critical of form, they might have something to offer researchers in more discrete disciplines and fields. This first part of a two-part panel looks specifically at artistic practices in pedagogy, photography, artist writing, and activism.

C.S. Peirce and Art History

Ashley Elizabeth Lazevnick, and Kimia Rose Shahi, Princeton University
Email Address(s):
alazevnick@gmail.com
kshahi@princeton.edu

Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) has been an influential figure across numerous branches of modern intellectual history. With rare exceptions, applications of Peirce’s thought within the field of art history have drawn upon his pioneering work in semiotics: the study of signs and symbols, their use and interpretation. Yet the elegance of Peirce’s famous triad of the sign, icon-index-symbol, has eclipsed the true breadth and complexity of his interests as well as the eccentricity of his ideas. Among other pursuits, for example, Peirce contributed to the advancement of geodesy at the United States Coast Survey. His studies of logic in relation to electronic circuits foreshadowed the development of modern digital computation. He also authored thousands of dictionary entries and invented the philosophy known as Pragmatism.

Art history is ripe for an expanded consideration or Peirce’s significance, especially in light of renewed scholarly interest in relationships between truth and visual representation, forms of mediation, and the political and ethical legacy of Pragmatism in the U.S. and beyond. This panel seeks to offer new avenues for exploring relationships between Peirce’s ideas and art and visual culture. We welcome papers that focus on Peirce’s contributions to knowledge during his lifetime, as well as those that consider his reception in the 20th and 21st centuries, including his influence on modes of critical analysis across a range of fields. Papers may address any aspect of Peirce’s work, including quantitative analysis, semiotics, linguistics, cartography, Pragmatism, neo-Pragmatism, theories of photography, and the index/indexicality.

Crafting knowledges: Approaches Through Botany, Climate, and Multispecies Interactions

Joey Orr, University of Kansas
Email Address(s):
joeyorr@ku.edu

This panel explores artistic practice as a method of knowledge production. The panel’s title, “knowledges,” is lowercase and plural to underscore that knowledge is produced on multiple registers, from seminar spaces to post-studio practices and the daily negotiations and politics of everyday life. When forms of knowledge go unexamined, however, their historical and political perspectives can get smuggled in and naturalized. Academic forms are not neutral vessels and should, therefore, be the subject of critical evaluation as much as content. Since artists are trained from the outset to be critical of form, they might have something to offer researchers in more discrete disciplines and fields. This second part of a two-part panel looks specifically at artistic practices engaged with botany, climate, and multispecies interactions.

Designing Scholarship: Communication Design and Academic Journal Publishing Practices

Amy Papaelias, SUNY New Paltz and Jessica Barness, Kent State University
Email Address(s):
papaelia@newpaltz.edu
jbarness@kent.edu

The visual design traditions of academic journals have endured since the late seventeenth century, when Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Sçavans began publication. Late nineteenth century publishing innovations, including stereotype printing, steam powered printing presses, and cheaper forms of paper and binding, allowed for a rapid growth of scholarly journals. In the late twentieth century, desktop publishing revolutionized and democratized the processes for reproducing images, creating page layouts, and the production of periodicals. More recently, digital publishing expanded ways of accessing, writing, and reading journals. The design of scholarship influences its credibility, comprehension, and accessibility. Printing and digital technologies, combined with visual communication design, play critical roles in establishing the conventions and future possibilities of scholarly publishing, yet limited research exists on this subject.

This session solicits presentations on the design of academic journals and welcomes contributions from designers, publishers, scholars, and editors. Selected papers will investigate the past, present, and future of communication design and journal publishing. Questions that may be addressed include: What are some examples (historical or present-day) of successful partnerships between designers, editors, and journal publishers? What role does design play in the tension between scholarly goals to openly share knowledge with the financial pressures of for-profit academic publishing? What is gained or lost in the digital production and templatization of journals? Where are design innovations happening in born-digital journals, open access models, and experimental publishing platforms? How can communication design amplify scholarly publication in emerging disciplines?

Empire Building and Resistance: Art and Colonialism in the Pacific Islands

Sascha T. Scott, Syracuse University and Shana Klein, Kent State University
Email Address(s):
sscott04@syr.edu
sklein18@kent.edu

"Empire Building and Resistance: Art and Colonialism in the Pacific Islands."

Keywords: Art, Empire, Pacific, Race, Indigeneity, Resistance

Pacific Islands that have been conquered and annexed by the United States are vital sites for interrogating the forces of colonization—political, economic, scientific, and cultural—and responses to them. This panel seeks proposals that examine the visual and material culture of the Pacific with an emphasis on how images and objects endorse or resist the United States’ mission of expansion and exploitation. Papers might address how diverse media, including paintings, advertisements, photographs, anthropological texts, tourist ephemera, and films, have served the colonial agendas of the U.S. government and American businesses; how objects and images work to resist to colonial powers and racial prejudices; and/or how visual and material culture trigger larger conversations about Indigenous rights and culture, racial plurality, and the prohibition or influx of immigrants in the Pacific. Representations of and objects produced in the Pacific offer insights into the complexities of American empire building and highlight ways in which U.S. interventions have been supported or rejected through visual and material expressions.

From the Ground Up: Geology, Mineralogy, and Materiality in Art and Design

Antonia Behan, and Julie Bellemare,
Email Address(s):
antonia.behan@bgc.bard.edu
julie.bellemare@bgc.bard.edu

The workers dig and cut to get some mountain bones,
A labor of many long days.
A thousand wonderful scenes come to life from the stone;
How ignorant can people be not to see nature’s art.¹

In words that could equally have been uttered by John Ruskin in the nineteenth century, eleventh-century Chinese scholar Ouyang Xiu captures the complex connections between geology, physical labor, and aesthetic enjoyment. Building on the material turn in art history, this panel responds to broader scholarly interests in the agency of matter. We posit that a focus on geological substances can challenge art-historical and museological conventions; for instance, whereas stone and metal are often considered distinct mediums, mineral and metal ores share certain characteristics that may undercut common artistic taxonomies. We invite submissions of papers that explore historical intersections between geological materials and the arts across historical periods and cultural contexts, with a particular interest in decorative arts, craft, and design.

Themes and questions might include, among others: What cultural roles have stones, ores, or minerals played in specific times and places? How have artisans, designers, or manufacturers made use of geological materials or conceptualized their importance? What kinds of mediation have such materials (or objects made with them) performed? How might they resist or complicate binaries such as natural/artificial, organic/inorganic, or static/dynamic? And what can the histories of mining, geology, or the collection and display of rocks and minerals contribute to art and design history?

¹Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), excerpted from Kemin Hu, The Suyuan Stone Catalogue (Weatherhill:2002), 64.

Re-Assessing the Northern European Male Nude

Martha Hollander, Hofstra University and Lisa Rosenthal, Univ Of Illinois at Urbana-Champaig
Email Address(s):
martha.hollander@hofstra.edu
lrosenth@illinois.edu

Long understudied in early modern Northern art and visual culture, the male nude is attracting new kinds of scholarly attention. Theories of embodiment and performance, and the rise of masculinity studies, have all contributed to broadening the previous focus on issues particular to female nude in Northern art. Recent scholarship has focused on how the Northern male nude constructs notions of virtue, classical stability, pastoral beauty, and pathos across a range of media and functions including prints and drawings, drawing books, portraiture, history painting, and the emerging genre of male bathers.

Such new inquiry demonstrates a diversity of animating questions and interpretive methods for considering how the male nude produced significance for various audiences in the Netherlands. This panel aims to reassess the male nude in relation to artistic production and reception; early modern humanist, natural, and material knowledge; and classed systems of status and power, fashion and body ideals.

Papers can address issues including but not limited to: representing the body in studio pedagogy and practices; the represented male body as a medium of scientific knowledge; dress and contemporary practices of personal grooming; early modern debates about nudity and morality in art; the collecting and display of male nude figures in aspirational portraiture and classical allegories; the male nude as the site of identification and/or disavowal for the male artist; the social, political and religious semiotics of the male nude male reassessed by gender and sexuality studies; the male nude shaped by the cross-cultural dynamics of the global Netherlands.

Re-staging “Black”, 2020

Izabel Gass, and Lindsay Riordan, Yale University
Email Address(s):
izabel.gass@gmail.com
lrriordan@gmail.com

Re-staging “Black”, 2020

In 1967, ArtsCanada convened seven men for a one-hour telephone discussion on the multiple meanings of “black”:

"as spatial concept, symbol, paint quality; the socio-political implications of black; black as stasis, negation, nothingness and black as change,

impermanence and potentiality"

A debate ensued between Cecil Taylor, the only black discussant, and Ad Reinhardt. In a recent conversation with fellow artist Kerry James Marshall, Charles Gaines recounted their conflict and its continuing significance for contemporary art:

"For Reinhardt of course, the word ‘black’ referenced a universal idea because black and absence were for him trans-lingual...For Taylor, black was steeped in language; it couldn’t be considered except as a metaphor because of his experience of dealing with it politically. One idea that came out of this debate was that the term provoked a binary that ultimately placed constraints on our thinking: how the meaning of the term is informed by one’s experience. Even though Ad was making the argument that it was trans-linguistic, only a white person could entertain such a pure notion. The suggestion was that its racial connotation is irrelevant to ideas of art. Cecil found in Ad’s commentary the kind of ideological thinking that perpetuates racism."

Our session seeks to re-stage the 1967 roundtable discussion on “black”, with especial focus on the problematic raised by the Taylor-Reinhardt debate –– specifically, how the significance of “black” is informed by “white.” Practicing artists, curators, and critics especially welcome.

Recursion, Reflexivity, and Self-Referentiality in Ancient American Art

Claudia L. Brittenham, University of Chicago and Andrew Finegold, University of Illinois Chicago
Email Address(s):
brittenham@uchicago.edu
andrewfinegold@gmail.com

The panel invites investigations of moments when ancient American artists reflected on their own processes of artistic creation or on the nature of the objects they made. Such reflexive and self-referential expressions are visible in images of artists at work, representations of works of art, and works that draw attention to the conditions of their own making, dedication, or viewing. For example, Mary Frame has shown that the imagery woven into Andean textiles frequently derives from or emulates the underlying structures of the cloth, thereby reinforcing the primacy of its material properties and the conditions of its production. And David Stuart has demonstrated that a majority of Classic Maya inscriptions relate directly to the dedication or ownership of the monuments or objects on which they appear, thus marking them as participants within the social landscape. Because they point to the substance, specificity, and social being of the objects and spaces they embellish, the analysis of such self-referential invocations holds great potential as an aid for understanding the ways local ontologies and worldviews were materialized. We seek papers that address how specific instances of art or architecture from any part of the Pre-Columbian Americas drew attention to aspects of their own presentation, including, but not limited to, their materiality, production processes, placement, contexts of use, or conditions of viewership. Explorations of less obvious examples of self-referentiality are especially welcome, as are papers that engage with this topic through the lens of indigenous concepts and cosmologies.

The Collector and the Institution

Elizabeth A. Pergam, Society for the History of Collecting and Adriana Turpin, Society for the History of Collecting
Email Address(s):
eapergam@gmail.com
adrianaturpin@gmail.com

As a continuation of the afternoon’s “The Institution as Collector,” this session presents four case studies that explore the ways in which a bequest, donation, or loan enters a pre-existing institution, its impact on that museum, and the museum’s impact on that collection. Examples are drawn from the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the United States, Europe, and Israel. Legal protections, the role of trustees, and the works of art themselves shed light on the functions and responsibilities of the institution.

Women Artists under Patriarchy: Less Press, More Censorship, Less Space, Less Value, #MeToo
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Coalition of Women in the Arts Organization (CWAO)

Kyra Belan, Broward College
Email Address(s):
kyrabelan2013@gmail.com

This session, Women Artists under Patriarchy: Less Press, More Censorship, Less Space, Less Value, #Me Too will examine the experiences of female artists working under the rules of a patriarchal society. Because of their gender, women artists operate within a culture that exerts pressure and control over them to function and remain throughout their careers as second class individuals and this fact often affects and restricts their artistic practices. This includes but is not limited to the scale of the artworks created, the actual space allocated to the artist, and the amount of public exposure received from the media. Women also face limitations due to the lack of funding obtained through grants and awards. Perhaps the most limiting factor is that restrictions are placed on the subject matter that women can use and the resulting censorship of their artworks. The general public does not see the actual scope of the subjects that women embrace as opposed to the subjects they are allowed by the patriarchy to exhibit. The art establishment values art created by women much less than the art created by males, and this custom is reinforced by the general public’s lack of interest to collect women’s art. This issue is acerbated by the disproportionately small amount of works by women in the world’s museum collections. Due to the time limitations this session will touch upon some of these issues, allowing a glimpse into the current status of women in contemporary culture.

Needling Institutions: Artistic Interventions Exposing Museum Ethics

Jessica J. Stephenson, Kennesaw State University and Amanda H. Hellman, Emory University
Email Address(s):
jsteph55@kennesaw.edu
ahhellm@emory.edu

Hans Haacke’s installations from the 1970s called into question the relationship between museums and corporate sponsorship. From the 1980s onwards the Guerrilla Girls’ collective works raise questions regarding bias in museum representation. In 1992 Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society examined context and curatorial authority. Pippa Skotnes' 1996 curation-installation titled Miscast at the South African Museum in Cape Town, South Africa highlighted conditions under which objects may enter museum collections. More recently, Nan Goldin’s 2018 and ongoing artist-activist “die-ins” at the Met and other museums draw attention to museum acquisition policies and donor affiliations, but also call into question the voice of the artist within larger institutions to critically engage ethical and organizational practice. While curations and exhibitions are often the focus of discussion and research around ongoing discourse on ethics and museums, what of the role of artists? This panel seeks to consider the artist and their artistic interventions – acts or objects that mediate between institution and viewer, past and present - which play with, question, comment on, provoke, subvert and transform museum policy and practice. We invite papers that explore artworks, installations and performances as interventions within museum spaces, that situate them within broader historical contexts, that evaluate different approaches and their success or shortfalls from critical perspectives, and that look to the past, present or future of artistic interventions as shapers of ethical museum practice.

Art and Design Pedagogy: A Fresh Start with Drawing Exercise
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Mid-America College Art Association

Chung-Fan Chang, Mid America College Art Association and Ann Kim, Indiana University East
Email Address(s):
chungfanchang@gmail.com
annbkim@gmail.com

Drawing is essential to train one’s ability to retain knowledge by looking, and looking immediately engage one in a questioning or wondering way. Drawing is about appearance, and to encounter that by contemplating. It is also about learning the self and one’s interpretation and expression of the world. How do we continue engage students in a fresh approach of drawing and to stimulate inquisitiveness through drawing? This session welcome innovative drawing exercise from meditative process to digital manipulation, static to performative, traditional to site-specific, and beginning to advanced. Studio practice that engage innovate drawing process are welcome. How do we forester a learning community through drawing exercise with a mix of curiosity, drive, collaboration and humanity? How do we continue to push and redefine its boundary?

Crip Solidarity and Access Intimacy in the Arts: What Might Be Possible?
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Diversity Practices

Stefanie Snider, Kendall College of Art and Design and Aaminah Shakur,
Email Address(s):
snider.stefanie@gmail.com
irwinr@ferris.edu

Disabled queer of color activist Mia Mingus coined the term “access intimacy” to describe the feelings created when others understand and readily work within one’s access needs regarding illness and disability.[1] All too rare, Mingus notes, access intimacy can take place among disabled folks and/or between disabled and abled people, in a variety of spaces, and creates a sense of relief and community for people who typically face the insidiousness of ableism. Further, Mingus described “crip solidarity” as the feelings and connections manifested when someone resists ableist ideas and activities in favor of love and community; crip solidarity posits that life is better when we value disability in all its messy glory instead of attempting to conform to an ableist world.[2]

This session seeks to put Mingus’ ideas into action by asking arts professionals from all realms what might be possible were we to fully embrace access intimacy and crip solidarity. What could physical, conceptual, and ethical access intimacy and crip solidarity look like in a wide variety of arts spaces? How might universal design be physically and philosophically possible in the arts? What might happen were we to embrace disability justice as a foundation toward artistic equity and to build upon it to remake and revolutionize ideas of inclusion?

[1] Mia Mingus, “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link,” Leaving Evidence, May 5, 2011. Accessed March 13, 2019: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/

[2] Mia Mingus, “Wherever You Are is Where I Want to Be: Crip Solidarity,” Leaving Evidence, May 3, 2010. Accessed March 13, 2019: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/where-ever-you-are-is-where-i-want-to-be-crip-solidarity/

Design Intervention and Engagement: Design Incubation Colloquium 6.2
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Design Incubation

Heather Snyder Quinn, DePaul University and Nathan Matteson, DePaul University
Email Address(s):
hquinn2@cdm.depaul.edu
nmatteso@cdm.depaul.edu

There is a presumed canon of visual communication design, one that includes its history, theory, practice, and even the interpretation of its global impact. While it is convenient to take this canon at face value, there are alternative lenses through which we can view the field. In order to continue advancing the discipline in equitable ways, to be inclusive and engage with a variety of practitioners and users, it is important to consider a multitude of alternative viewpoints. Interventions in our attitudes happen in many ways—from envisioning how design alters the world, to methods we use to interpret design in new contexts. This panel will explore such critical interventions, uncovering new ways to re-engage with design education, design practice, and design communities.

