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CAA Affiliated Societies and CAA Professional Committee - Sessions Soliciting Contributors


Artist Associations and Professionalizing the Arts
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey
Nadia von Maltzahn, Orient-Institut Beirut


This session aims to analyze the role of artist associations in the professionalization of the arts in a comparative manner, in particular in contexts where artists were only just starting to organize themselves in a collective manner, including but not limited to postcolonial nations. The aim is to look at case studies of specific artist associations and unions, and to examine what brought them about, how they were organized, what missions they pursued, and what impact they had on the art worlds in which they operated. The relationship of these associations to state institutions such as ministries and art schools is also of interest. Of particular concern are case studies of countries that were in the process of nation-building at the time. By approaching the subject comparatively, it is hoped to determine to what extent associational groups operated under the same imperatives, what shared and specific challenges they faced, and what motivated them. It will become clear in what ways these associations, unions and collectives responded to particular contexts and what joint concerns they shared. Did they serve a nominal function, or did they act as a driving force in changing the working conditions of artists? And has this evolved over time? Ultimately, their role in institutionalizing the arts will be assessed.


"La main outillée attaque. Elle a le geste hostile": The Notion of Violence in Printmaking
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Print Scholars
Anastasia Belyaeva, University of Geneva and Roman Grigoryev, Hebrew University at Jerusalem


This panel seeks to investigate the brutality of the printmaking process. Techniques such as engraving, drypoint, or woodcut, imply a battle with the matter by altering the matrix with sharp tools. Chemical processes in etching entail the danger of explosions and burns. Making changes on a metal plate requires burnishing out and leveling with a hammer. Pressure is required to drag a squeegee when making a screenprint. Force is required to manipulate a press. The very terminology of printmaking is aggressive: plates cut, scratched, impressions pulled, matrices cancelled and destroyed.

This physical intensity on the edge of violence affects the working process and the work. Rembrandt’s "The Three Crosses", for example, embodies both the aggressive treatment of the plate and the atmosphere of the Golgotha events. Or, Gaston Blachard’s analysis of Albert Flocon’s engravings led to his theory of printmaking as "combat anthropocosmique." Taller de Gráfica Popular’s trademark of hands cutting a matrix with knifes refers both to their preference for linocut and woodcut techniques and the group’s self-representation as armed fighters.

The panel invites papers that examine the impact that the brutality of printmaking methods have on the artists, the aesthetics, and the poetics, and on their perception by the public and scholars. We welcome papers studying the connection between violence and printmaking across all cultures and periods, and across a variety of approaches, including, but not limited to, material, conceptual, and methodological, both through a theoretical lens and through the lens of the creative practice.



Center and Periphery?: Mapping a Future for Research in Netherlandish Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Netherlandish Art
Stephanie Dickey, Queen's University and Suzanne van de Meerendonk, Queen's University


In recent years, academic scholarship on Netherlandish art has increasingly embraced decolonial and intersectional approaches to the study of visual culture. Meanwhile, museums continue to mount exhibitions and sponsor technical research focused around well-known artists such as Pieter Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer. Easel painting remains the crowd-pleasing focal point of most large-scale art exhibitions even as new research illuminates alternative media ranging from glass engraving to textiles. Efforts to reinscribe those previously excluded from the 'canon', such as women artists, offer promise but must reckon with the problematics of canonicity itself. This session seeks papers that model a productive synthesis or dialogue between these trends, mapping pathways for future inquiry that reconcile divergent goals and prepare today's emerging scholars for careers both within and beyond academe. Papers might situate works by familiar artists in unfamiliar terrain, for instance by examining them in relation to global trade, material culture, or through an intersectional lens. Others may offer critiques of the 'center and periphery' dichotomy by foregrounding historically marginalized topics and makers against the background of canonical art production. Analyses of innovative museum projects (recent and future) are also welcome, as is a frank assessment of the continuing value of connoisseurship as practice and methodology. Proposals from early-stage scholars are especially welcome.