Diversifying Diversity: Addressing Marginalized Global Communities through Design
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Design Studies Forum

Yelena McLane, Florida State University , Neeta Verma, University of Notre Dame and Audrey G Bennett, University of Michigan
Email Address(s):
ymclane@fsu.edu
nverma@nd.edu
audreygbennett@gmail.com

While design has often been understood by historians as capturing the aesthetic ethos of an era, it has played an even more compelling role shaping and defining ideologies and creating cultural shifts addressing the human condition. This humanitarian potential has shifted the historical, theoretical, and applied studies of design away from movements and styles to examining how design addresses deeper problems like inequity and marginalization. Yet, most design discourse is still focused on the western world. Design by and for marginalized communities in the global context falls to the periphery of mainstream design discourses from the late 20th century to present. How do we bring the seesaw of creative access back to its balanced state of inclusion and equity on a global scale? Focusing on humanitarian design echoes revolutionary movements including Arts and Crafts, Women’s Suffrage, 99 Occupy, and Black Lives Matter, each of which centered on issues of class, gender, and/or identity and concomitant disparities in political, economic, intellectual, and cultural resources. Addressing these challenges requires designers to traverse cultural boundaries delineated by disciplinary, ethnic/racial, geographic, generational, sexually-oriented, impaired, class- and gender-based differences among others. Amidst this complexity, designers must learn to cross global boundaries in order to create sustainable and humane solutions to contemporary problems, not only locally but worldwide. We invite proposals that extend the conversation about diversifying design to include global perspectives. The panel will comprise live and virtual presentations and culminate in a compendium disseminated via the CAA website along with publication in a journal.

The Challenges of Commissioning Memorials: Symbolic Actions, Political Pressures and Visual Literacy
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Public Art Dialogue

Harriet F. Senie, City College of New York, CUNY and Cher Krause Knight, Emerson College
Email Address(s):
hfsenie@gmail.com
cher_knight@emerson.edu

Since the events of Charlottesville, memorials have been a primary focus of local and national news, and public art historians have increasingly been called upon to serve on civic memorial commissions and selection panels. Based upon our experiences in New York and Boston, we have become increasingly aware of the problematics of practices that are often driven by symbolic actions, political pressures and visual literacy—or the lack thereof. Despite their significance memorials do not actually ameliorate the sociopolitical issues prompting the controversies that surround them, though these controversies can dramatically increase opportunities for civic engagement and advance social justice issues. Political pressures may stem from those in official positions of power as well as local individuals and community and special interest groups directly affected by or strongly supportive of these issues. Although visual literacy is crucial to interpreting visual forms in coherent ways or considering their impact on the public spaces in which they will be sited, such literacy is often in short supply among memorial selection committee members. Best practices are sorely needed in this ongoing enterprise, which shows no sign of abating in the current political climate; hopefully this panel may help jump-start their formation.

The Collector and Cultural Narratives

Julie Codell, Arizona State University
Email Address(s):
julie.codell@asu.edu

The Collector and Cultural Narratives

Julie Codell, Arizona State University

From the mid-19th century, a new kind of narrative about private collectors appeared in Europe and the US, e.g., Anna Jameson's Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries (1844), Gustav Waagen's Kunstwerke und Künstler in England und Paris (Berlin, 1837-1839), trans. Elizabeth Eastlake as The Treasures of Art in Great Britain (4 vols. London, 1854, 1857); M. J. Dumesnil's Histoire des plus célèbres amateurs (1853-1860); F. G. Stephens's 90 Athenaeum articles on British collectors (1873-87); Edward Strahan's (pseud. of Earl Shinn) The Art Treasures of America (1879-1882); and René Brimo's The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting (1938), among others. To Oscar E. Vázquez, "collectors and collections...are a creation of the modern era" with "increased attention to...the collector over the collected object" (Inventing the Art Collection 57-58). Attention to collectors began in the 18th century; by the 19th century, collectors became cultural icons and national figures. Many gave their collections to museums, shaping public taste and the canon. Panelists will examine the discourse around the cultural and national identity of the collector and consider such questions (but not limited to these): How did these narratives shape and revise collectors' images over time? Did narratives about collectors inflect notions of the modern? Of tradition? How were gender, class or national identity applied to collectors? Did narratives about collectors endorse cultural hierarchies? Were collectors tastemakers? public servants? cultural paradigms? How did collectors' perceived motives and desires affect their collections' meanings?

Women and Stand-Up Comedy: Rosalyn Drexler Meets Mrs. Maisel

Mona Hadler, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
Email Address(s):
hadlerm@aol.com

Women and Stand-Up Comedy: Rosalyn Drexler Meets Mrs. Maisel

The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a revolution in comedy and humor that presaged the politics and counterculture of the generation of revolt. At this very moment stand-up comics in the United States, from Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, to Mort Sahl, as well as the comedians of the British stage revue Beyond the Fringe, changed the face of comedy. They accomplished this shift in tandem chronologically with the rise of Pop Art and the growth of happenings and performative practices. R. Crumb has famously credited Lenny Bruce with giving him the courage to shift styles and freely express his perverse fantasies in his art. But what about the women? Who were the women comedians of the postwar era? Mrs Maisel invokes Joan Rivers, but what about Moms Mabley whom Rosalyn Drexler found “nasty in the best sense of the word.” Rivers too has had a following in the visual arts. Deborah Kass cites her as well as other Jewish comedians such as Totie Fields and Belle Barth as inspirational. Jo Anna Isaak and others have charted the “radical power of women’s laughter,” and this panel seeks to bring stand-up comedy into the mix. It presents papers on women comedians or artists inspired by them. While the panel will address postwar topics in the United States, it is not limited to that time frame or country. Broader discussions of the comedic or more targeted papers are included.

Biennialization and its counternarratives

Rafal Niemojewski, Biennial Foundation
Email Address(s):
caa@biennialfoundation.org

Art world professionals and scholars rarely indulge in the exercise of counting the art museums in the world. On the other hand, the latest estimate of the actual number of contemporary art biennials became a permanent feature of every conference paper or publication on the subject.

This session will investigate the underlying motivations behind this strange case of arithmomania. It will interrogate the discourse of biennialization, which has been dominating debates surrounding contemporary art biennials over the past decade. Biennialization has, particularly within Western academic and professional circles, become a prominent buzzword, conjuring a diversity of associations, connotations and attendant mythologies. One of the characteristics of this discourse is a habitual conflation of the epistemology of biennials with several essentially contested concepts – such as globalization, gentrification or activism – which often leads to association fallacies. The session attempts to identify the latter, as well as other underlying assumptions and the ways in which the arguments made about the biennialization may be flawed or inconsistent with actual developments occurring around the world.

The aim of this session, intended as a polemic, is to provide a selection of most prevalent – and often competing – narratives and viewpoints in order to better understand how arguments about the contemporary biennial are currently framed and illuminate potential, new approaches to the subject.

Curating on the Margins: Women and Curatorial Praxis

Anne K. Swartz, Savannah College Of Art Design
Email Address(s):
aswartz@scad.edu

Working as a successful curator requires pluck and determination, in addition to invention, knowledge, and creativity. It also requires access. Women in the field, particularly black, brown, and immigrant women, who seek out opportunities to conduct object research and make exhibitions must meet the linked challenges of demonstrating these qualities while surmounting individual and institutional racism, sexism, and xenophobia.

Until now, no convening of curators has privileged the voices of independent curators, especially representations of curators of color, LGBTQ curators, or disabled curators. Few standards for independent curators exist, aside from CAA’s guidelines for the “Hiring of Guests Curators by Museums” and the Association of Art Museum Curators’ sample letter. Thus, this panel brings together diverse curators at various stages in their careers to discuss the opportunities and limitations present in the field.

How do independent curators make connections and find resources? What institutional collaborations help? Which hinder? Is consulting a viable way to build relationships? Where may the existing system be entered into and innovated for increased alliances? Where are mentors who support advancement? How can peers support achievements? How might we balance the ecosystem between exhibition focus and public programming? What attention goes to community partnerships and engagement? How do independent curators build networks?

Framed and formatted as a conversation, this panel consists of independent curators at different stages of their professional careers, including seasoned participants and elders, about achieving success, variously defined, and overcoming difficulty. They will describe the ways they’ve consolidated or evolved curatorial practice(s).

Decolonising Design History
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Design History Society

Daniel J. Huppatz, Swinburne University and Megha Rajguru, University of Brighton
Email Address(s):
dhuppatz@swin.edu.au
M.Rajguru@brighton.ac.uk

Over the past two decades, the geographical spread of design history has become more inclusive of design from various parts of the world and practitioners beyond Europe and North America. While this represents some progress, it is only part of the promise of decolonial histories. The other part is a reassessment of historical methods and themes. Recent thinking on decolonising design has argued for a shift from the production of universalising narratives towards pluriversality (Arturo Escobar and Tony Fry) and the promise of a more inclusive and decolonial practice. For design historians, this challenge entails how to reframe the discipline, not only in its geographical reach but in its assumptions and foundations.

This panel calls for papers that examine alternative approaches and critical perspectives towards canonisation, periodisation and designer-biographical work that have been the dominant frameworks for research and teaching in design history to date. We are interested in papers that explore new design historical methodologies and forms of knowledge that might create a more inclusive practice. In what ways can design history research and teaching undertake this task without being trapped in a traditional/modern binary framework? Does a decolonised design history require new periodisations, new artefacts, or new designers, or does it require challenging the core principles of design that are anchored to industrial modernity? We welcome critical and engaging papers that address these questions.

Disability in the Arts: The Active Participation of People with Disabilities in the Arts

Martha M. Schloetzer, National Gallery of Art
Email Address(s):
m-schloetzer@nga.gov

Hendrick Goltzius was burned in a fire as a child, an accident that permanently damaged his right hand. Andy Warhol’s health was never the same after he was shot. Since 1975, Yayoi Kusama has lived primarily in a mental hospital. Throughout the history of art, there are countless examples of artists with disabilities. This session seeks to increase disability awareness in the arts by exploring the connection between creativity and disability. Issues that may be addressed include: the idea of art and disability as mutually beneficial, art as a way of coping with negative aspects of disability, art as a way of communicating about disability, and the stereotypes that exist between disabled artists and their art.

Expanding the Canon: Curatorial and Art Historical Activism

Julie R Widholm, DePaul Art Museum and Mia Lopez, DePaul Art Museum
Email Address(s):
julie.widholm@depaul.edu
ms.mia.lopez@gmail.com

This panel addresses how museums and art historians are working to improve and increase the representation of artists and stories that have been relegated to art history’s margins. As recent studies report that 85% of artists in U.S. museum collections are white, and 87% are male, what are museums doing to diversify? Is the notion of the canon worth engaging or do we create parallel, alternative canons? How does expanding the canon affect teaching? What forms of research (exhibition, publications, public programs) allow us to create new knowledge that changes the canon? How can artists serve as collaborators and constructive critics while American museums catch up with national demographics and respond to their communities? What are some examples and case studies that deserve to be recognized, and what pitfalls should be avoided? Presenters will share examples that highlight creative solutions, outline common challenges, or underscore problems that still need to be addressed, in an effort to broaden the critical discourse around museum practices, equity, and inclusion.

DePaul Art Museum Director and Chief Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Assistant Curator Mia Lopez are panel co-chairs, and will touch on their institutional efforts in this area.

Interwar Islamic Arts
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Islamic Art Association

Ashley V. Miller, University of Michigan
Email Address(s):
avmiller@umich.edu

The interwar period witnessed major transformations in the political and social landscape of the modern Muslim world, from new nation states arising in the Middle East to the forging of transregional and diasporic pan-Islamist communities. This session explores the role of art, its makers, and its patrons in expressing and shaping this new world order. What new audiences, networks of collaboration, or material and visual resources became available to Muslim artists during the two world wars and the interwar period (ca. 1914-1945)? How did “Islamic art” as a discipline change during this era, with its validation in universities and museums in the United States, the emergence of scholarly journals such as Ars Islamica, or the organization of public collections of Islamic art outside of Europe? What role did Muslim artists, patrons, or visual practices play in the articulation of national identities, as well as various forms of internationalisms that aimed to promote exchange across regional and national boundaries? Recent efforts to reimagine the disciplinary scope of Islamic art have called for, on the one hand, a close examination of the field’s formation in the nineteenth century and, on the other hand, a reassessment of modern art produced in the postwar and contemporary Middle East. By focusing on the production and reception of Muslim visual cultures during the intervening decades and from a broad geographical perspective, this session aims to enrich our understanding of the history and historiography of Islamic art at a critical moment of global transition.

Landscape through a Sociopolitical Lens: Representing the Environment in the Early Modern Netherlandish World
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Netherlandish Art

Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Harvard Art Museums and Sarah Walsh Mallory, Harvard University
Email Address(s):
joanna@seidenstein.com
sarahmallory@g.harvard.edu

Scarcely a news cycle passes without discussion of national borders, climate change, natural disasters, and globalization. This discourse has prompted new questions about the visual representation of the physical environment, making this an apt moment to reassess the extraordinary production and consumption of landscape imagery in Northern Europe in the early modern period. This session seeks to complicate existing understandings of this material by focusing on its intrinsic but diverse sociopolitical content. Papers will address, through discussions of paintings, prints, and decorative objects, how pictorial tactics and conventions function as inscriptions of power, control, identity, and otherness. This panel will examine how the vision of the land provided by Northern, particularly Dutch, practitioners, informed or shifted understandings of “space,” “nature,” and “environment” and contributed to contemporary conversations about social ecologies, climate, land ownership, and labor. Importantly, this session also attends to the concept of “world,” integrating considerations of “the Northern landscape” with those of depictions of overseas territories, particularly New Spain, Africa, and Curaçao.

No Country for Old Murals

Angela Sprunger, Ohio Univerisity and Sam Dodd, Ohio University
Email Address(s):
as991715@ohio.edu
dodds1@ohio.edu

Common representations of “the rural” tend to collapse rural identities and lived experiences into romanticized, master narratives. This session invites papers that update our understanding of the rural within contemporary artistic, historical, and pedagogical practices. In particular, we hope to hear from rural arts practitioners and academics on how their studio work, collaborations, teaching, and other creative activities are informed by their specific rural contexts. These inquiries might demonstrate an appreciation for the robust networks of commitment and care found within rural communities and their value in addressing contemporary challenges, including but not limited to: environmental sustainability, especially in post-industrial landscapes; drug addiction treatment and recovery networks; resource insecurity, including limited access to food, housing, transportation, healthcare, and education; and ongoing marginalization of people of color, LGBTQ folks, the elderly, and those living with developmental disabilities. When might urban-normative modes of social practice transfer to rural settings, and when does their transference cause damage or harm? What dominant modes of locational thinking have emerged in response to capitalism’s economic drivers in valuing artistic production (i.e. the creative economy)? What, too, are the social and cultural responsibilities of rural public universities? How can locational issues of scale, density, and interconnectedness help shape restorative rural practices for social and spatial justice?

The Longest March: Feminism, Institutions, and Art

Elspeth Mitchell, Loughborough University and Hilary Robinson, Loughborough University
Email Address(s):
elspethrosemitchell@gmail.com
h.robinson@lboro.ac.uk

This panel’s title riffs on two phrases from the late 1960s: Juliet Mitchell’s ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ (1966) and Rudi Dutschke’s phrase ‘the long march through the institutions’. Mitchell engaged Marxist theory, challenging the left with its omission of women; Dutschke, drawing upon Maoism, proposed entering institutions to enact revolutionary work from within and thereby utterly change them. Fifty years after the women’s movement in art began, it’s obvious that asking for equality (50% women) is not enough; and that ‘add women and stir’ will not bring political and cultural change in museums, galleries, and Universities. At this time of hardening differences, defunding and attacks upon many cultural and educational institutions, we invite papers that address feminist resistance as a strategy for change from within institutions.

Papers may address, inter alia: What has been achieved – or not – by the political, social and economic goals of feminism entering the institution? Is Dutschke’s strategy useful in the current socio-political climate in arts institutions? Who can actually ‘get inside’ institutions? How do we reconcile strategies of resistance from within with the heavy facts of institutional violence experienced by women, people of colour, queer and disabled people and others in white patriarchal institutions? Can ‘revolutionary work’ be done within the arts and its institutions, and how? How can feminism resist being co-opted into capitalist gestures of ‘inclusiveness’? What other strategies might ensure institutional change? Is rejecting institutions an option? What institutional initiatives have been tested – to what effect?

Topographical Drawing

Cynthia Roman, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale and Patricia Mainardi, The Graduate Center - City University of New York
Email Address(s):
cynthia.roman@yale.edu
pmmainardi@gmail.com

Topographical Drawing

Chairs: Patricia Mainardi and Cynthia Roman

In the modern era, landscape painting has been largely defined by Impressionism, favoring atmospheric visuality over fidelity to form. And yet this was not always the case. This session seeks to explore the parallel incentive, topographical drawing, in all its manifestations. We define topography as a pictorial description of a specific place in a wide array of forms with a diversity of functions and patrons or audiences. These might include travelers’ sketchbooks, architectural renderings, mapmaking, estate portraits, botanical illustration, etc. We are interested in the work of professional and amateur artists, scientists, architects, and engineers. Proposals could focus on scientific knowledge of space (detail/geology/geography); on making and learning strategies; on the functions of topographical projects (patron, creator, or audience expectations); methods of observing, recording, or conveying the desired “information” about the place (choices of media, format, style, color, technique).