Decentering the North Atlantic in Global Discussions of Race: From Alejandro Malaspina to Lorgia García Peña and the Iberian/Ibero-American Experience
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society for Iberian Global Art
Prof. Ray Hernández-Durán, Ph.D., University of New Mexico


Historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra recently stated, “neoclassical German theories of race did not gain any purchase in Spain...We need to go back to Malaspina’s own epistemological warning, expressed in his political axioms about America: We should quit applying northern-European models to the interpretation of stubbornly unyielding realities.” The realities he speaks of partly concern how difference was perceived, understood, and represented in the Iberian and Ibero-American world(s), where ideas about race developed along different lines than those upon which the theoretical frameworks dominating scholarly conversations today are based, most of which privilege a north Atlantic, primarily anglophone, perspective. This panel will feature new research that examines the visual and material record with an eye to an exploration of how questions of race, ethnicity, etc. unfolded in the Iberian global context, which included, Spain/Portugal, their imperial territories from the West/Southwest U.S. down through South America, including the Caribbean, the Philippines, and regions of Africa. Given the geographic location and history of the Iberian Peninsula, processes of ethnic and racial identification took on a different form than elsewhere in Europe. What were those differences and how did they shape peninsular racial formations? How did/do such ideas play out in the Americas? How were these racial dynamics registered in social practice and in visual or material culture? Papers could examine themes of historical peninsular migrations, feudal social structure, church and religion, royal and/or viceregal policy, imperial geographies, missionary activities, African and Indigenous American slavery, global commerce, medical/scientific developments, miscegenation, or modern national racial frameworks.


Outside the Lecture Hall: Community Engagement in the Art History Curriculum
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Northern California Art Historians
Dr. Mya B. Dosch and Rachel Miller


Research shows that community-based service-learning projects improve student outcomes on assessments of critical thinking, communication, civic responsibility, and global understanding (Robinson and Prentice, 2010). In addition to clear benefits to student learning, such projects can help community arts organizations satisfy unmet needs and build relationships with young audiences. While the journal Art History Pedagogy & Practice offers a few excellent essays on community-engaged art history (Borland and Siddons, 2018; Kingsley 2019), most pedagogy conversations focus on the classroom and not the community. This panel will disseminate adaptable models for community-based art history projects. We ask: How do we build community-engaged art history projects? How do they support our existing learning outcomes? How do we ensure that community-based art history is done ethically?

We invite short, pragmatic seven-minute talks outlining one art history project used to foster student-community engagement. Topics could include, but are not limited to: Community-Based Learning, museum-university partnerships, K-12 student engagement programs, student-led public art tours, oral history or interview projects, art history as social practice, and service learning projects. Presenters are also encouraged to address both how to fund these projects and how to assess their efficacy.



Place-based Positionality and the Public Sphere
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Diversity Practices
Cory Pillen, Fort Lewis College and Megan Alvarado-Saggese


As individuals, we occupy multiple identities that are contextually situated and dynamic, being continuously amended and reproduced. These positionalities influence our personal and professional lives. They are also political points of departure. The environments we live and work in are important and often understudied components of this positionality, joining race, class, gender, and other aspects of identity to affect what we and others see, hear, know, and document.

Building on the scholarship of writers such as Linda Martín Alcoff, Paula M. L. Moya, Satya P. Mohanty, Michael Hames-García, and Marisa Elena Duarte, this panel explores the ways that current debates on identity politics intersect with the public sphere, impacting the ways we teach, research, and create. In the midst of revived debates on academic freedom, the time is ripe for a reevaluation of this critical standpoint. This panel invites papers that explore the place-based positionality of the researcher or the researched as a foundational component of historical interpretation, artistic practice, theoretical inquiry, and/or pedagogy that promotes diversity and inclusion.



Polycrisis and Design: Ethics, Intervention, Possibility
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Design Studies Forum
Anna Talley, Edinburgh College of Art and Craig Martin, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh


The term ‘polycrisis’ is a recent coinage (Morin, 1999; Tooze, 2022), intended to highlight the intersection of multiple crises that cause systemic risk to contemporary planetary ecosystems and social cohesion: from climate collapse, to the rise of far-right populism. Reflecting the growing recognition of both design’s complicity in (Fry and Nocek, 2021; Martin, 2022) and challenge to the polycrisis (Rawsthorn and Antonelli, 2022), this panel will explore designed objects and systems from any point in history, including the present, that have amplified or in part caused specific crises (for example, planned obsolescence and unsustainability) or have worked to help alleviate intersecting crises. We invite papers that consider either dimension—creating polycrisis or mitigating it—regardless of whether the paper focuses on the past, present, or future of design. Further, we encourage submissions that engage in the intersections of multiple crises. Designs and design practices may be formal or informal, global systems or locally produced, and may test the authoritative role of designers in addressing these challenges as professional practitioners.

Examples of the polycrisis and design relevant to the panel might include, but are not limited to:

  • threats to democratic systems of governance
  • the climate crisis (including food & water insecurity, resource depletion, migration)
  • Information/disinformation/misinformation
  • unstable economic systems and wealth inequality
  • military conflict
  • black markets
  • Counterfeiting and fakes

The panel aims to raise complex ethical discussions about the role of design and designers in both creating and alleviating the seemingly numerous, intertwined global crises facing societies today and throughout history.



Abolish THIS! Queer and Trans* Voices of Abolition
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: The Queer Trans Caucus for Art
Lorenzo Triburgo


Abolitionist and anti-assimilationist ways of living ground contemporary queer studies as well as trans*, queer, and transqueer lenses on art and visual culture. These lifeways and ideas also face ongoing criminalization in the U.S. and abroad. In April 2023, as I was drafting this call for proposals, I received a call from a museum in Florida asking me to self-censor the description of my work - which included phrases such as "gender abolition and liberation," "anti-assimilationist communal spaces," and a "queer history of displacement" - or cancel my upcoming visit. Recent U.S. legislation especially threatens queer and trans* scholarship, obstructing our responsibility to educate students and disseminate ideas necessary in the march towards liberation. How do we, as scholars and artists with institutional access and the privilege of traveling in order to commune in thought, ensure that our theories and aesthetics yield action and material solidarity with those most excluded, who inspire our radical hopes?

We encourage submissions that articulate theories of abolition in queer and trans art history, engage artistic practices of reparation and future-building, and that foreground the liberatory possibilities embodied in queerness, transness, and transqueerness. Topics might include but are not limited to:

  • Queer art and abolitionist politics in challenge to the prison industrial complex
  • Narratives of queer artist-activists standing against hegemonic violence and surveillance
  • Queer and trans resilience in the face of usury, trafficking, and forced labor
  • Gender and sexual politics on the contemporary reservation


Acts of Care
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Women's Caucus for Art
Rachel Epp Buller


Since 2020, US news outlets have regularly reported on increased levels of loneliness, isolation, and anxiety among many populations. The authors of the recent Care Manifesto argued that we live in a world in which “carelessness reigns,” and that we must conceive of care as broadly as possible if we hope to change our own behaviors or our institutions. And yet this crisis of connection and lack of caring did not originate with the COVID-19 pandemic. Artists, curators, and cultural workers have addressed this crisis, directly and indirectly, for decades, exploring ways that artistic projects can facilitate connection or speak to relational care through participatory interactions, immersive installations, or performative gestures. Already in 1992, Suzi Gablik coined the term “connective aesthetics,” anticipating a rise in contemporary art that would invoke interaction, listening, and reciprocity. This panel seeks presentations by artists and art historians featuring artistic projects that address, enact, or facilitate care and connection. Specific topics might include art as a reparative gesture, with human and more-than-human relations; participatory projects in carceral and congregate living settings; intergenerational collaborations; curatorial outreach to marginalized communities; artistic explorations of, or arts-based support groups for, illness, grief, and loss; art that celebrates and builds community; explorations of how a specific artistic medium or method facilitates relationality; artistic invitations to engage with ecological kin; or speculative inquiries that propose connections to, or caring relations in, possible futures.


Design Incubation Colloquium 10.2: Annual CAA Conference 2024
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Design Incubation
Camila Afanador-Llach, Florida Atlantic University and Heather Snyder Quinn


We invite unique proposals on topics relevant to communication design research. Submissions should be design-related case studies, contemporary practice, scholarly research, design theory, design history or design pedagogy. We welcome proposals on a variety of topics.

Submit an abstract of 300 words along with title, category (design research, design theory, design history, teaching, or service), keywords (5), citations, name and affiliation. Please use the Design Incubation abstract submission form found here:

https://designincubation.com/call-for-submissions/

Submissions are double-blind peer reviewed. Reviewers feedback will be returned. Final presentations are limited to a 6-minute video, preferably Pecha Kucha style.The conference session will be a moderated discussion.