Building on recent scholarly attention given to the role and history of topographical views, most notably the British Library’s project Picturing Place and broadening the ongoing Yale University-wide project on topography sponsored by the Lewis Walpole Library, we seek to cast as wide a net as possible, not limited either geographically or chronologically. We have designed this session as an open call for proposals. Preference will be given to new participants because we hope that this session will follow the long-standing CAA tradition of identifying and making connections among scholars whom we do not yet know but who share our interests.

Undergraduate Research and Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History

Alexa K. Sand, Utah State University
Email Address(s):
alexa.sand@usu.edu

Undergraduate research in art history, whether part of a faculty-directed project, class-based, or an individual pursuit on the part of a student, is an ideal example of active and engaged learning. Students identify questions, evaluate source material, test ideas and theories, and produce reports in some form, usually including a significant written component. In the studio art and design fields, research can take a different form, with creative practice being one way outcomes of a project can be delivered.
This session will gather outstanding examples of undergraduate research, and discussions of aspects of mentoring/directing undergraduate research, in poster form.
Submissions are invited from students conducting research such as object and/or medium studies, text-based analysis, experimental archaeology, thesis research, and/or creative inquiry.
Submissions are also requested from faculty and museum professionals who have experience with mentoring undergraduate research in Art and Art History, including Studio, Graphic Design, Visual Communication, and other creative fields, as well as the more traditionally-understood-as-research field of Art History. Posters may address specific projects or case studies of student research projects, assessment of undergraduate research, characteristics of successful programs, or other approaches that addresses the challenges and benefits to students of undergraduate research. This poster session is being proposed as part of a collaboration between Art History Teaching Resources and the Council on Undergraduate Research -- Arts and Humanities Division.

Who’s In and Who’s Out of Fashion (Studies)?

Sarah Scaturro, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ann M Tartsinis, Stanford University
Email Address(s):
sarah.scaturro@metmuseum.org
atartsin@stanford.edu

Is there a correct or wrong way to do fashion studies? The field has rapidly grown ever since the 1998 issue of Fashion Theory surveyed the methodological status of its emergence. The major concern then was identifying and reconciling what dress historian Lou Taylor termed “the great divide” between practice-based (museum-oriented) and theoretical-based (academia-oriented) approaches to the study of fashion. Since then, approaches using fashion as a lens to engage and explore our material and visual world have exploded, uniting scholars from disparate academic disciplines—from art and design history to anthropology, among others—under what we now call “fashion studies”. Fashion deeply resonates as a scholarly subject for those concerned with debates on gender, modernity, and globalization as well as other sites of critical inquiry. The question remains: where does fashion studies begin and end? Is fashion studies research permitted to travel across or exist between disciplinary borders? Might we frame fashion studies as fundamentally interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and/or cross-disciplinary? There remains much anxiety around policing the boundaries of scholarly discourse, leading to questions of legitimacy and membership (Who is allowed to do this? What are the requisite credentials?) What is the state of the field and how might we advance the understanding of fashion studies as a central node in a dynamic constellation of research areas across the humanities and sciences?

This panel seeks papers that challenge the received assumptions about the field and those that aim to reposition it in relation to its attendant disciplines through case studies.

Generative and Machine Creativity: Is AI in the Arts and Design Evolution of "Artistic Intelligence" or Rupture?
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Leonardo Education and Art Forum

Ruth West, University of North Texas and Andres E. Burbano, Universidad de los Andes
Email Address(s):
ruth.west@unt.edu
aburbano@uniandes.edu.co

From legal sentencing recommendations to creating sounds never before heard or images never before seen, autonomous vehicles and optimizing the design of chairs, conversational agents embedded in daily objects to real-time responsive intelligent physical environments, we are transforming how we live and create through the application of machine learning and generative models to human endeavors. This session explores advances in the application of artificial intelligence in the arts and design along multiple dimensions: AI as a medium, method(s), tool(s) and new creative practices, evolving views of creativity and authorship, and the societal and cultural impacts. Does generative and machine creativity, or AI in the arts and design, represent an evolution of “artistic intelligence” or is it a rupture in the evolution of creative practice yielding new forms and types of authorship? There’s obviously so much more to the topic than this, and we hope you’ll join us for a lively dialog exploring crucial questions on this theme.

A Third Museum Is Possible: Towards a Decolonial Curatorial Practice

Anni Ankitha Pullagura, Brown University
Email Address(s):
anni_pullagura@brown.edu

K Wayne Yang (la paperson)’s A Third University Is Possible (2017) attends to the “how” of settler colonialism, whereby we examine “the mechanisms, not just the motives, of colonialism” in order to “forecast colonial[ism’s] next operations and to plot decolonial technologies” (5). As Decolonize This Place, #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, and #museumsrespondtoferguson remind us, the art museum requires a critical redress of its origins and institutional investment in colonial systems of exhibition, collection, and ways of seeing. This roundtable considers la paperson’s call to action as it may be found in the settler colonial technology of the exhibitionary space. How can we think through these questions in relationship to art history’s exclusionary past and present? What futures are we building, and for whom? How have artists like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Ja'Tovia Gary, Adrian Piper, or Titus Kaphar engaged with these questions, futures, and imaginations? As Joanne Barker reminds us, “Art is part of the struggle to reclaim a future that is not about the future at all but a present in which Indigenous territories, stories, bodies, and sensualities are unoccupied and uncivilized: I want to live there; that is where I live.” In amplifying this world vision, we ask: How has settler colonialism framed our understanding of the museum, the exhibition of art, and the production of art historical scholarship? How can we forward a decolonial curatorial practice that does not replicate oppressive frameworks? How can we imagine the art museum, and art curatorial practice, as engaging with and advancing such futures?

Artist-made Objects of Indeterminate Status and the Catalogue Raisonné
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association

Susan Cooke, Catalogue Raisonne Scholars Assn
Email Address(s):

Is every object made by an artist a work of art? Should we, and if so according to what criteria, include in an artist's catalogue raisonné works that exist in a seemingly provisional, unfinished, experimental, or fragmentary state? Or that may have served as designs, models, or studies for works subsequently (or not) realized in a "final" form? Is every doodle a "drawing"? Are unexposed negatives part of a photographer's oeuvre? Is an object artfully made to serve a utilitarian purpose a sculpture or a tool? How are newer media–time-based, digital, or otherwise–changing our understanding of the bounds of a catalogue raisonné? How do scholars identify, categorize, and represent oeuvres that defy easy definitions?

And are these kinds of questions and distinctions even relevant to the work of compiling complete catalogues of historical or contemporary artists' bodies of work? If so, why? Is it possible to formulate a set of "best practices" for how catalogues raisonnés distinguish between art/non-art works made by artists? The panelists will investigate these questions from a variety of practical and philosophical view points, and discuss them in relation to works created by artists in working in a range of media and different time periods.

Black, Brown + Latinx Graphic Design Educators

Kelly A Walters, The New School, Parsons School of Design
Email Address(s):
kelly.walters@newschool.edu

Black, Brown + Latinx Graphic Design Educators: Experiences and Reflections

In Black, Brown + Latinx Graphic Design Educators: Experiences and Reflections, designer and educator, Kelly Walters, invites black, brown and latinx graphic design educators to share reflections on how their identity or race influences their teaching and design practice. This session is focused on fostering a dialogue around the specific concerns, methods, observations of black, brown and latinx design educators from:
– Private art and design schools, colleges or liberal arts institutions (majority international students)
– Public art and design programs at universities or community colleges (majority domestic students)
– Minority serving institutions
– Historically black colleges and universities
– Predominantly white institutions

We invite you to submit proposals that address this topic in response to the following areas:
– What are your experiences in design education?
– How has your identity influenced the way you teach graphic design?
– What are the challenges/successes of teaching graphic design at a minority serving institution or HBCU?
– What guides the visual and material choices for your students?
– In what ways does your design curriculum explore imagery, typography, color or pattern informed by black, brown and latinx cultures?
– Based on your student population, what are the professional, social, environmental, etc. factors that guide where students aspire to work or learn graphic design?

We aim to have two panel discussions that engage these questions with various faculty and allow for an open Q&A that will engage the audience. A design publication will be created that highlights the discussion generated by these panels.

Curatorial Impacts – the Futures of Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019)

Jane Chin Davidson, California State University, San Bernardino and Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Florida International University
Email Address(s):
janechindavidson@alumni.reed.edu
alpesh.patel@fiu.edu

Nigerian art historian, curator, poet, and educator Okwui Enwezor left a tremendous impact, beginning with his 2002 debut as the first "non-European art director of documenta" whereby “Democracy Unrealized” was the "first truly global, postcolonial documenta exhibition." Enwezor’s creation of political platforms and artistic manifestoes not only changed the form and function of global exhibitions, but also opened up new ways to implement social and political knowledge in association with curatorial initiatives and practices. Over the course of the 2015 Venice Biennale, Enwezor staged a reading of Marx’s Capital every single day as a performative speech act, acknowledging the matrix of global capitalism, nationalism, and money-status that global artfairs and expositions signify. In this way, he instrumentalized Venice’s world platform at the 56th esposizione as he spotlighted the 2015 “humanitarian catastrophe on the high seas, deserts, and borderlands, as immigrants, refugees, and desperate peoples seek refuge.” Much needed, however, is an understanding of how his approaches actually intersect with discourses related to theories of affect, queer, race, and feminism, in addition to economic class. Through the enlarged scope of curatorial influences, this panel engages in the political model for transforming the use of exhibitions including the creation of decolonial platforms, feminist/race manifestoes and other types of political interventions. The presenters will contribute to the understanding of the innovative strategies, proclamations, speech-acts, performative stagings, and different ways in which exhibitions can inspire, instigate, and forge new visions to change the existing boundaries in art, art history, and the artworld.

Decolonizing Design Towards Systemic Equity

Jessica M. Jacobs, Columbia College Chicago and Lisa Elzey Mercer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Email Address(s):
jessica@jessicajacobs.com
lemercer@illinois.edu

The role of the designer is shifting from that of a service provider to an individual with an epistemological understanding of design and their role in the design process. There has been an increased acknowledgement of design’s role, both in practice and in academia, in perpetuating systems of inequity through the “colonization of knowledge, the colonial conditions that inform knowledge production and validation” (Abdulla, 2016). With its focus on empathic design solutions and user research, the widespread adoption of design thinking methods has shifted some power from the designer to the user. Furthering this, some practitioners are developing methodologies that seek to intervene in and disrupt the design thinking process with new methods to foster equity-based design solutions. Designers are shifting their focus from outputs (what gets designed or built) to outcomes (future, people-centered aspirations) for longer-term, resilient, sustainable impact towards desired futures.

We continue to design products, services, and systems that increase inequity, including biased algorithms, automation that leads to planned obsolescence and deskilling, and limitations on access to technology and communication. How might a change in design methods or engagement models alter solutions to be more equitable? We are interested in hearing from individuals whose scholarship and research is focused on challenging the traditional Westerns ways of knowing (Wilson, 1999) and who are developing and advocating for decolonized systems, traditions, and ways of being and knowing (Biermann, 2011). How might designers add to the discourse of a “global village” where a homogeneous world culture is dominant (Fiss, 2009)?

Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art

Onur Ozturk, Columbia College Chicago and Xenia Gazi, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Email Address(s):
oozturk@colum.edu
xgazi@artic.edu

In a time when divisive politics have become increasingly popular around the globe and white-supremacy, otherizing, and Islamophobia are on the rise, it is essential more than ever for scholars, curators, and artists to study, curate, and engage with incredibly rich and diverse historical and contemporary visual cultures of Islam. However, one major challenge is the fact that the term Islamic Art, an umbrella term used today to cover arts of many cultures and civilizations, is in fact a western construct originally created by European scholars. Many “exotic” objects brought by crusaders and travelers to Europe, were not even considered examples of Islamic Art until they were collected by the European museums. The continuous use of this term with its orientalist origins strengthens normative and homogeneous notions of Islam and Islamic Art. Yet today, the field of Islamic Art, with its own history for more than a century, has contributed to our understanding of the dynamic and diverse nature of cultures developed by various civilizations of Europe, Africa, Middle East, and Asia. This session invites papers addressing how universities, museums and other educational institutions can continue to challenge stereotypical notions of Islam and Islamic Art through scholarly research, special exhibitions, and art projects while avoiding the creation of new myths and the encouragement of nationalistic and ethnic attitudes.

Fast Fashion/Slow Art

Alan Wallach, The College of William & Mary and Bibiana K. Obler, George Washington University
Email Address(s):
axwall@wm.edu
bobler@gwu.edu

Art historians have studied the art of high fashion clothing, but with the well-known exceptions of Degas’ paintings and drawings of milliners, seamstresses, and the New Orleans cotton trade, and Lewis Hine’s depictions of child labor in American cotton mills, they have seldom considered the work of artists who have addressed the history and contemporary reality of textile and clothing manufacture. This is a striking omission. In his magisterial study, Empire of Cotton (2014), Sven Beckert argues that cotton has been central in “the making and remaking of global capitalism, and with it of the modern world.” One could make similar if less all-embracing arguments when it comes to the history of linen, wool, silk, and synthetic fibers.

We seek papers that deal with representations in any medium of the work and workers associated with textile and clothing manufacture. Possible subjects include, but are not limited to, the Lawrence Textile Strike (1912) (associated with the slogan “Bread and Roses”), The Paterson Silk Strike and strikers’ Pageant (1913), the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911), the Tazreen Factory Fire in Dhaka (2012), Philip Evergood’s Through the Mill (1940), etc. We encourage scholarly papers as well as talks by artists—scholarly or otherwise.

Knowledge is a Verb: The Craft of Creative Research

John Sharp,
Email Address(s):
sharpj@newschool.edu

Though it can be said to share a common goal with other forms of knowledge production—academic scholarship and scientific research—creative research differs in important ways. Creative research simultaneously generates knowledge and material expressions of that knowledge. This deepens, strengthens, questions, assesses, and otherwise provides input into an artist’s or designer’s work as it produces knowledge for the artist, their communities and publics.

There is no one “creative research.” The field of research-based art practices has grown in parallel but discrete form to design research. While the later grounds itself in either the scientific method or in the rhetorics of futuring, the former leaves much more space for individual definition and methodologies. Both have much to learn from and share with one another.

To that end, this session has two goals: to connect art and design educators approaching creativity as research, and to create a cross-disciplinary community of educators and practitioners art seeking to further the discourse. We welcome proposals that address or explore the following questions:

What project strategies successfully instill the idea that “making is learning”?
How are research project questions and criteria established?
What methods and modes of creative research are employed in the classroom and/or studio?
How can the work of creative practice become an emergent learning process?

We seek proposals from art and design educators, as well as creative practitioners who have strategies to share about their approaches to teaching and mentoring creative research. We welcome graduate students whose work explore these questions.

Pressing Revolution

Gilda Posada, Cornell University and Asli Menevse,
Email Address(s):
gp367@cornell.edu
am2468@cornell.edu

The print has been the preferred medium of radical leftist imaginations and movements from past to present. The printed picture has always been there: from the Paris Commune (1871) to the Cuban Revolution (1953-9); from the anti-colonial struggles and black radical traditions of the twentieth century to the Civil Rights and contemporary LGBTQIA2+ movements; from Indigenous and Environmental activism to labor unionizing efforts across the globe. The print has been a site for a praxis of the radical imagination; it has been and still is weaponized as a medium for change in the fight for equitable futures.

This interdisciplinary and trans-historical panel brings together artists, historians, scholars, and activists to think about the history and the future of this practice of revolution in our contemporary moment. Our approach invites inquiries that attend to the ontology (eg. ephemerality, multiplicity, mobility); function, (eg. revolutionary pedagogy, commemoration, and utopian projection); histories; presence in the public space (eg. circulation, interruption, infiltration); interactions with other media; adaptability and responses to changes for accessibility (eg. new technologies of printing, digital presence, social media). Through this panel we are aiming to initiate a theory of radical print into praxis that takes the medium and encompasses the richness of its past and brings it into conversation with its ever-expanding revolutionary practices and practitioners who continue to utilize it for conceptualizing alternative futurities. The cultural practitioners of this panel offer a path for resistance and revolutionary change that is urgently needed in amidst global climate crisis and authoritarian regimes.

Producing and Consuming the Image of the Female Artist

Ellery E. Foutch, Middlebury College and Alison Jane Carr, University of Huddersfield
Email Address(s):
efoutch@middlebury.edu
alliejcarr@gmail.com

American illustrator Zoë Mozert (1907-1993) was the ultimate 1940s “Calendar Girl,” famously serving as her own model for the pin-ups that she so prolifically painted. Newsreels and magazine coverage fostered a fantasy of an artist-model who willingly and flirtatiously revealed herself to viewers. Her assertive engagement with commerce and publicity and canny use of her own body helped to launch and sustain her creative career.

Although Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz incisively analyzed and articulated the tropes, "myths," and "legends" of male artist-creators throughout history, the image of the female artist has not been as extensively investigated. This panel invites explorations of the role of women artists in society and art history, across chronological and geographical boundaries. How have female artists embraced, rejected, or adapted stereotypes of artistic identity and success for their own ends? When the dominant genre of artistic achievement has been the representation of the female nude, how have these artists inserted or adapted the representation of their own bodies? What does it mean to deploy one’s own body in image-making? What does the exploitation through idealization of the artist’s body mean? How might we understand bodies as sites of and vehicles for exploration, experimentation, and even protest?