Monumental Debates and Racial Reckoning on the Symbolic Landscape at Colleges and Universities in the United States
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Public Art Dialogue
Evie Terrono


Debates on symbolic landscapes at institutions of higher learning in the United States have foregrounded the persistence of politically fraught public works of art that promoted and perpetuated racist depictions and narratives. Student and community activists alerted their communities to monuments associated with Lost Cause ideals, historical figures that espoused or benefitted from the institution of slavery and works that reinforced racist hierarchies. Since 2018, when protesters at the University of South Carolina at Chapel Hill toppled the statue of Silent Sam, institutions across the South and the North removed offensive and injurious markers and monuments and have renamed buildings honoring morally contemptible individuals, though not without opposition.

Concurrently, institutions have enriched multivocal communal spaces with new monuments that address historical exclusions and seek to create more equitable and inclusive public spaces. In 2017, the University of Texas at Austin removed its expansive monumental program to actors of the Confederacy and supporters of slavery, and in 2021, it installed Simone Leigh’s Sentinel IV, addressing the diasporic labor of Black women. The confrontations surrounding the removal of Ann Rice O’Hanlon’s New Deal mural at the University of Kentucky, opposed even by Karyn Olivier whose 2018 work entitled Witness dialogued with O’Hanlon’s work, are indicative of the complex negotiations occurring on college campuses. This panel seeks papers that explore controversies and debates over problematic monumental landscapes on university and college grounds or that foreground the didactic possibilities of new monumental undertakings in these spaces that strive for historical and racial reckoning.



Open Session for Emerging Scholars
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Latin American Art
Gabriela Germana, Independent Scholar and Savannah Esquivel, University of California Riverside


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 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, the art of the long nineteenth century, modern art, and contemporary art, in any of its forms and expressive manifestations from what is today 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. Co-chairs encourage papers that address issues related to underrepresented genders, ethnic groups, and social classes.


The American Carceral Landscape
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: SECAC
Keri Watson, University of Central Florida


Some 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States, but the prison system remains largely invisible to many Americans and the physical and psychological marginalization and minoritization of system-impacted people allow many to ignore mass incarceration, even as it is among the most crucial issues of our time. Inspired by Nicole Fleetwood’s notion of “carceral aesthetics,” this panel invites artists and scholars to engage with the American carceral landscape. From Alfredo Santos’s murals in the dining hall at San Quentin (1953) and Faith Ringgold’s For the Women’s House at Rikers Island (1971) to Al Black’s murals at the Central Florida Reception Center in Orlando, Florida (1997-2006), American jails and prisons have inspired artists, both incarcerated and non-incarcerated, to respond to their physical environment with visual art, but systems of power impact both the conditions under which these artists create their work and shape the circuits through which others engage with the resulting artwork. As such, this panel invites papers that engage with topics such as representations of prisons and images of those in confinement; the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and the establishment of prison art and education programs in the 1960s; the role of federal funding in prison art programs; the Angola Prison Arts and Crafts Fair; prison architecture; and the role of universities, museums, and other institutions in the care and collection of carceral art; among others.


What Would Morris Do? Textile Use and Sustainability for the 21st Century
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: William Morris Society in the United States
Tracy Meserve, William Morris Society in the United States


In 2022 ultrafast fashion company Boohoo released a collection featuring William Morris’s designs. Four years earlier, in 2018, H&M produced its own line of Morris-inspired clothing. The use of Morris’s name and image in the 21st-century textile industry raises questions about environmentalism, sustainability, and labor in a world of mass production, greenwashing, and misinformation. At a time when many historic designs have entered the public domain, and their use by textile manufacturers is becoming widespread, art history and contemporary textile production are deeply interconnected. Taking the use of Morris textiles in the 21st century as a starting point, this session invites contributions exploring the relationship between the history and practice of art and the urgent questions surrounding textile sustainability in the present day.

While much has been written about how textile sustainability is impossible under our current economic system, Morris envisioned a utopian socialist society. What textile futures can we imagine today? How could textiles be produced, used, and appreciated in a more equitable society? What does a slower textile movement look like and what steps could we take to create it? What is the proper role of technology in such a society? Are there people or organizations (historical or current) that have successfully worked toward this vision?

We welcome submissions that engage with these and other questions about textile sustainability, commercialism, and the history and practice of art, craft, and design. Contributions from scholars and practitioners addressing textiles from any period or geographic region are welcome.



Building a Legacy: Catherine Asher’s Boundary-Crossing Scholarship Remembered
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: American Council for Southern Asian Art
Rebecca M. Brown, Johns Hopkins University and Deborah S. Hutton, The College of New Jersey


To honor the legacy of Professor Catherine E.B. Asher (1946-2023), we invite short engagements with a single object, building, or text that unfold questions of central concern in Asher’s own work. Asher published transformative interventions into the way we think about histories of inter- and cross-sectarian architectural collaboration and patronage, particularly focused on the Mughal era, but extending into the present. Her intellectual probity allowed us all to re-think spaces of Hindu and Jain temples, mosques, Sufi shrines, tombs, and chattris, mining their spatial forms, their decorative and inscriptional programs, and their patronage histories to find evidence of dynamic conversations across artificially constructed disciplinary boundaries. She sought out sites and works at the margins of the canon, sponsored by sub-imperial patrons, hidden behind nondescript façades, or sited in remote rural areas, and enabled us to see those patrons, works, and sites as also central to the retelling of South Asia’s art and architectural history. She also committed herself to gathering archival material for use by Indian researchers, and her lifelong engagement with questions of heritage and preservation has become particularly poignant in the face of the erasure of Mughal history in India’s own educational system.

We welcome proposals for 6-minute presentations on an individual work, inclusive of all media, monuments, texts, and archives. Presenters may focus on South Asia or the wider Islamic world; we welcome proposals from artists as well as scholars. Collaborative and creative submissions also welcome. Please submit a title and 50-100 word abstract.



Critical Race Art History and the Archive
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Critical Race Art History
Camara D. Holloway, Association for Critical Race Art History and Jacqueline Francis, California College of the Arts


In Subject to Display (2009), Jennifer A. González asserts that “the collection and display of bodies, images, and artifacts in museums and elsewhere is a primary means by which a nation tells the story of its past and locates the cultures of its citizens in the present.“ In this session, contemporary archivists’ discuss their approaches to telling the narratives of racial identification and racialization—past and present. What has been collected and how has that material been interpreted? What questions do they bring to institutional systems of classification? How do they create space and cede power so that marginalized communities can access resources that support their created and managed archives? In what ways have the concerns of the humanities—analysis, interpretation, argumentation—been mainstreamed into digital humanities practice in the scope of critical race art history?


Indigenous design? New perspectives on decolonising design
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Design History Society
Marta Filipová, Masaryk University


Part of the decolonisation call in the history of design is the acknowledgement that cultures are an ever-changing, organic phenomenon, and that they evolve and constantly interact with each other. The ability to adapt and adopt has often been crucial to the survival of some cultures in the face of colonisation. Such recognition challenges the notions of the ‘traditional’ and ‘indigenous’ in design and invites a provocative question: to what extent are they still valid categories today?

While bearing in mind the terminological inaccuracy of the phrase ‘indigenous design,’ this panel invites papers that interrogate examples of what such design, considered from the global perspective. It particularly welcomes views offered from the point of local communities across the world and those that offer new methodological approaches. Examples can range from adoption of indigenous design in dominant cultures, adaptiveness of indigenous design to modernity, recent changes in institutional practices of display and collecting, or attempts at preservation of traditional customs.



The Dark Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Historians of 19th-Century Art
Sarah C. Schaefer, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee


This session will explore the visual culture of fantasy in the long nineteenth century with particular emphasis on subjects interpreted the lenses of colonialism, imperialism, gender studies, ecocriticism, and other related discourses. “Fantasy” in this context encompasses magical or supernatural elements manifesting in folkloric, mythical, and legendary traditions. The “dark fantastic” derives conceptually from the work of Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, who uses the phrase to signify “the role that racial difference plays in our fantastically storied imaginations.” For the purposes of this panel, it will function in a broader capacity, referring to responses to post-Enlightenment industrial modernity as they emerge subtly and overtly in nineteenth-century fantasy.

Although fantasy genres began to be academically analyzed and codified in the second half of the twentieth century, existing scholarship remains largely within the purview of literary and cultural studies. The aim of this session is to advance art historical perspectives on the vast landscape of nineteenth-century fantasy visual and material culture, specifically addressing their ties to the urgent issues of the period and of academic discourse today. While this does not preclude discussion of medievalisms – one of the dominant threads in contemporary fantasy studies – papers that engage with the legacies of the Middle Ages should still situate the topic primarily within the nineteenth century.