Professional Pathways for the 21st Century: Idea Exchange
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Education Committee

Ellen Osterkamp,
Email Address(s):
osterkampe@lanecc.edu

While the call for greater diversity in the arts and higher education is not new, what pathways lead students from underrepresented communities toward successful careers in these fields? In this context, we define diversity broadly to include race, ability, and identify, as well as socio-economic circumstances that factor into students’ academic and professional success. Given the costs of higher education, the realities of the academic job market, and public perceptions that question the value of a degree in the arts and humanities, how do we assure students that an art education is worth the time, resources, and risks?

Designed by CAA’s Education Committee to stimulate discussion, this session provides a forum to share ideas and information about innovative programs, curricula, and other pre-professional opportunities that help students achieve their post-graduation goals. While we are interested in how to diversify enrollment in arts programs and entry into arts-related professions, we are also curious about approaches that highlight the transferable value of skills cultivated through a visual arts education.

We want to hear about institutions that are creating robust pipelines for students from diverse backgrounds, as well as from students and professionals whose stories provide insight and feedback about such academic initiatives. We invite submissions in the form of proposals or letters of interest, and encourage contributions from community colleges, multi-institutional and cross-sector partnerships, businesses, and other organizations that provide advocacy and support around art education. Selected participants will collaborate with the Education Committee in determining the session’s format and presentation guidelines.

Sounding to Power: Resistance and Identity in Contemporary Sound Art

Melissa Warak, University of Texas at El Paso
Email Address(s):
melissa.warak@gmail.com

In recent years, more and more contemporary sound artists have merged aesthetic concerns with politicized content to use sound, music, or silence as vehicles for nuanced takes on issues of identity, representation, and geo-political realities. As one example, Jefferson Pinder’s 2006 video installation Juke explores assumptions of identity by filming African American performers lip-syncing to popular songs often associated with white culture. Viewers would not know the songs being performed until putting on the headphones associated with each video, and thus the element of surprise helps produce a reaction. More recently, Ragnar Kjartansson’s 2018 long-duration performance Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy featured thirty-one women musicians performing pared-down arrangements of well-loved pop songs throughout the Women’s Building in San Francisco in order to highlight the misogyny of the songs’ lyrics. In both of these cases, beauty melds with trauma to incite audience reactions. This session seeks papers that examine ways that sound and music in contemporary art invites and distorts concepts of political resistance. Papers may additionally look to the methods with which artists use sound to pressure concepts of identity; how the use of or presentation of the body enhances the use of sound in politicized art; and how artists use technology as an aid in exploring identity and resistance with sound. Papers may present individual case studies, reflect on artists’ own practices, or theorize how artists engage with particular issues of both local and global scope.

Teaching as a Career-Building Strategy for American Women Artists in the 20th-Century

Amy M. Von Lintel, West Texas A&M University
Email Address(s):
avonlintel@wtamu.edu

This session examines the strategic uses of teaching for US women artists of the modern period. With few exceptions, the academy/dealer/collector/museum model of artistic legitimization, which was the norm for male artists, was not as readily accessible to women until the later 1900s, when this model slowly began opening to women with the rise of second-wave feminism. As an alternative, American women artists often chose teaching—including short term and itinerant jobs, and many beyond urban, coastal centers—as a way to demonstrate their seriousness and independence as artists. Our session investigates the nuances and implications of this gendered phenomenon in art history. Such teaching allowed many women to thrive beyond the contexts of marriage and family, and to carve out careers not supported through studio work alone. Our focus on teaching as an significant mode of artistic success, particularly for women, recognizes the root problem in art history-making apparatuses: patriarchy, financial value, and power have long shaped the art market and museum collections, and to this day, women artists are significantly undervalued compared to their male colleagues. The highest selling painting by a woman artist—O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed—went for $44.4 million in 2014, a mere fraction of the $100+ million that male modernists have made for decades. As museums struggle today to diversify their holdings, this session seeks to explore the implications of a different approach to recognizing legitimacy in building collections—one that redefines success based on public impact and cross-continental outreach, rather than on market values in major art centers alone.

The Bounded Field: Landscape Models and Microcosms

Ruth Ezra, Harvard University
Email Address(s):
rezra@fas.harvard.edu

The groundbreaking 2014 exhibition, Silent Partners: Artist & Mannequin from Function to Fetish, brought renewed attention to the subject of the lay figure in Western art. The proposed panel will complement this and other recent scholarly contributions on artists’ models by considering how landscapes, rather than figures, were represented, miniaturized, and mocked-up in workshop settings. According to Johann Neudörffer, the late-medieval sculptor Veit Stoss likely relied upon a topographical relief of mountains and rivers when carving scenery, and in the eighteenth century, the painter Thomas Gainsborough famously constructed a table-top landscape consisting of “cork and coal,” “sand and clay,” “bushes of mosses,” and “distant woods of broccoli.” As these cases suggest, the purview for the session will be broad, comprising examples drawn from a range of geographies and time periods. The ontological uncertainty of the model—tool? work of art? both?—will also inform a wider discussion of why there are so few independent landscapes in the Western sculptural tradition. Topics explored may include naturalia and artificialia; the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm; dioramas and natural history; seriality; divisions of labor; and problems of scale. Finally, papers are also welcome on the subject of miniaturized landscapes not as models per se, but rather as they appear in the bases or backgrounds of finished sculpture.

The One and the Many: Monuments Without Heroes

Neysa Page-Lieberman, Columbia College Chicago and Paul M Farber,
Email Address(s):
neysapl@gmail.com
paulfarber@gmail.com

The One and the Many: Monuments Without Heroes

Monuments deemed racist, sexist and culturally insensitive have continued to be dismantled in towns and cities across the U.S. In their place, communities have grappled with what else to erect, as well as questions about whom, how, and why to honor in their place? City officials and cultural leaders voice their commitment to change, to embrace new voices and ideas towards a more inclusive narrative of American history. But what has changed, and how should monument creation evolve? An emerging discourse around twenty-first century memorials suggests that subjects for new monuments should resist the tradition of isolating a single person or elite hero from a movement or moment in history; that rarely in life does an individual accomplish sweeping change without extraordinary cooperation and collaboration with others. Similarly, even the process of selecting groups and stories to memorialize often gets compromised by too much centralization of power in one deciding body, who may lack the tools or will to incorporate inclusive participation or marginalized voices. More democratic decision-making processes could resist these top-down practices in favor of community-engaged, open forum discussion guiding the process, selection and development of a new work. This session seeks artists, curators, makers, scholars and other cultural producers conversant in these ideas and issues for a roundtable discussion, addressing new models for commissioning public works that can lead to exciting, impactful outcomes. Submissions should include participant’s bio, CV, and ideas or examples of progressive models of monument making.

Undergraduate Research and Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History (Part 2)

Alexa K. Sand, Utah State University
Email Address(s):
alexa.sand@usu.edu

Follow on to Session 6407, "Undergraduate Research and Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History"

Blind Spots: Overcoming Individual and Institutional Biases
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Museum Committee

Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, Yale Center for British Art
Email Address(s):
jennifer.reynolds-kaye@yale.edu

Recent scholarship in the field of global modernism has argued for the inclusion of previously ignored or under-represented regions, artists, and practices. Such efforts to expand the art historical canon have focused on cultural production once deemed “peripheral” or “marginal,” resulting in new theoretical and methodological models for approaching art history. Despite these developments in the field, individual practitioners continue to have their own personal “blind spots.” How do we — as art historians, artists, designers, and museum practitioners — perpetuate these “blind spots”? How might we identify and address them in our scholarship? In what ways can we acknowledge, account for, and adequately respond to them in museological displays? What new models exist?

This session draws together artists, activists, designers, scholars, educators, and museum professionals, to debate current research and case studies that shed light on these issues. Speakers and participants are encouraged to share reflections on their own blind spots in their scholarship, artistic practice, or museum work and demonstrate how they confronted their oversights. Speakers may also discuss recent exhibitions, artworks or scholarship that demonstrate the exclusion or erasure of marginalized identities and perspectives as well as instances that have sensitively addressed indigenous oppressions, colonial and post-colonial power structures, complex racial histories, and geographic omissions.

Connecting Global Issues in the Classroom

Natacha Poggio, University of Houston Downtown and Emily L Keown, Edgewood College
Email Address(s):
poggion@uhd.edu
elkeown@hotmail.com

In an ever-shrinking world, bringing global issues into the classroom is more important than ever, in order to better prepare our students to become engaged global citizens. With an increasing array of communication technologies available at our fingertips (and so many ways to stay "connected" nowadays), we have a duty to equip our students with skills and ideas that will enable them to grow their empathy for others as well as an understanding of the world they live in. Such a pedagogical approach gives students a chance to identify the social, cultural, economic, and climate issues, as well as to connect and reflect on how the work (research and artwork) they make and study sits within a larger context.

In a Pecha Kucha style panel presentation, we will explore how different disciplines utilize global issues as topics for research and connect them to their course work/instruction. For example, how a design student may use a topic about climate change to create an awareness campaign; how a fashion course may explore colonialism/ cultural appropriation; or how a historian may introduce migration into the themes they are teaching.

We envision this multidisciplinary session to be a place for dialogue, from presenters as well as the audience participants to learn and exchange strategies on how different disciplines connect global issues in the classroom.

Contracts, Waivers, and Workman's Comp: The Art of Finding Participant Labor in the Archive

Shannon Flaherty, University of Minnesota and Vanessa Reubendale, University of Minnesota
Email Address(s):
flahe128@umn.edu
reub0013@umn.edu

In the post-war period, the emergence of performance and participatory works and the institutionalization of the avant-garde have resulted in a corresponding rise in administrative and legal labor to support the creation and exhibition of temporal, multi-participant works. While visual documentation of these works may be scarce or fragmentary, a dive into the archive might yield objects as diverse and mundane as meeting minutes, emails, research studies, contracts, insurance forms, past-due notices, checks, payments, invoices, grant letters, liability waivers, consent forms, or union documents. What does it mean to examine this minutiae as visual evidence? How do we read questions of risk, embodiment, and authorship through personnel files and legal waivers? What do we make of the increased accumulation and use of these documents by art institutions? This session invites papers attuned to the aesthetic questions yielded by the social and legal systems of support that enable artistic creation.

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to: participatory art projects and their ephemera, artists' engagement with or employment in labor unions and the legal profession, strikes or other legal actions that impacted artistic production, the use and display of organizing documents in exhibitions, the publication of documents for art historians’ reference, and pedagogical uses of the archive.

Early Modern Women in the Streets? Women’s Visibility in the Public Sphere
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender

Maria F. Maurer, University of Tulsa
Email Address(s):
maria-maurer@utulsa.edu

In light of the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States, this panel seeks papers that investigate women’s visibility in the early modern world. Religious and literary discourses often admonished them to remain hidden from public view, but early modern women were skilled at negotiating social and cultural strictures. As artists, patrons, beholders and actors, and as individuals and groups, women used visual and material culture in order to proclaim their presence.

This session therefore seeks papers that explore the visibility and agency of women in the early modern world. What roles did women play in artistic production and consumption, especially in highly visible locations such as the church or city square? Or, conversely, what strategies did women use to publicize artistic projects that may have been less visible? How did women negotiate, and at times violate, the boundaries between domestic or conventual space and civic space? How did women participate in early modern ritual and ceremonial life?

We seek papers from any area of the globe from c. 1400 - c. 1800. We especially welcome papers that take a global or transcultural approach to the question of women’s visibility and agency.

Ethnographic Aesthetics, Fashion Visualities

Alice Morin, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and Axelle Boyer, UC Santa Cruz
Email Address(s):
alice.p.morin@gmail.com
axboyer@ucsc.edu

In 1967, American Vogue published « The Quest for Beauty in Dahomey, » a 16-pages photographic essay shot by American photographer Irving Penn, accompanied by a scientific text by Belgian ethnologist Jacques Maquet. While it has seldom been critically analyzed, fashion photography has a long-standing tradition of fascination for ethnographic subjects, categories and imagery. Conversely, visual anthropology has often been accused of aestheticizing “the Other.” Photographs such as Penn’s, that flirt seductively with both fashion and ethnography, were widely disseminated in periodicals such as National Geographic, Life and Vogue. Mainstream press, and the fashion press in particular, has largely participated in the naturalization of the Euro-American worldview. Can fashion photography help us rethink the categories of anthropological knowledge?

This session will explore photographic works produced at the intersection of fashion and ethnography, that convey an aesthetic and a particular worldview. Our focus will be on images circulating via mainstream magazines--understood here, after Mary Louise Pratt, as « contact zones, » that is as sites of encounter between Euro-American and Global South cultures and aesthetics within the context of unbalanced power relations. We welcome papers located at the critical juncture of fashion studies, media studies and postcolonial studies that interrogate the reciprocal influences of fashion and ethnography as they unfold in a variety of images, be they editorials, advertisements, photographic campaigns or commissioned series, from the 19th century until today.

Feminisms and Democracy: Feminist Art Changing the Game
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: The Feminist Art Project

Connie Tell, The Feminist Art Project and Kathleen M. Wentrack, City University of New York - Queensborough Community College
Email Address(s):
crtell@comcast.net
kwentrack@qcc.cuny.edu

At this particular historical moment when democracy is under threat from authoritarian rulers and right-wing populism, feminist art practices have been used as social critique in efforts to transform politics in general and democracy in particular. Yet, specific questions remain. What difference does it make to treat democracy as a topic of inquiry as an artistic practice, a curatorial strategy, or a critical perspective in the visual arts? What new insights about democracy as both ideal and as praxis can emerge if gender, race, sexuality, (dis)ability, socioeconomics, and immigration status are central to such inquiries? This panel aims to interrogate these complexities and how they inform the intersection between democracy and feminist art practices that can challenge the status quo and make a positive change.

In the teeth of empire: Making a Mess and Other Queer Orientations
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Queer Caucus for Art

Oli Rodriguez, California State University, Los Angeles , Dan Paz, and Alejandro Acierto, Queer Caucus for Art
Email Address(s):
oliveriovrodriguez@gmail.com
danpaz@gmail.com

Pushing up against a singular codification of queerness, in the teeth of empire draws upon the multiplicity of queer orientations often framed by the conditions and histories of heteronormative settler violence. Parallel to the work outlined by anthropologist Audra Simpson and Indigenous and queer studies scholar Mark Rifkin, queer bodies have often been marked as different from settler colonial frameworks that have shaped normative ways of being. While the language of refusal has often been employed as a strategy for self-determination within conditions of exclusion, queer bodies have needed to exist within and in spite of these heteronormative structures. In particular, trans*, non-binary, and gender nonconforming bodies have historically troubled the ways queer identity formations have been narrativized, making a mess of the language, discourse, and visual remnants of those experiences. While heteronormative structures have historically attempted to coerce queer bodies from recognition based around tropes of difference, this discussion uses the specificity of experiences that begin to enable more inclusive and complex sensibilities of being – where a multiplicity of orientations disrupt singularizing these narratives. We invite contributors from interdisciplinary fields of practice such as: artists, scholars, theorists, curators, and other cultural producers.

Kitsch and Craft in the Middle Ages: Making Medieval Art Popular

Nathan S. Dennis, University of San Francisco and Rachel Danford, Marshall University
Email Address(s):
ndennis@usfca.edu
danfordr@marshall.edu

From its academic foundations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the art historical discipline has always relied on various forms of connoisseurship to determine “masterpieces” as the exemplars of stylistic movements, iconographical foundations, or even entire historical periods, and the history of medieval art and architecture is certainly no exception. Privileging this model of elite patronage and viewing (royal, ecclesiastical, aristocratic) has often marginalized the aesthetic concerns—and by extension, historical realities—of large numbers of consumers of the visual or material arts in the premodern world. This session is designed to highlight nonelite patronage and viewing practices in the Middle Ages, how workshops catered to the aesthetic sensibilities of the masses, and how art and artifacts designed for lower-class consumption can inform the history, politics, theology, economics, anthropology, or culture of specific people groups or geographical regions in ways that traditional art historical methodologies have ignored. How did workshops or individual artists adapt stylistic or iconographical trends from more elite spaces, or commissioned by elite patrons, for a general public of eager consumers? How did the acquisition of art or artifacts by lower-class patrons affect social stratification and mobility? How did popular aesthetics affect shifts in medieval viewing, craftsmanship, or materiality in the Middle Ages? Papers addressing any of these social concerns in production and reception of nonelite medieval art, from late antiquity to the long Middle Ages in Europe, North Africa, or Western Asia are welcomed.

Lightning and Thunder: Practice and Impact of Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History

Sara E. Orel, Art Department, Truman State University
Email Address(s):
orel@truman.edu

Undergraduate research has grown popular in American universities over the last 20 years, both for the value of the experience to student learning as well as its potential impact on engagement, retention, and post-graduation success. While developing a robust program can be challenging, these significant benefits make it a desirable practice for both students and their faculty mentors. This two-part session will serve as a forum for undergraduates to share share original research on topics in studio arts, design, and art history, and provide an opportunity for faculty interested in supporting undergraduate research to learn more about pedagogical models, assessment strategies, and potential outcomes.

The session format will feature short lightning presentations by undergraduates on their research, followed by opportunities for students to respond to questions from the audience. We invite applications for presentations from faculty whose students have been or will be conducting ambitious research while undergraduates. Abstracts from their students themselves will be due later in the fall. We are looking for undergraduate research that represents a variety of sub-categories within the broad designation of art, including studio, design, and art history.

Following the student presentations, the faculty mentors will discuss best practices in undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative activity. These may include class-based research activities, as well as individual investigation of questions that serve as capstones to an undergraduate degree program. Their brief discussion will serve as an introduction to broader conversation among the audience, presenters, and mentors.