The Objects of Art History: Material Challenges to Canonical Histories
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: National Committee for History of Art
Anne Collins Goodyear, Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Richard E. Meyer, Stanford University


Rooted in the study of objects, the history of art has long grappled with the resistance of objects to the imposition of taxonomies and hermeneutics. This session, developed by the National Committee for the History of Art (NCHA) in conversation with the upcoming theme of the 36th Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) World Congress, "Matter/Materiality,” invites proposals that explore how grappling with objects—through their physical attributes, assertive presence, or propensity to decay and disintegrate, absence, theft or appropriation—can exert pressure on the canonical histories that have controlled or excluded them and the power structures embedded in these narratives. How might decolonial, feminist, or queer methodologies provide new tools for restoring lost meanings that may inhere within material objects? Conceived in a moment when trends in consumption such as “fast fashion,” social media, and born-digital texts and images encourage disposability and dematerialization, this session invites panelists to consider the future of historical inquiry and the fragility of the objects, records, archives, and the very notions of “history” we are constructing and deconstructing today. Proposals are invited from artists, art historians, archivists, curators, and other visual arts professionals.


The Politics of Relevancy: What is the Value of Art History Today?
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Services to Historians of Visual Arts Committee
Kathleen Pierce and Heather Belnap, Brigham Young University


In this session sponsored by the Services to Historians of Visual Arts Committee, we seek to explore a key question levied at historians of art and visual culture as well as the institutions where they work and teach: what is the relevance of art history today? We aim to take this question head on. How might, for example, a department respond to such a question received from an administrator? Or a parent of a potential major? In this session, we aim to excavate the complexities of such queries. How have what we might call a politics of relevancy shaped the discipline of art history? For whom have art history and an art-historical education been valued across time, place, and diverse cultural contexts? We seek presentations exploring both the genealogies of and contemporary responses to these questions.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Alternative careers for art historians
  • Combating stereotypes about what art history is perceived to be
  • Questions about/strategies for recognizing and valuing labor
  • Explorations of shifting valuations of the discipline across time and place
  • Strategies for self-advocacy and the valuation of labor
  • Acknowledging art history’s ambivalence to accessibility of the discipline
  • Value of visual literacy in image-saturated world
  • Advocating the discipline’s value to students, parents, administrators, donors, institutions, the public
  • The in/hospitableness of the discipline to DEI initiatives
  • Explorations of what visual studies might offer to myriad STEM professions
  • The instrumentalization and weaponization of art history in cultural discourse, past or present


The Transcultural Circulation of Illustrated Books (1500-1950)
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Bibliographical Society of America
Fletcher Coleman, University of Texas, Arlington and Gillian Zhang, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


This panel will address illustrated books that originated in Eurasia during the Early Modern and Modern periods. It will focus on those that have been translated, visually as well as textually, for a reading public in a different language community than that for which it was originally produced, whether elsewhere in Eurasia or overseas.

We are especially interested in the illustrated book because of the essential role that images play in cross-cultural contact. This panel aims to pose a range of questions, such as how paratext and its interpretation changed when illustrated books were retrofitted for their new audiences. How were illustrations also transformed and adapted as texts were translated and reprinted? To answer these questions, this panel broadly explores the movement of books as well as the ways knowledge and technology travel during production, circulation, and consumption in a cross-cultural context.

This panel takes illustrated books as its central subject, with the goal of rethinking the translation of language, images, and, most importantly, the translation of culture. Proposals from a range of book formats, literary genres, and geographic regions are welcome.



Yes, and... Agendas: from little to big!
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: National Council of Art Administrators
Elissa C. Armstrong, VCU School of the Arts and O. Gustavo Plascencia, New World School of the Arts


Setting an agenda, whether it is simply structuring a meeting or composing a complicated academic overhaul, can be like trying to prepare for a game of improv. Administrators need to be flexible enough to change tactics on a dime and react quickly in the face of opportunity when there often is no clear road map to success. Many times, we encounter new challenges without an institutional policy in place, and like magicians, we need to pull a strategy out of the hat. Additionally, a successful leader builds consensus among all stakeholders, leads through example, and establishes short and long-term goals. Knowing how and when to make these high- and low-impact decisions can be tricky.