Modern Continent Personifications: Controversial Monuments

Maryanne C. Horowitz, Occidental College
Email Address(s):
horowitz@oxy.edu

Modern Continent Personifications: Controversial Monuments

European artists and writers visualized the known world through personifications holding attributes related to each continent. Since the sixteenth century, continent personifications of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America appeared in pageants, atlases and prints, and became a very popular iconographical motif throughout Europe in all artistic media. These figures clearly show the way Europeans perceived the rest of the world - often characterized as a stereotypical Other – and were generally designed to express Europe’s belief of its own superiority, as well as its quest for a newer global identity. The organizers are publishing a co-edited book titled “Bodies and Map: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents” elaborating on continent figures ancient to eighteenth century, and are inviting authors for a sequel on the controversial topic of “Modern Personifications of the Continents.” For CAA 2020, we are welcoming papers dealing with modern continent personifications discussing - among others - examples such as the six sculptures (now in front of Musée d’Orsay) commissioned for the Exposition Universelle, 1878, Paris; Daniel Chester French’s sculpture set (1903-7) for former Custom House (now National Museum of the American Indian-New York; or monuments of Columbus portrayed with indigenous figures.

Please send proposals to Louise Arizzoli (larizzol@olemiss.edu) and Maryanne Cline Horowitz (horowitz@oxy.edu). Include in your proposal: name and affiliation, paper title (max. 15 words), abstract (max. 250 words), and a brief CV (max. 300 words; in ordinary CV format).

Reconsidering the Imaginary of the Ruin: Emancipation, Subversion, and Resistance from the Nineteenth Century to Today

Ewa Matyczyk, Boston University and Caitlin Lathrop Dalton, Boston University
Email Address(s):
ewa.matyczyk@gmail.com
cdalton@bu.edu

When Notre Dame went up in flames, news and social media erupted with tributes, photographs, and memories of the famous monument. Perhaps more captivating than the event itself were the images that followed: a pile of smoldering wreckage lying before the ornamental altar or the cathedral’s burning spire tumbling amidst plumes of smoke. Suddenly, a bastion of artistic accomplishment was transformed into a jarring reminder of impermanence. The imagery of ruins exists as a particular kind of memento mori; an imprint of the passage of time, it functions as a point of contact with the past, while also referring to an elusive future where our monuments collapse, transform, are reimagined, or rebuilt.

This session considers the discourse of ruin as a subject, metaphor, and process. Past scholarship has examined the relationship of the ruin to modernity, industry, and the environment. Expanding the conversation, we invite papers that consider how ruin can be understood as a site of obsession, production, or emancipation. We welcome projects that look at the construction, reproduction, and dissemination of ruin imagery as a dialogic and social endeavor. Papers may ask how the ruin functions as political subversion or a modality for protest or resistance, and conversely how it is also used to shore up dominant ideologies. This session also intends to examine the ruin outside of so-called “western” narratives and consider why ruination outside of the global north has largely been ignored. This panel reconsiders the pivotal role of the ruin in art and architecture history.

Registering the Matrix: Printing Matrices as Sites of Artistic Mediation
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Print Scholars

Jun Nakamura, University of Michigan
Email Address(s):
junn@umich.edu

Printing matrices often have storied pasts. Rembrandt’s plates were reprinted, reworked, otherwise altered, and sent under the roller until little of the artist’s hand remained. One eighteenth-century printer etched over a Rembrandt plate in the name of restoration before cutting it down into smaller plates; another printed Rembrandt’s plates with masks, plate tone, and in combination with other plates in order to create new compositions; and Rembrandt himself repurposed a plate by Hercules Segers. Beyond Rembrandt, Gauguin’s woodblocks were printed in editions by himself, by printer Louis Roy, and posthumously by Pola Gauguin. The resulting editions vary widely in inking, coloring, and support. Contemporary artists’ prints produced by publishers like Gemini G.E.L or Crown Point Press are often as much a product of collaboration with the printers as of the artist’s singular hand. While the Blocks, Plates, and Stones conference held at the Courtauld in 2017 did much to shed light on the matrix itself, examining the contributions of printers and publishers adds complexity to notions of authorship and illuminates processes particular to the medium; and looking at the afterlife and reuse of matrices provides evidence of artistic encounters, exchanges, and processes.

This session seeks papers that address the printing matrix as site of mediation, across time and geography. Papers topics might include:

- Reuse, restoration, or defacement of printing matrices

- The contributions of printers in printing other artists’ matrices

- Creative processes manifest in the printing of matrices, rather than in their making

- Collaboration via the matrix

Technological Frontiers: Design Incubation Colloquium 6.2

Alex Girard, Southern Connecticut State University and Daniel J. Wong, New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Email Address(s):
girarda5@southernct.edu
dan@dan-wong.com

Recent advances in technology and improvements of accessibility allow designers to deliver meaningful experiences to broad populations of ages, cultures, abilities, etc.—those who have previously been isolated from the discourse. These rapid changes in technology have also changed the landscape of design practice (for both better and worse) creating the conditions for more collaborative and multi-disciplinary teams who leverage these new or improved tools. This panel will address research projects working at the edge of contemporary technology, across disciplines, and within emerging disciplines. They leverage technological innovation to address issues of representation and access.

The Fabric of the Object: Material and Technical Innovation Among Female Painters in the Post-War Period

Frauke V. Josenhans, Rice University and Cynthia M Schwarz, Yale University Art Gallery
Email Address(s):
fvjosenhans@gmail.com
cynthia.schwarz@yale.edu

This session proposes a new discussion of the crucial contributions made by female painters worldwide to modern art during the post-war period. Many of these artists pioneered new techniques and materials but their role has been largely overlooked in past art historical writings.

The session will take into consideration the cultural and historical context, which led to experimentation with and adoption of new materials and techniques by female painters. Their material investigation benefited from historical factors, such as the rapid technological innovation during the Second World War, a period during which female workers were led to perform traditionally male jobs for war-production. During the immediate post-war period, many new commercial products for the household, such as aerosol paint, were advertised to women. Additionally, increased migration during and after the war forged new aesthetic and technological collaborations that would have a lasting impact on the art world. To emphasize a global perspective, this session would focus on artists from different continents, with examples ranging from the Romanian-American artist Hedda Sterne’s early use of spray paint; Venezuelan Elsa Gramcko’s hybrid canvases; Hungarian-born Judit Reigl’s scraped “excremental rags”; Belgian Evelyne Axell’s use of plastics and spray paint; to Japanese artist Aiko Miyawaki’s incorporation of marble dust into oil paint to create evocative reliefs.

Instead of limiting themselves to one media, many of these artists took an experimental approach to their studio practice, which this session proposes to further elucidate. Submissions from practicing artists who engage in this tradition of material experimentation are encouraged.

Women in the Nation's Collections

Catherine Southwick, National Gallery of Art , Anjuli J. Lebowitz, National Gallery of Art and Emily Ann Francisco, National Gallery of Art
Email Address(s):
c-southwick@nga.gov
a-lebowitz@nga.gov
e-francisco@nga.gov

Upon the centennial of women’s suffrage, museums nationwide are marking the anniversary with a wide range of initiatives. This panel focuses on collections in Washington, DC, both as the city where the historic legislation passed in 1920 as well as the site of a continued push for progress for all women. Inspired by the National Gallery of Art’s forthcoming Women 20/20 installations and the Smithsonian Institution’s Because of Her Story project, this session seeks to explore methods of telling alternate histories of art in museum collections that have a significantly low proportion of works by women artists, and an even lower proportion of works by women of color. How might we emphasize other roles, such as patrons, subjects, donors, and dealers of art? Can an increased focus on cataloguing, provenance research, and digital tagging or mapping reveal hidden or anonymous women who are part of a work’s story? Can we foreground mediums other than oil painting, such as sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts, and time-based media? How might we rethink collecting practices (and priorities) in order to build more diverse national collections? How do we bridge the gap between institutional traditions and our aspirations for greater inclusivity? This session will explore academic and curatorial perspectives on decentering traditional paradigms, developing alternative parameters of taste and quality, and forging a new model of producing an expansive history of art in the nation’s collections.

Word and Image in the Studio Practice
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: International Association of Word and Image Studies

Véronique Plesch, Colby College
Email Address(s):
veronique.plesch@colby.edu

Artistic practice is of course fundamentally exploratory; but what role does the verbal play in this exploration? From artist statements to talks, and from grant applications to teaching, how do artists conceive of a verbal expression meant to convey a visual body of work? What verbal expressions, both from the artist and from readings in literature, criticism, philosophy, etc., enter into the creative process and with what goals in mind? And finally, how does the awareness of the difference between verbal and visual discourses help in this exploratory endeavor?

“Only a Closed Book”: Monolingualism and Contemporary Art in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

Foad Torshizi, Rhode Island School of Design and Maryam Athari,
Email Address(s):
torshizi@risd.edu
maryamathari2021@u.northwestern.edu

The discursive landscape of Western metropolitan art criticism and curatorial practice is dominated by a monolingualism that assimilates the aesthetic diversity of non-Western art to its own frames of legibility. This monolingual attitude lacks the sensibilities to recognize those practices and objects of art that articulate meaning, value, and desire according to their own worlds, both linguistic and cultural. Subject to trite overpoliticization, contemporary Middle Eastern and North African art is regularly expected to inform viewing publics about the plight of the region in terms dictated by the West.
This panel seeks to look beyond the boundaries of monolingualism to address the following concerns: How have artists from the MENA region resisted the monolingualism of Western institutions? What happens when this resistance manifests in a grammar that may be illegible to the discursive frame that reduced the non-West in the first place? To what degree does the ethos of “benevolence” among the First World public determine the distribution of institutional attention to artists from outside the West? What are the horizons for studying contemporary art of the MENA region without limiting this geography to local expressions that putatively hold no claim to universality? Beyond the indubitable challenges of textual and cultural translation, how does monolingualism regulate the relevance or irrelevance of art-historical knowledge? Is it possible to broadly reshape the uneven landscape in which, as Timothy Brennan has warned us, “one knows the other and the other sees in the one only a closed book”?

ART AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT IN AFRICA: PUBLIC SPACE VS COMMON SPACE, ARTISTS AS MEMBERS OF AFRICAN SOCIAL PARLIAMENT

Hugues Humen Tchana, University of Maroua
Email Address(s):
abumen2000@yahoo.fr

Although different African countries have diverse histories which translate into different memories and arts, Africa still have share emotional solidarity on key historical events such as colonialism slave trade, migrant labour, violence-shared memories and essences of the arts. In Africa, one of the many roles that arts/artists play is to capture the problems of the society through their visual expressions, thus stimulating discussions on relevant socio-cultural issues to influence a positive change in their respective communities. This is pivotal in defining the essence of arts in contemporary Pan-African society. Thus, art is used to create that space of engagement in the spaces of silence and of gaps; as a space of possibility where we can negotiate a richer knowing.

This panel will focus on the contemporary artists, as members of the Pan-Africa’s social parliament particularly for the role they usually play in contributing to the dialogue on national issues of crucial importance through their works. we must think of the encounter of Africa on two levels including the encounter of Africa with herself (her memory, her wounds, her heterogeneity) and the encounter of Africa with the world. The panel will grapple with the following questions:

How art holds the space to have a connection between history and memory?
How can we tell our own stories through visual arts?
How African art have to dialogue?
How to negotiate encounters?
where does this encounter take place? In "public space" or "common space"?
What can be the terms of urgent negotiations?

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory at 50

Jordan M. Rose, University of California, San Diego and Anthony E. Grudin, University of Vermont
Email Address(s):
jmrose@ucsd.edu
agrudin@uvm.edu

Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory turns 50 in 2020. Published the year after Adorno’s death in 1969, the book remains one of the most powerful critiques of art and philosophical aesthetics ever written. Yet it is undeniably a 20^th-century work. It has the 20^thcentury in mind. The extent to which Aesthetic Theory illuminates our contemporary moment is of necessity a matter of dispute. Surely Adorno wouldn’t disagree – Aesthetic Theory is nothing if not specific and partisan. This session, conceived in part as a celebration of Adorno’s achievement (alas, one he never quite finished), asks the following questions: What is to be gained by reading Aesthetic Theory 50 years after it first appeared? To what end ought we – can we – read it? What have we still to learn from it? How does or doesn’t Aesthetic Theory help us to understand the work of art today? Are there ways in which the contemporary political climate, and the rise of nationalist and fascist tendencies with in it, makes Adorno’s magnum opus more relevant now that it has been in decades?

Arthurian legend in American Art

Anne R. Norcross, Kendall College of Art and Design and Rebecca Jeffrey Easby, Trinity Washington University
Email Address(s):
annenorcross@me.com
easbyr@trinitydc.edu

Visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago continue to be enthralled by a little-known painting by the artist Toby Edward Rosenthal entitled Elaine (1874). Its subject, the story of Elaine pining away for love of Sir Lancelot taken from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, was already popular in Britain, but took America by storm. When Rosenthal’s Elaine was exhibited in Boston and San Francisco, thousands waited in long lines to get a glimpse of the painting, and it received a gold medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. In the United States, Elaine clubs were formed, the demand for Tennyson’s verses skyrocketed, and Elaine cigars and copies of an Elaine waltz, which was composed in honor of Rosenthal’s painting, were widely sold. This session seeks papers that explore the American Arthurian tradition. Papers might consider some of the following questions: Why did Arthurian characters and motifs gain popularity in the late 19th century? What made the subject or legend so appealing to American viewers? What did Arthurian legend, or more broadly the medieval past, offer Americans in the late 19th century? How do the Arthurian subjects found in American art compare and/or relate to their British counterparts? Does this sudden popularity of Elaine as a subject have any relevance to any other literary or social issues in American society at the time? Papers discussing a variety of media including but not limited to painting, sculpture, illustration, comics, advertisements and film will be considered.

Emerging Subjects: Portrait and Type in the Americas, 1840s-1910s

Phillip Troutman, The George Washington University
Email Address(s):
trout@gwu.edu

Scholars exploring the “slave portrait” in early modern Europe and colonial America have revealed it to be more paradox than oxymoron, occupying vexed territory shaped not only by convention and stereotype, but also idiosyncratic interactions among artists, sitters, and audiences. This panel extends that inquiry into the nineteenth and early twentieth century Americas. The explosion of print culture and genre painting brought many marginalized groups into the visual arts for the first time, but also promulgated a suite of tropes delimiting the depiction of race, gender, class, religion, and sexuality. Could socially and politically vulnerable individuals break through those representational constraints and emerge as pictorial subjects in their own right? These papers explore this question along the spectrum from portrait to type, a broad cultural space blurring the idiosyncratic and the generic. How could portraitists’ use of conventions empower or undermine the signaling of individual sitters’ subjectivity? How did artists, illustrators, and publishers exploit portraiture’s realistic gestures to produce stereotypes authenticating social prejudice? Could image makers instead work through or against generic types to invoke the subjectivity of real persons? When and how did subjects actively participate in this process, revealing an awareness of how they might be perceived as individuals or as representatives of a group? In what ways did they use or respond to finished works, whether commissioned by themselves or others? Four case studies pursue these questions in paintings, prints, drawings, illustrations, and photographs produced or circulated in North and Central America between 1840 and 1920.

Framing Black Paintings: Histories and Legacies in the American 20th Century

Nicole Georgopulos, State University of New York at Stony Brook and Amy Rahn, University of Maine
Email Address(s):
nicole.georgopulos@stonybrook.edu
amy.rahn@maine.edu

From the nineteenth century onward, artists from Francisco de Goya to Norman Lewis have produced series of works they called “black paintings.” Now popularly associated with the pantheon of mid-twentieth-century abstract painters such as Joan Mitchell and Jackson Pollock, and through exhibitions like Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella (Haus der Kunst, 2006-07), black paintings now occupy a critical position in American Modernism and the history of painting at large. Yet, as pervasive as the terminology has become, black paintings’ rich lineage has only begun to be fully articulated. Recent discussions of blackness and black abstraction have enriched political and artistic consideration of works and exhibitions by artists like Kerry James Marshall and Glenn Ligon, deepening the historical and cultural questions posed by black paintings.

This session includes papers that reconsider twentieth-century American black paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Wally Hedrick. These papers consider these works' affective and rhetorical resonances in terms of race, opticality and invisibility, language, and political action, framing a selection of the many valences that surround black paintings’ powerful presence in modern painting.

From Canvas to Stage: The Visual Artist and Opera Scenography

Corrinne Chong, Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and Hannah Chan-Hartley, Independent musicologist
Email Address(s):
corrinnecareens@gmail.com

Visual artist-opera collaborations such as Dalí’s Salome (Covent Garden, 1950), Chagall’s Magic Flute (Metropolitan Opera, 1967), David Hockney’s Turandot (Lyric Opera of Chicago, 1992), and William Kentridge’s Wozzeck (Salzburg Festival, 2017) attest to the enduring influence of Wagner’s ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk and, more generally, to the appeal that the musical stage has held—and continues to hold—for painters and sculptors since the start of the early modernist generation. This interdisciplinary panel examines the artist’s role as opera scenographer—one which involves the orchestration and manipulation of space, architectonic structures, costumes, props, lighting, and images; in short, the visual elements of the performance environment. Inevitably, the artist’s aesthetic language and subjective lens shape the scenographic realization of the operatic work. The outcome is an interpretation which can either complement or challenge the authorial intention, whether it be textual and/or musical. Furthermore, the artist’s scenographic vision can align with or disrupt spectators’ expectations of the production. These underlying tensions can provoke polarizing critical responses.

Papers might consider: the impact of “artist interventions” on the operatic stage and the various ways in which these have sought to stimulate and invigorate the existing repertory; an artist’s idiosyncratic reading of the original dramaturgical intentions for a particular work; the appropriation of art historical imagery in the scenic tableau; and the implications of the increased presence of visual artists in the field of opera scenography. This panel particularly welcomes papers that incorporate perspectives across the spectrum of visual culture, musicology, and theatre studies.

How to Mythicize a Plague: Archetypal Images of HIV/AIDS

Lauren Ashley DeLand, Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta and Alisa Swindell,
Email Address(s):
delan104@umn.edu
aswind2@uic.edu

How to Mythicize a Plague: Archetypal Images of HIV/AIDS

Seeking to render an invisible disease comprehensible, mass media and medical establishments in the first two decades of the United States AIDS epidemic presented “carriers” of HIV and AIDS as archetypal figures identifiable by way of their gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Yet even as artistic, literary, and activist responses combated this social partitioning, so did their contributions take the form of archetypal roles, including the saintly gay man suffering through his illness; the self-sacrificing lesbian caretaker; the mother as vector, and the dangerously duplicitous bisexual. This session will consider the narrativization of HIV/AIDS that persists across a broad spectrum of artistic responses to the epidemic, and analyze its dimensions in art and scholarship at the height of the crisis and to the present day. How were archetypes of people with HIV and AIDS forged, subverted, maintained, and shifted? Who is mourned and who is celebrated in recent, classicizing exhibitions including Art AIDS America? How are these curatorial decisions an outgrowth of narratives formed in those early years? We welcome papers from a variety of disciplines including performance, media, cultural, gender, queer, and critical race studies. Possible topics might include: the prevalence of healthy, white male subjects in narratives about HIV/AIDS and the contrasting absence of empathic depictions of black women and lesbian, bisexual, and trans subjects; discourses of pleasure coexisting with HIV/AIDS; the trope of the angelic dying body; ball culture and HIV/AIDS in popular representations; and the performativity of AIDS activism.

Latinx Archives: Art, Counterhistories, and Critical Speculation

Deanna Ledezma, University of Illinois at Chicago and Tamara Valdez, University of Illinois at Chicago
Email Address(s):
deanna.ledezma@gmail.com
becerravaldez@gmail.com

Beyond their function as repositories for documents and records, archives are sites of knowledge production, intervention, and narrative transformation. For Latinx artists and art historians, as well as scholars and professionals specializing in Latinx art, the power and potential of the archive is made visible not only in its histories of exclusion and colonial conquest, but also in its orientation toward the future. In its attention to speculation as a mode of engagement and imagining historical possibility, this panel draws upon historian Saidiya Hartman’s conceptualization of “critical fabulation” as a means of “straining against the limits of the archive.”

How have contemporary Latinx artists worked toward decolonizing the archive? Given the problematic rhetoric of archival recovery and discovery, how do Latinx artists and scholars recuperate and reclaim these terms? How have histories and personal experiences of migration and diaspora affected the availability of public and private Latinx archival materials, and what strategies have artists, scholars, and curators deployed in the physical absence of these archives? How are community-built and artist-run archives addressing issues of public accessibility and the inclusion of previously untold Latinx histories and narratives? How have Latinx artists engaged with the materiality of the archive? Seeking an interdisciplinary dialogue, this panel invites submissions of academic papers and performative presentations from scholars, creative practitioners, and archive, library, and museum professionals. Papers and presentations on born-digital Latinx art archives and developments in the digital humanities are also encouraged.

Paradoxes of Presence
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Northern California Art Historians

Justin Underhill, University of California, Berkeley and Whitney M. Davis, University of California
Email Address(s):
justinhunderhill@gmail.com
wmdavis@berkeley.edu

The phenomenology employed in art history, visual studies and related disciplines tends to assume that the principle effect of presence or presencing involves animacy, life-likeness, lifeliness (Lebendigkeit), among other ‘reality effects’. While this (the appearing of appearance) is certainly part of the story, there are additional dimensions of presence to consider, especially those concerning the disappearance of the appearing. This panel seeks to explore inversions, negations, and other aporia that inherently accompany presence. For example, when the illusion of animated like-likeness becomes perceptually apparent a beholder may come to experience the artifact in an entirely new register of significance. Historical examples can be drawn from arts and visual cultures regardless of historical period or geographic locale. We are especially interested in papers that might address foundational historiographies of presence and its paradoxes in art historical and related discourses.

Politics of Art in Public Spaces
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: European Postwar and Contemporary Art Forum

Sandra Uskokovic, University of Dubrovnik and Boris Bakal, Shadow Casters
Email Address(s):
sandra.uskokovic@gmail.com
bacaci.sjenki@gmail.com

Post-communist countries after the fall of their oppressive regimes used to dream about a new, more human society. However, most of the EU countries as well as US– to a greater or lesser extent – have experienced neoliberal forms of capitalism that partially cutback former liberties, and through economic exploitation reduced public spaces. This increasing loss of public spaces Sloterdijk has called the "asynodic constitution" of contemporary society.

In the context of crisis of democracy today, this session invites art works that react to the detrimental transformation of public space and sphere from diverse cultural and historical, discursive and socio-political perspectives. It is a pursuit that is searching for particular public areas and practices in relation to power structures of art world, looking at transnational processes of subjectification and community building.

In time and place in which experience of public spaces is generally mediated by ownership and finances, a site is open for practices of mediation that show complex social experiences of the public space in more creative and palpable manner. By enhancing socio-political subversion of their art in public spaces, artists reacted to neoliberalization and privatization of cities, marketization of life sphere that were historically always outside market parameters, thus discerning the power of experience of the place created in public interest.

This session could be viewed as a product of shared public spatial field in which interactions of artist will produce opinions, ideas, values and practices that show and enhance new models of existence and art production in public space.

Teaching Design in an Age of Interaction

Brandon Waybright, George Fox University
Email Address(s):
bwaybright@georgefox.edu

The foundational courses emphasize print design, learning code feels like learning a foreign language, designers grow frustrated when forced to spend their time in research and content creation, the holy trinity of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign offers only marginal help, new tools keep emerging and changing, and somehow, often with only a single course focused on the web or interaction, design programs across the country are expected to produce students primed and ready to enter an industry that assumes their readiness to construct and craft web sites, apps, and interactive experiences.

What do we do when faced with the goal of preparing students to work in a field that requires at least a basic understanding of code, information organization, interaction theory, content production, and basic page layout? Where do we begin? How do we craft a course or design a curriculum that provides students with the necessary foundation while also allowing creative space for experimentation and its accompanying trial and error?

This session will provide space for a discussion of the ways that educators teach web and interaction design as well as ways educators measure and encourage student learning. Examples of successes and failures, projects and outcomes, curriculum revisions and novel processes are welcome. Considerations of content, resources, strategies, technologies, and prompts will be explored. The panel will preserve time at the end for open discussion and strategizing with all attendees.

Archive Unsettled: Indigenous Materials as Travellers, Ancestors and Cultural Belongings

Gloria J Bell, McGill University
Email Address(s):
gloria.bell@mcgill.ca

Drawing inspiration from Seneca historian Arthur Parker who described First Nations wampum as an “ancient archive” for Indigenous peoples in 1916, this session proposal invites historical and theoretical papers investigating Indigenous materiality and archival relations, beyond the colonial settler frame. Shifting from the margins of the art historical discipline, this panel will center Indigenous art and visual culture. How does engaging with Indigenous materials as ancestors as beyond-human kin, as travellers and cultural belongings, as mobile and sentient things, reframe our relationship with Indigenous artworks in colonial archives? For Indigenous and allied scholars, writing archival experiences into scholarship helps unsettle the expectations of colonial institutions and encourages respectful engagement with material things for Indigenous and settler communities. This session proposal welcomes papers from a variety of disciplines with an engagement in Indigenous arts, Indigenous histories and archival dynamics.

Keywords: Indigenous materialities, wampum, tufting, beadwork, quillwork, sashes, travellers, ancestors, cultural belongings, indigenous-settler relations, colonial institutions, archival methods, material culture studies

Buddhist Modernism Across Asia: A Genealogy of Global Art

Sohl Lee, Stony Brook University (SUNY)
Email Address(s):
sohl.lee@gmail.com

Since their inception more than two millennia ago, Buddhism and Buddhist art have undergone cross-cultural pollination across inter-Asian, intra-Asian borders. While these international connections in Buddhist art have been productive in generating a transnational methodology in art history, little attention is given to the modern transformation of Buddhist art. This panel seeks to explore the intersection between Buddhist art (Buddhist world views, pluralism, cross-cultural histories, iconography, compositional logic, genres, and popular distribution platforms) and the epistemology of modern art and modernity (the division between the sacred and the secular, the avant-garde, categorization and canonization, curation and art education, and the expanded audience in new institutions) that emerged and crystalized amid the twentieth-century histories of nation-building, imperialist expansions, and postcolonial independence. Expanding the inherently transcultural history of Buddhist art into the twentieth century is how India and Japan from the continent’s two corners began to reconnect through the shared Buddhist heritage during the rise of Pan-Asianism. Around that time, the epistemology of Asian art was rearticulated in America based on the study and exhibition of ink rubbings from the 6th-century cave temple in Central China. At once a religious belief and an aesthetic system, Buddhist legacy continued to reverberate across multiple regime changes and devastating wars, as seen in the Buddhist visual productions of colonial Korea and post-partition India that erupted vibrantly in times of transformation. Together, the panel poses crucial questions about heterotemporality of indigenous modernity and alternative imaginations for contemporaneity currently unaccounted in the methods of global art history.

Modern Architecture, Handicraft Design, and Twentieth-Century Tourism

Daniel E. Coslett, Western Washington University and Jessica Gerschultz, University of Kansas
Email Address(s):
dcoslett@gmail.com
jgersch@ku.edu

The development of mass tourism during the twentieth century brought increasingly large numbers of travelers into contact with distant locales. Tensions between demonstrating modernity, offering expected levels of comfort, and representing host locations and peoples, produced mixed built environments charged with complex objectives. While references to “local” identities were at times achieved through regionalist approaches to modernism that incorporated elements of the vernacular, the decorative application of “traditional” handicrafts to structures, interiors, and furnishing was a popular means for such representation. Levels of theorization, authenticity, and inclusion regarding the use of handicrafts varied in different contexts and time periods, opening compelling questions regarding the definition, value, and purpose of handicraft in built environments as well as the gendering of roles and concepts designated as architectural or artisanal. Questions one might ask include the following: What elements of handicraft were deployed by modern architects in tourism settings, and why? How were crafts transformed, theorized, and modernized in the process of that deployment, and in what ways were they feminized? How did the use of handicraft shape narratives of identity that privileged specific histories, identities, mythologies, and marginalized others?

Members of this panel address intersections between modernist architecture and "locally" inspired handicraft from twentieth-century sites of tourism in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. In its totality the panel considers gender, power dynamics, colonialism, and collaborations between artisan and architect, as well as the current state of these sites.

Objects from elsewhere: Transcultural constructions of identity

Robert Wellington, Australian National University and Alex Thomas Burchmore, Australian National University
Email Address(s):
robert.wellington@anu.edu.au
alexander.burchmore@anu.edu.au

This session will consider the personal dimensions of transculturality revealed by our relationship with material culture, seeking to interrogate the role that objects from elsewhere can play in the construction of identity. Theories of transculturation have come to occupy a position of prominence in the study of art history, reflecting a growing desire to explore previously overlooked cultural connections and networks. Ideas of the transcultural have been used to great effect to dispute a traditional view of cultures as self-contained, homogeneous entities, as well as the persistent Eurocentrism that continues to haunt discussions of globalisation or global art history. Nevertheless, most art-historical studies present transculturality almost exclusively in collective terms, focusing on the overlapping of cultures and communities across self-imposed or externally enforced borders with little thought for more intimate aspects of transculturation.

Just as objects can instantiate the broad dimensions of transcultural identity in their movement between cultures, so they can also shed light on personal identity formation as material anchors for narratives of the self. This session aims to be trans-historical. We invite proposals for papers that might focus on (but will not be limited to): the incorporation of objects from elsewhere into local performances of identity; the multiple association of objects with memories of other times and places; the construction of collections; the significance of mementoes and souvenirs as vessels for remembrance of former selves; and artistic projects of rediscovery or recombination in which aspects of personal heritage are mobilised within composite visions of identity.

Postmodern Margins

Janina Marshall, Columbia University and Nicholas C Morgan,
Email Address(s):
jm2286@columbia.edu
ncm2136@columbia.edu

The art historical literature dedicated to postmodernism grows from a series of articles, exhibitions, and debates amongst artists, scholars, and curators articulated between 1977, when Artists Space hosted Douglas Crimp’s exhibition Pictures, and 1989, the year Ann Goldstein and Mary Jane Jacob opened A Forest Of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation at MOCA Los Angeles. Scholarship on this period has developed into two distinct branches, one linked to the temporal engagement of audience with performative artwork and the other emphasizing the critique of art institutions and mass media. This bifurcation undermines the significance of those who fall between the two, including artists incorporating subjective or affective content and those working in intermedia or in political collectives. How do these historically marginalized practices deform our understandings of postmodernism from within? How might attending to their minor narratives necessitate a rewriting of art historical genealogies of the period? Shedding light on artists, activists, and projects that currently lie at the border of postmodernism’s confines allows for a reassessment of still-dominant art historical origin stories: that Pictures art derives from Walter Benjamin’s notion of baroque allegory; that it can be directly traced to the post-studio practices of John Baldessari and Allan Kaprow; that it is always already inflected by readings of Baudrillard. We invite papers investigating artists, exhibitions, texts and spaces that have been, until now, unsung or peripheral, and especially presentations that examine interfaces between these marginal postmodernisms and feminist and queer politics.

Postwar Photography’s Institutional Histories

Josh M Ellenbogen, University of Pittsburgh and Adam D. Jolles, Florida State University
Email Address(s):
jme23@pitt.edu
ajolles@fsu.edu

During the decades after World War II, the configuration of institutional forces that shape photographic practice assumed their current form. Although some scholarship has already addressed photography's incorporation into the museum, this panel strives to broaden the frame. While retaining an interest in the museum’s role in shaping the medium, we also aim to consider additional institutional forces that have determined photography: the emergence of photo-criticism as a genre of writing, and the related insertion of photography into the dealer-critic system; the introduction of photography into higher-education programs (BFA, MFA, Communications, etc.); the role of corporations such as Kodak in guiding photography; the emergence of the history of photography as a subject in the academy; and changing practices in exhibiting photography. By developing these vantages on the medium, we hope to illuminate the broader constraints within which photographic artists have worked, and to which they have responded. This panel aims to develop an alternative perspective on photography in the years in which photographs began circulating as artworks.

Research Institutes and New Initiatives
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Research Institutes in Art History

Liza Kirwin, Deputy Director, Archives of American Art; ARIAH delegate and Nan Wolverton, American Antiquarian Society
Email Address(s):
kirwinl@si.edu
nwolverton@mwa.org

Research Institutes and New Initiatives

The Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH) exists to promote advanced research in the history of art and related disciplines. While ARIAH member institutions are celebrated for their residential fellowship programs, they also engage in a broad array of new initiatives aimed at increasing diversity in doctoral programs and university faculties; developing innovative models for teaching; encouraging interchange and collaboration among scholars internationally; and promoting innovative collection-based scholarship. This panel invites representatives from research institutes to share the background, development, and goals of their most innovative programs, as well as from participants who have benefited from such programs. Presenters will address the stakes of establishing new initiatives, as well as practical questions that research institutes face related to how they can best steward and support collection-based research in a digital age.

Rulers, Consorts & Mothers: Queens in the Long 18th Century
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: American Society for 18th Century Studies

Kristin M. O'Rourke, Dartmouth College
Email Address(s):
kristin.o'rourke@dartmouth.edu

Judging by the success of films like The Favourite to TV series like The Crown and Victoria, contemporary viewing audiences are fascinated by the lives and lifestyles of historical queens. These filmed portrayals fixate on queens' sexual behavior and offer voyeuristic pleasure in sumptuous sets and costumes. Politics and power relations are figured primarily through sexuality, maternity, and personal relationships. This panel hopes to probe the image and characterization of queenship in the long 18th century as portrayed in visual arts and popular culture of the time and in relationship to our own era. Did queens have as much (or as little) power as we see in these films? How did the relationship of queens to luxury industries influence public opinion? How did the structure of courts and queenship change visibly as the century moved towards revolution? Topics might include: the body of the queen vs. the king in art, literature and the popular press; propaganda and slander; dress, makeup or ornament; the politics of reproduction; divinity and corporeality; caricatures and portraits; political marriages and alliances; patronage of the arts and architecture.

Teaching in the Trenches: Pedagogical Strategies for the Teaching-Intensive Institution

Meghan Bissonnette, Colorado Mesa University
Email Address(s):
mbissonnette@coloradomesa.edu

Many well-known and lauded teaching resources are written by professors at large research universities or selective liberal arts colleges (i.e. Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do). This panel is designed for the rest of us—faculty (both full-time and adjunct) teaching art history and visual culture at teaching-intensive universities and colleges. Higher education in the fine arts is at a tipping point with a growing percentage of classes taught by graduate students and contingent faculty and the perceived irrelevance and resulting cuts to the fine arts and humanities. This situation magnifies the challenges particular to primarily undergraduate, teaching-intensive institutions: large course loads of 4/4 (or more) for full-time contracts, growing class sizes managed without any assistants, and the increasing enrollment of academically underprepared students, many of which may also come from underrepresented groups (first-generation, minority students, etc.). Presenters will share pedagogical strategies, in-class exercises, assignments, exams, and projects that engage students while addressing the challenges posed by working at teaching-intensive universities and colleges. What insights into teaching and learning can be gained from trying to just get by while teaching in the “trenches”?

The Body on Display: Art, Eugenics, and the Great Depression

Keri Watson, University of Central Florida
Email Address(s):
keri.watson@ucf.edu

Although many associate eugenics with Nazi Germany, the United States employed a broad-based eugenics program that continued well into the 1970s, and able-bodied bias exerted a strong influence on American society during the Great Depression. Discriminatory legislation, in the form of “ugly laws,” made it illegal for people with visible disabilities to be seen in public, and with the Supreme Court’s decision in Buck v. Bell (1927) that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” numerous states adopted statutes that allowed compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded.” Considered by the medical and political establishments as unfit for normal roles in society, people with disabilities were excluded from jobs provided by New Deal programs, which, according to the WPA Workers’ Handbook, were reserved for “able-bodied” Americans who were “certified by a local agency.” Politicians, inspired by the notion of American exceptionalism and justified by pseudo-scientific evidence, enacted laws to limit the civil liberties of those considered undesirable, many of whom were women and/or people of color, and public support for discriminatory legislation was buoyed by visual culture, which constructed people with disabilities as less than, other, and immoral. This session seeks papers that examine the influence of eugenics on Depression-era art and explore the ways in which the “Average American,” one who was naturalized as white, able-bodied, and heteronormative, was visualized during the 1930s to propel a eugenic political and cultural agenda that persists to this day. Of particular interest are papers that address the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and disability.

Anticolonial Open Knowledge: Digital Curation for the Pluriverse

Virginia Poundstone,
Email Address(s):
vpoundstone@gmail.com

The Creative Commons, an open access project that works to make copyright free works available online, has vastly expanded the potential for the public to engage with material deemed important cultural works. Yet, many of these works have complicated legacies. Unchallenged, such online material could ironically and unintentionally serve as a means of reinstating old modes of domination.

Museums have been experimenting with ways to establish connections with contemporary postcolonial communities, and to come to terms with their historical role in exploiting otherness and displaying the spoils of empire. Practices, such as through making all their public domain works available through the Creative Commons, have helped increase accessibility and decentralize works away from institutions themselves.

However, making these works accessible only addresses one part of the issue. These newly available digital collections have the possibility of further unpacking colonialism and including more voices, but only if there’s space to curate content into nodes of new oppositional works that resist systems of domination.

This is a call for papers (and call-to-action) on topics relating to what cultural knowledge we grant access and for whose benefit, whose interpretations of culture are privileged, and how to design structures of collective sharing in ways that resist Eurocentrism and neo-coloniality. We’re seeking papers that historically contextualize digital archival practices, examine how access to cultural knowledge can encourage new readings and new assemblages of meaning, and how open access can support Art and Historical scholarship inclusive of diverse viewpoints and Global Majority participation.

Beyond the Bestiary: Images of Fantastic Fauna in Afro-Eurasia

Petya Andreeva, Parsons, The New School
Email Address(s):
andreeva@sas.upenn.edu

Rapid environmental changes tend to trigger resettlements, large-scale migrations, and notable shifts in migration patterns. As they travel between cultural spheres, human actors are not only exposed to new artistic modes, but are also introduced to the topographical features of unfamiliar landscapes and the make-up of new ecosystems. Adaptations to both novel cultural environs and biological environments lead to new ways of envisioning and representing fauna in art. This panel explores the role of non-human actors, that is, fantastic images of composite animals in the making of visual cultures across Afro-Eurasia. The papers thus address the implications of various entanglements. Of utmost significance is the entanglement of the human maker and the non-human hybrid beast as a co-agent in the construction of a visual language. No less important is the relationship between humans and their sociopolitical settings: what makes communities manufacture fantastic visions of wildlife in funerary, court, ceremonial, literary, religious contexts? Do sedentary empires envision fantastic beasts differently from their nomadic neighbors? Whether implemented in portable art, illustrated manuscripts, or monumental architecture, zoomorphic images inform our understanding of the economy, collective memory, and cognitive responses of humans from various social structures and niches in society; as such, zoomorphic configurations can also serve as status or identity-signifiers. This panel looks at the construction, meaning and social lives of animal imagery which, via the Steppe and Silk Routes, spread across Afro-Eurasia, a supercontinent of diverse biota and climate conditions.

Black and Latinx Arts: Radical Solidarity and Racial Intersections
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: US Latinx Art Forum

Kaelyn Rodriguez, UCLA and John Vincent Decemvirale, UC Santa Barbara
Email Address(s):
krodriguez018@ucla.edu
jvdecemvirale@umail.ucsb.edu

Participants in this panel reflect on the rich histories and shared practices between African American and Latinx artists since the 1960s. Scholars like Kellie Jones and Karen Mary Davalos have researched and recorded the groundbreaking creative cultures of the Black Arts and the Chicanx Art Movements respectively. The artistic collaborations that have taken place between these movements have too often been neglected as they fall at the intersection of Black and Latinx communities. This intersection is a unique strength and important point of historical and artistic connection. Presentations will explore a range of such projects and practices including muralism, performance art and arts activism that historically aggrieved people of color have used collaboratively to consolidate and advance cultural and artistic capital within a competitive and economically driven art world. We seek presenters from diverse backgrounds who can expand and enrich this already dynamic discussion with their knowledge.

Claims on Home: Figures of Unbelonging

Kirsten Scheid, Clark Art Institute-Williams College and Todd Porterfield, New York University
Email Address(s):
ks28@aub.edu.lb
todd.porterfield@nyu.edu

This session investigates artistic, critical, and historigraphic practices that make claims on home, an urgent and long-standing issue with disciplinary and international consequence. Movements to repatriate looted objects and claims to return exiled peoples sometimes suppose an integral bond to home. Opposed to the dispossessed and the transient, home sits on the side of possession, permanence, and immutability. Has it always been and must it be the case? What are the ethical stakes in starting histories of art with a given, preset home?

We present papers on artistic and art historical practices from multiple perspectives. In both Lebanon and Algeria, as in "France-proper," for example, claims to be at home were made through art while impossible in other realms. More contemporary concerns interrogate artistic strategies that stand for home and signify at-homeness in currently colonized lands or sites of dispossession. How does art renew standing claims of affiliation with a "home audience" or broadcast new claims in an unfamiliar context? What formal strategies and economic arrangements effectuate home-making?

We know that art historians and curators have long deemed origin and provenance as essential markers and determinants of character, meaning, and value. How do those points of claimed origin fix notions of identity and presumptions of belonging? Does one start Vietnamese or Palestinian art history with the pre-colonial "lost homeland" or with the later exchanges that articulated the right to the homeland? The recent flux in discourses around home-lands offers an opportunity to reevaluate art narratives, vocabularies, and methodologies.

Critical Issues in Indigenous American Art and Visual Culture Roundtable Discussion

Annika Kelsey Johnson, Joslyn Art Museum and Ximena Alexandra Gomez, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Email Address(s):
annikakjohnson@gmail.com
xgomez@umass.edu

This roundtable will focus on the various, asymptotic approaches employed in recent scholarship on the indigenous art and visual culture of the Americas. In light of the broadening of the “American” art category to encompass Native American, Latin American, and the Black Atlantic, we seek to bring together specialists of the indigenous art and visual culture of the regions now known as North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean, and begin a conversation that has been stymied and, we contend, made necessary by the enduring legacies of colonial hegemony.

We propose two main objectives: First, to identify the obstacles inherent to the study of indigenous American visual culture, including genocide, the suppression of native epistemologies, archival erasure, the loss of material culture, the environmental impact of stolen lands, and multigenerational trauma. The discussion will be particularly interested in understanding how the legacies of colonizing powers have impacted the represented geographic subfields of study. Second, to share the methodological and theoretical approaches employed in scholarship on indigenous art and visual culture. The first part of a larger conversation, this roundtable will be a critical intervention in the shaping of a quickly-growing field.

Exploring Fascism in American Art

Kay Wells, UW-Milwaukee
Email Address(s):
katharine.wells@gmail.com

While important new scholarship on the history of American fascisms has emerged in recent years, panels on art and fascism have still failed to consider the American context. This session asks whether Cécile Whiting’s 1989 assertion—that there were no fascist artists in America, only anti-fascist ones—still rings true. Whether or not American artists identified as fascist, how did they engage with the ideologies, aesthetics, techniques, and visual cultures of fascism?

This panel investigates how the history of American art intersects with fascism, broadly defined. Specific topics include the visual culture of Jim Crow; the fascist ideologies of modernist architecture in the US; and the construction and reception of fascist art in Latin America. In keeping with CAA’s collaboration with the Committee of Women in the Arts, this panel also addresses the role of women in producing and promoting art aligned with fascist politics, as well as how constructions of gender and sexuality intersected with those of race, ethnicity, class, age, and disability in furtherance of fascist ideologies. In considering American situations outside of the United States and a wide range of art and visual culture, this panel begins to define what “fascist art” could mean in an American context.

Narrating for Future Cities

Janet Bellotto, Zayed University and Adina Hempel, Zayed University
Email Address(s):
janet.bellotto@zu.ac.ae
adina.hempel@zu.ac.ae

Through media, international travel and trade, cities are linked to a large network that perhaps could even be considered as a giant global city. The development of a unique city identity today is largely impacted by the need to easily disseminate information through social media. The curated online identity of cities has shaped the urban culture and the presented narrative around important architecture, design and public art projects as ambassadors of the city’s cultural importance. The influence of 21st century technology therefore largely contributes to how the city is perceived while negating elements function and origin.
Chicago's 2016 Architecture Biennale’s “Vertical City” exhibit explored Chicago’s Tribune Tower Competition and the establishment of new narratives and concepts. In 2019, the biennale moves beyond buildings to view what circumstances shape the built environment. Overall as the Chicago Biennale aims to engage the public experience of architecture in a city where interdisciplinary projects have explored storytelling through its buildings, artists/designers/researchers/architects today use experiences and personal perspectives to shape an imagined city of the future. This panel aims to examine the development of the perceived and experienced identity of cities from an interdisciplinary angle. How are cities forced to narrate their history in this age of social media? What lens has been used in re-branding a city? How do other cities, with complex histories, deal with this development? How has this media impacted not only the identity or brand of a city but also the development of the creative industries and their cultural representations?

Rethinking Media and Process: Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in Art Foundations Education
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Foundations in Art: Theory and Education

Lauren Kalman, Wayne State University
Email Address(s):
lauren.kalman@wayne.edu

A version of the Bauhaus model of foundations education became ubiquitous in American institutions beginning in start of the 20^th century. Still in practice today, art foundations curricula emphasizes universal principals of design derived from the Bauhaus model. Does this notion of a universal set of rules set our curriculum up to be bias? This historic curriculum is almost 100 years old and built out of the Western canon, with its masculinist, Eurocentric focus and construction of the singular artist-genius paradigm. Are the concepts we teach truly universal?

What does it mean to deemphasize hand-skill and deep material/technical knowledge in favor of composition and concept development? Do material and process choices hold bias? The Western canon has excluded media and methods of making and therefore artists, because of a media’s association with a gender or ethnicity. Does this exclude a history and set of role models for our students? By bringing those marginalized media and makers to a central place in our classroom (rather than an art historic addendum to the Western canon) we can provide space for alternative narratives and role models?

In collaboration with College Art Association Education Committee, this panel seeks papers from individuals interested in discussing how diverse and inclusive practices can strengthen art foundations curricula.

Sensual Texts, Material Histories: Language in the Long Eighteenth Century

Elizabeth Bacon Eager, Southern Methodist University
Email Address(s):
eeager@smu.edu

Writing in 1781, English antiquarian Horace Walpole reflected on the Inka custom of knotted record-keeping known as the khipu, professing himself “so pleased with the idea of knotting verses...that if I were to begin life again, I would use a shuttle instead of a pen.” Going on to explore the linguistic implications of both the khipu’s feel and scent, Walpole’s discussion draws attention to concerns over the materiality of language in the eighteenth century. Over the course of the century, a burgeoning trade in encyclopedias, scientific atlases, and technical treatises gradually reordered the unruly logic of physical experience into a more systematized and largely textual form. In this context, the sensory capacity of language came increasingly under scrutiny. While a growing body of literature has sought to investigate this problem through the images that often accompany such texts, this panel explores the material form of the text itself. How did individual letter forms function as repositories of material knowledge? What can a material history of the word tell us about the relationship between language’s abstractions and sensory knowledge in the long eighteenth-century? Drawing inspiration from Walpole’s notion of the khipu as a “soft language,” this panel seeks contributions that explore the range of material practices through which text was produced in the eighteenth century—from the casting of type to the threading of needles. Papers that examine this notion of a tactile language from outside or in contact with the West are particularly encouraged.

Teaching on the Margin: Nepantleros and Borderlands Art Pedagogy

Christen Sperry Garcia, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Email Address(s):
christen.garcia@utrgv.edu

The border, as defined by Gloria Anzaldúa, is conceptually marked by an ideological site called nepantla—a space existing in-between worlds. Borderlands Art Pedagogy merges art with Anzaldúa’s concepts of nepantla, Coyolxauhqui (simultaneous incompleteness/wholeness), resistance, tension, and hybridity. This panel focuses on the intersection of borderlands and the visual arts as sites for pedagogy. We seek papers that explore the US/Mexico border through visual art in institutionalized and non-institutionalized pedagogy. Questions to consider include: how can the border be used as a site for learning through visual art? What are the tensions existing between education, art, the border, and Latinx issues? How can the complexities of definition inherent in the border be conveyed to audiences at sites where the border is misrepresented or ignored? What is the relevance of Latinx, Chicanx and border art in problematizing the border wall, immigration, white supremacy, asylum-seeking, and xenophobia? Currently, what methodologies are and can be employed pertaining to the intersection of the border, art, and pedagogy? How can Borderlands Art Pedagogy be used to affirm under-recognized voices such as those of Central Americans, indigenous people, and Black Latinx communities? In terms of canonical disciplinary delineations, what ruptures do the intersection of art, pedagogy, and the border generate for educators, artists, and scholars? In examining these questions, projects and papers that focus on objects, workshops, and/or performance will be given preference.

The Art History Generalist: Challenges, Strategies and the Future of Teaching Art History

Sarah E. Diebel, University of Wisconsin-Stout
Email Address(s):
diebels@uwstout.edu

As art history departments shrink and specialist positions decline in colleges and universities it is more likely that new PhDs entering the job market (or even seasoned professionals seeking to change positions) will have to take on a “Generalist” teaching post, which is typically not seen as a plum position in academia. Generalists face significant challenges in trying to maintain an active research and publication record while also performing at a high level as they teach across a broad spectrum of areas, and deal with heavy course loads and large class sizes. The impact such a position can have on one’s career and scholarly output are seldom acknowledged by college and university administrations, either for adjuncts or for tenure-track faculty, who must routinely over-perform to ensure renewal of contracts. Neither are these challenges often addressed within the larger academic community. Meanwhile, generalists perform a vital function because in teaching a broad range of topic and period courses they are often the “front line,” introducing a general population of students to art history and fostering an appreciation for the arts. As generalist positions increase there will be a need for re-thinking how their work can be fairly assessed and properly valued within academia and the field of art history at large. This session proposes to invite papers that address the challenges art history generalists face and that offer strategies and solutions for maintaining an active scholarly identity and advancing in one’s career, even while feeling stretched thin by teaching responsibilities.

The Queer Feminist 1980s

Sarah Louise Cowan, University of California, Berkeley and Emma Rose Silverman, Smith College
Email Address(s):
sloucowan@gmail.com
esilverman@smith.edu

Until recently, the 1980s in the United States existed largely in art historical narratives as a period of cultural production inflected by a widespread conservative turn. The rightward shift in national politics, exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s successful presidential campaign and the onset of the Culture Wars, seemed to signal defeat for the radical artistic practices that had emerged out of liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. For histories of feminist art, the 1980s are positioned between the vibrancy of the so-called Second and Third Waves.

This panel joins a growing body of scholarship that looks anew at the 1980s, focusing on the ways that queer artists negotiated feminism in the art and visual culture of that decade. Topics include Sarita Johnson’s images of Black lesbian families; alternative media and HIV/AIDS activism in the work of Zoe Leonard; and the legacy of critic Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation. In centering the contributions of queer feminist artists, the panel reframes the 1980s as a vibrant period when marginalized artists innovated forms of critique and methods of display, enabling the formation of new cultural communities.

The fragmented self: Objects from elsewhere and the search for new identities

Robert Wellington, Australian National University and Alex Thomas Burchmore, Australian National University
Email Address(s):
robert.wellington@anu.edu.au
alexander.burchmore@anu.edu.au

Second session following abstract from "Objects from elsewhere: transcultural constructions of identity"

Resonating Reality: ARTISTS in AR/VR

Kathleen H. Ruiz, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst - 110 8th Street
Email Address(s):
Ruiz@Rpi.edu

As virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and multiple reality (MR) emerge as a medium within the artist toolkit, an increasing number of artists are expressing the human condition, changing our perceptions and raising issues about increasing our capacity for empathy with others. However, the many real world issues and logistics of exhibiting AR/VR/MR artworks in museums, galleries and alternative spaces need to be addressed. Will new spaces be created to show these emerging works? Bringing the voice of the artists, curators and sponsors into these dialogs is critical in laying a foundation for the ongoing development and presentation of art in this medium.

Important and relevant questions arise such as how do organizations explore the many emerging and established artists who work in the medium of AR/VR/MR and how do they bring their work to the public? What are the potentials and the parameters of curation, funding, sponsorship, exhibiting, and critiquing VR Art exhibitions? What happens to our innate perceptual senses? How do we archive the history of this work? How can the work be distributed, experienced, resonated, and interpreted for digital natives, as well as others, and those of varying economic, age groups, abilities, and cultural backgrounds? Practical issues surface such as how can artists afford to work in this medium that requires both creative as well as technical knowledge? What new narrative structures are being be formed? How can we ensure that the voices of historically marginalized people be heard and expressed?

Animating Research: Puppets and Performing Objects in the Academy

Felice C. Amato, Boston University
Email Address(s):
felice.amato@mac.com

There is something compelling about a puppet when it shows up unexpectedly; they are natural disruptors. Puppetry is experiencing renewed popularity across the world. In contemporary art practice, they often blur the boundaries between visual art, theater, and performance. Puppetry, and the broader category of object performance, includes a range of practices including the manipulation of shadows; masks; scrolls; object, figure, and toy theater; and hybrids of these.

Often associated with narrative, this panel will explore other potential ways that puppetry and related forms can find a place in the academy. While still an exceptional strategy for storytelling, object theater can activate new approaches to both research and theory, as well as the communication of scientific and scholarly work. Inherently collaborative, transdisciplinary, and relational, puppetry can bring disparate academic practices together and create a catalyst for community. Puppets allow for non-verbal thinking and telling. They are powerful tools for arts-based research and design thinking. They insist on the value of play and metaphorical thinking. They activate and engage not only the intellect, but also the affect through humor, suspense, and empathy.

The panel will consist of individual presentations and discussion. As the chair, I will present on a course I recently co-taught at Boston University called “Thinking through Puppets and Performing Objects: Using Theatrical Tools to Communicate the Complex, the Abstract, and the Technical,” in which undergraduate students created research-based puppet pieces and assisted doctoral students in crafting short performances based on their research, culminating in a doctoral puppet slam.

Claims on Home: Museums and Art’s History Unbound

Todd Porterfield, New York University and Kirsten Scheid, Clark Art Institute-Williams College
Email Address(s):
todd.porterfield@nyu.edu
ks28@aub.edu.lb

Part 2 of "Claims on Home"

This session investigates artistic and historiographic practices that make claims on home, an urgent and long-standing issue with disciplinary and international consequence. Movements to repatriate looted objects and claims to return exiled peoples sometimes suppose an integral, historical, and even natural bond to home. Indeed, home would seem to be on the side of possession, permanence, and immutability, and opposed to the dispossessed and the transient. Has it always been and must it be the case? While there are clear art historical stakes in finding origins or acknowledging intended audiences, what are the ethical stakes in starting histories of art with a clear sense of a given, preset home? The session brings together pressing cases from the contemporary Middle East to challenge art historical reliance on the notion of "home," both conceptually and institutionally.

Constructions of 'Place' in South and Southeast Asia
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: American Council for Southern Asian Art

Lisa N. Owen, University of North Texas and Melody N. Rod-ari, Loyola Marymount University
Email Address(s):
lowen@unt.edu
melody.rodari@gmail.com

Structural and rock-cut sites across South and Southeast Asia have been examined by art historians as sacred places of worship, as spaces for economic and social exchange, as expressions of royal power and patronage, and/or as locations for lay and ascetic interactions. While these different approaches prompt us to ask different kinds of questions, they converge on how identities of ‘place’ are constructed. For this Soliciting Contributors session, we would like to invite individual papers that address the nuances of ‘place’ articulated and/or conceived at sites in South and Southeast Asia.For example, place can be construed of as ‘home’ (to an individual, resident, community, and/or the divine) and place can be a destination, a temporary locale, or be miraculously manifested (for a visitor, pilgrim, ascetic, and/or the divine). Place might also be defined primarily through performative actions (rituals, renovations, acts of remembrance and/or memorialization, negotiations with past identities, and/or imaginative acts) that equally contribute to a site’s identity. Specifically, what are the place-making activities that create and characterize a site? We also welcome papers that address place as having layered identities that reveal the complexities of lived and/or desired experiences. With this line of inquiry, we can ask how sites are made more meaningful. By recognizing the fluidity of ‘place’—that it is a construct that is constantly redefined and reimagined—the papers in this session will contribute to a reassessment of how select sites in South and Southeast Asia have been studied and understood.

Democracy and Disruption: Systems Theory and Conceptual Art in the long 1960s

Dawna L. Schuld, Texas A&M University and Christine A. Filippone, Millersville University
Email Address(s):
dlschuld@tamu.edu
christinefilippone@yahoo.com

This panel explores territory consistently overlooked and unaddressed in the current revival of “systems aesthetics.” The term was already laden with tension when, in 1968, Jack Burnham deployed it to address the need for “precise socio-technical models” of analysis in an increasingly technocratic world. He argued that in the hands of artists, systems theory could be put to different, even unruly, ends. Drawing on the open systems of biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, he foregrounded the human element, social systems, and ecology. Indeed systems thinking became an empirical description and heuristic model for process-oriented, multi-sensory, collaborative, performative works that not only engaged, but infiltrated social and political contexts, including works by Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, Julio Le Parc, Graciela Carnevale, Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke, On Kawara, Cildo Meireles, Marcel Broodthaers, Trisha Brown, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Betsy Damon, and Robert Smithson.

In emphasizing the social aspect of systems aesthetics we aim to displace the presumptive source of agency from a cybernetic control to networks of participants encountered along diverging systemic pathways. We seek papers that de-center the techno-centric narrative so as to ask whether or how such a methodology was productively—or even disruptively—applied in marginalized arts communities and in other cultures.

Possible topics for discussion include:

The parallel history of systems aesthetics in South America
Use of systems aesthetics in de-centering gendered norms
Systems analysis of labor, maintenance, de-skilling, and communication in art
Art as disruption and/or subversion of political systems.
Eco art as remedy for industrial degradation

Flesh and Circuit: Rethinking Performance and Technology

EL Putnam, National University Ireland, Galway and Conor McGarrigle, Dublin Institute of Technology
Email Address(s):
el.putnam@nuigalway.ie
conor.mcgarrigle@dit.ie

The relationship between performance and technology has received increased attention since the end of the 20^th century. The live, embodied, material, and interactive qualities of performance have made it a notable means of exploring the creative potential of technological engagement acting as a critical vector for revealing and resisting the technological colonization of everyday life. The innovative collaborations of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) during the 1960’s with artists such as Yvonne Ranier and Robert Rauschenberg, Sterlac’s extreme body modifications, Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s poetic technology, and Blast Theory’s critical interactive productions, have mapped the advances in technology and opened new creative fields to explore. However, there are still some significant oversights in regard to the pervasive and intimate nature of technological tracking, surveillance, and behavioral modification of algorithmic governmentality. Currently, technological embodiment assumes new forms tied to data assemblages of unprecedented scope and granularity. The body is commodified as data to be exchanged, surveilled, and controlled in algorithmic regimes of governance and as raw material for machine learning and AI. New normative assumptions are being hard-coded into data-driven algorithmic systems that amplify and consolidate bias, which include disability, nonbinary gender, queer identity, and race. Artists working with performance and technology are engaging with these exclusions, re-defining embodiment for the 21st century.This panel invites submissions from artists and scholars that rethink the relationship between performance and technology. Potential technologies to consider include: mobile tech, augmented and virtual reality, sensors, open source hardware and software, customized interactive platforms, robotics, and biotechnology.

Race Beyond the Human Body in the Long Eighteenth Century
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture

Danielle Rebecca Ezor, Southern Methodist University and Michael Feinberg, University of Wisconsin Madison
Email Address(s):
dezor@smu.edu
mfeinberg@gm.slc.edu

Attempts to ossify conceptions of race by creating visual affinities between race and bodies emerged as a motif during the Enlightenment era. Our studies of art, visual, and material culture depend on racialized constructions and assumptions about the human form such as Winckelmann's analysis of beauty that is grounded upon enwhitened sculptures of Greek boys. As Anne Lafont has recently argued, the study of visual and material culture is a “remarkably efficient tool” for understanding race. While Lafont’s research focuses primarily on depictions of the human, she also gestures toward the ways in which longer histories about color, light, shape, and depictions of fabrics played important roles in attempting to create race-based iconographies. Taking race less as a fixed iconography than as an elusive process that matters over time, this panel aims to investigate how objects and pictures that may not even be directly about race at all can problematize the relationship between race and the human form. How can the study of images and objects problematize or unsettle the triangulation about race, the human body, and the black/white binary? How does race matter, and how does it operate independently from the human figure?

State of the Art (History): Museum / Classroom

Karen D. Shelby, Baruch College, City University of New York and Michelle Millar Fisher, CUNY Graduate Center
Email Address(s):
karen.shelby@baruch.cuny.edu
michellemillarfisher@gmail.com

At the 1999 Clark Conference, The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, then museum curator (now director) Gary Tinterow suggested that “museums are offspring of the Enlightenment, and most curators are practitioners of that Enlightenment faith, empiricism .... For us...the author never died and the object still matters.” Twenty years on, the divisions and the moments of confluence between the academy and the museum, between classroom and gallery, have become far more complex than this statement suggests, proving not only a rich ground for research and discussion, but one of renegotiation and revolt.

Museums are spaces in which the visual collides with historical, political, economic, and geographic vectors. Like classrooms, they are social spaces, both constantly renewing, reshaping, and reevaluating relationships between objects, histories, and people. However, they are not always free to enter, and, as La Tanya Autry, Mike Murawski, Brian O’Doherty, and others, remind us, neither are they neutral spaces. As art and design historians, museum educators, and other stakeholders engage in pedagogical discussions around visual canons, how do we navigate, translate between, and connect museum and classroom spaces?

This session offers strategies for engaging, fostering, and facilitating discussions and interactions via the intersections between the classroom and the museum at all levels of Art History instruction. The session is facilitated by ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org (AHTR) alongside museum thought-leader respondents across a range of ideas and issues.

The Art Historical Canon Today

Amy R. Gansell, St. John's University and Ann T. Shafer, Harvard AKPIA
Email Address(s):
amygansell@yahoo.com
ann.shafer@gmail.com

The art historical canon is defined as a consensus of art – objects, monuments, buildings, sites, installations, performances, and more – that is considered to include the “best” and most representative works of world culture. As an arbiter of quality, today’s canon identifies and organizes so-called masterpieces of civilization by region and period, producing a timeline of art that structures survey textbooks and course syllabi. It provides our discipline with a common core, offering touchstones and bridging divisions. The canon, however, is not simply a list of “greatest hits,” but is a complicated, dynamic, and powerful phenomenon formed by questionable Western agendas and biases that it continues to propagate. Today, more than ever, the canon needs to be critically confronted and re-assessed as the face of our discipline.

In the wake of #MeToo-inspired interventions, intersectionality, post-colonial revision, the global turn, interdisciplinarity, cultural heritage destruction, public access to images on the Internet, digital pedagogies that replace textbooks, and other factors, art historians are moving away from traditional canon-tied narratives. But when a discipline diverges from its canon, what becomes of the discipline, and of its canon? What is to be done with the current, still dominant, canon? Critiqued for decades, but with little resolution, the canon stands at a crossroads, to be salvaged or transformed. How can today’s scholars, artists, educators, publishers, and museum professionals ethically and productively engage with and determine the canon’s future? This session is a call for reflection and for action.

The Present of the Future: Indigenous Futurisms in the Visual Arts

Suzanne Fricke, University of New Mexico , Yvonne N. Tiger, University of Lethbridge and Suzanne Kite, Concordia University
Email Address(s):
suzanne@fricke.co.uk
Tigery@uleth.ca
suzannekite@alum.calarts.edu

For at least two decades, a growing number of Indigenous artists have combined popular science fiction with Indigenous imagery and ideals, such as Bunky Echo-Hawk’s (Pawnee/Yakama) painting of Yoda wearing a feathered headdress, Jeffrey Veregge’s (Port Gamble S’Klallam) digital print of the Starship Enterprise executed in the distinctive Northwest Coast formline style, and Debra Yepa-Pappan’s digital print of Dr. Who’s TARDIS flying over Plains tipis. Indigenous Futurisms (IF), as defined by Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon, offers artists the visual vocabulary to construct a vision of the future based on the ideologies and aesthetics from previous generations. Predicated on the concept of biskaabiiyang, the Anishinaabemowin word for “returning to ourselves,” artists engage with “ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world.” (Dillon 2012) This field offers a narrative and visual language to address the aftermath of colonization, which includes the destruction of environments, disruption of lifeways, slavery, and imperialism, using rhetorical devices such as satire, parody, and irony to subvert the imperialist drive to erase indigenous peoples and histories. As the artist Skawennati (Mohawk) notes, IF offers a way “... to envision futures in which we are thriving [by] creating images of Indians in the future.” In this panel, we will address the theoretical framework of Indigenous Futurisms and consider how artists use technology, including Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, Indigenous philosophies, ethical frameworks, and Indigenous languages, to not only imagine the future but to create it.

Unfinished Aesthetics: Thinking through the Haphazard and the Incomplete in East Asian Art

Chun Wa Chan, The University of Hong Kong
Email Address(s):
gchanart@gmail.com

From relief sculpture in cave temples, to abstract paintings and calligraphy by contemporary artists, the unfinished as an aesthetic choice has recurred in East Asian art across times. As Vidya Dehejia and Peter Rockwell have argued, the aesthetic category of “finish” is a malleable concept that is predicated on social and historical conventions. This panel therefore invites papers that examine unfinished works in East Asia from ancient to contemporary times, as well as from a broad range of contexts. In particular, the panel asks: what factors determined the perimeters of refinement and fineness in East Asian art, and the reception of the incomplete? What purposes did unfinished works serve, and what kinds of discursive devices were deployed by artists or critics to justify that? How to theorize the unfinished in light of the traditions of emulation in literati art, sketching in court ateliers, or ritual efficacy in religious contexts? To what extent were unfinished works iconoclastic by challenging the judgement of taste, canons, and institutional practices? How did the unfinished complicate our understanding of labor, time, and the obligation of meaning in art? Taken together, how is one to reconceive a history of East Asian art when the unfinished entails not a disruption but a reassertion of creative agency? And how does the case of the unfinished speak to the practice of art history, a discipline that often preoccupies itself with unity, wholeness, and technical fineness?

Freezes and Thaws in the Socialist Bloc
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture

Yelena Kalinsky, Michigan State University and Adrian Barr, Winona State
Email Address(s):
yelena.kalinsky@gmail.com
ABarr@winona.edu

The twentieth century was marked by unprecedented change and political contestation. Revolutions were followed by retreats. Cultural efflorescences gave way to periods of cruel repression. In many national and regional contexts where freezes were followed by thaws, societies were faced with the task of exhuming and grappling with the past, or dancing with bones that were never fully buried. This session will consider artworks from any region of Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia that tried to recuperate, revivify, or re-engage cultural formations that had previously been rejected or suppressed. This could include, but is not limited to, the recuperation of historic avant-garde strategies in the 1960s–70s, post-1989 ‘ostalgia’, or the return of Cosmism and other forms of utopian thinking in the 2000s. Can we conceptualize such returns via the model, advanced by Hal Foster, of traumatic nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action? Or does the pervasive erasure of the past and the archaeological task of recovery demand new methodological frameworks sensitive to the specificities of the region’s political and cultural histories? How do we conceive an artistic chronology that is alternately marked by forced curtailment and belated, necessarily partial revivification? Does the revival of a past present a tool for political praxis, or does that past’s original excision render it inert, a museum piece for contemplation or nostalgia? We seek theoretically grounded papers that offer concrete examples of cultural freezes and thaws from the region that address these or other questions related to displacement, erasure, and return.

Material Translations in the Art of South Asia

Catherine M. Becker, University of Illinois at Chicago
Email Address(s):
cathbecker@yahoo.com

In crafting the canon of art from South Asia, art historical scholarship has tended to focus on key materials: stone, bronze, and mineral pigments, for example. Each is posited as a distinct mode of image production, requiring specific artistic skills. However, some of the earliest extant monuments reveal processes of material translation, with now-lost wooden prototypes serving as inspiration for stone structures. In later periods, colonial authorities recreated antiquities in plaster to transform objects of religious devotion into exemplars to be studied. More recent religious and political monuments in South Asia replicate and enlarge historical photographs in durable materials such as bronze and stone. The contemporary India artist Subodh Gupta casts the humble potato in bronze, plating his tubers in 24k gold. This panel includes presentations that investigate forms of material translation across a broad chronology of South Asian art and architecture as meaningful and revelatory gestures. What is added and erased in the process of moving across media? When does material adaptation allow new mobilities for objects and monuments? When do these translations portend a conservative impulse to render once ephemeral objects in more permanent media? How are new audiences addressed and new claims to authority articulated in the translation process? How are perceptions of value enhanced, questioned, or upended in the adoption of new material? When might the materiality of an object or site exert its own claims on these acts of adaptation and translation?

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