This panel seeks stories and examples of how effective administrators get big and little things done, all while including disparate voices and sharing responsibility. Please feel free to interpret this panel theme broadly. For instance, you may wish to share your thoughts about a specific idea or project, provide insights from your personal experience that could include the good and the bad, or perhaps present an agenda item plan not yet implemented. We are, of course, available to assist and support in developing a topic.



Critical Conversations and Incredible Book Works: An Examination of History, Canon and Critical Analysis in the Field of Artist Books
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: College Book Art Association
Peter J. Tanner, University of Utah and Levi Sherman, University of Wisconsin - Madison


Over the last six decades, the book arts and the artist book have been expanding their influence both internally, within libraries and museum collections, as well as beyond institutional and disciplinary boundaries due to their unique capacity to engage with and question metanarratives.

Their unparalleled ability to initiate innovative exploration of even canonical art works and authors, and their capacity to interrogate knowledge formation in fields such as history, art history, literature, printing, critical theory, artistic praxis, book making, etc., distinguishes this field from any other.

Despite the ability of book works to raise questions regarding any subject that could exist within a library's collections, the history of art has rarely engaged with the liminal space that is the homeland of book art. This session promotes the need for critical discourse around the artist book and book art from multiple perspectives.

We invite papers about any aspect of book arts criticism and analysis, including but not limited to: art historical analysis, literary analysis, book arts production praxis, theoretical questions, exhibition and access, questions of cultural and racial hegemony, gender, activism, and other topics that explore the spaces betwixt visual, textual, and critical practice in the evaluation of the book arts.



Hand and Glove: Art Market Studies and the History of Collecting
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society for the History of Collecting & The International Art Market Studies Association
Blair Asbury Brooks and Natasha Degen


The Society of the History of Collecting launched in 2015; The International Art Market Studies Association followed a year later. The founding of both organizations, and their rapid growth since, evidences new scholarly interest in collecting, the art market, institutional histories, and the circulation and exchange of art more generally. Yet, despite their many points of intersection, the two subfields remain distinct. Hand and Glove explores the self-understanding of each subfield, their differences in subject matter and approach, as well as areas of overlap between the two. Relevant papers include those on Art Market Studies that have been influenced by the History of Collecting (and vice versa); those that illuminate the methodological differences between the two subfields (from quantitative or data-driven approaches to connoisseurship and art historical contextualization); those that examine gray areas (such as dealers-as-collectors or collectors’ art market influence); and those that discuss the variety of forms that research on collecting and the art market has taken, including recent exhibitions.


Shaking it Up: New Students, New Strategies
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Community College Professors of Art and Art History
Prof. Susan M. Altman, MFA, Community College Professors Of Art and Art History and Dr. Monica Anke Hahn


Today's students are very different from the students of the past. As educators, how can we be innovative and teach in new ways that respond to what our students need now? How has our teaching changed over the past few years? What has been successful for our students? This panel seeks presentations on innovative pedagogical strategies. Are you using new approaches to grading such as contract grading or ungrading? Do you have new ways to approach critiques or exams? How do you increase student engagement or make your classroom and assignments more equitable and inclusive? Perhaps you’re doing something different entirely. We’d like to hear how you provide more authentic learning for students in your studio and art history classes that meets your students where they are and helps propel them forward.


Catalogue Raisonné Scholarship Today: “If by yes you mean no, then yes."
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association
Eileen Costello, The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and Parker Field, The Arshile Gorky Foundation


A catalogue raisonné should serve as the most reliable source of information on a given artist. Within it, one should be able to confidently confirm, learn, or simply familiarize oneself with a particular artist’s work. Catalogue raisonné research has become increasingly more sophisticated over the past two decades, yet with this plethora of research comes a plethora of dilemmas: What if an author discovers a work by an artist that might not actually be included in the catalogue raisonné, for any number of reasons?: the artist themselves has disavowed a work that, in fact, originated with their hands; inept draftsmanship that an author feels would not further the scholarship; newly discovered double-sided paintings that leave the author wondering about the artist’s intentions; overpaintings that may either cover-up or invalidate a work of art; “inconsequential” marginalia, and more. These issues raise questions as to how the artist wanted their work to be publicly shown and whether they wanted the whole of their work shown, and at what point is a work by an artist no longer a work by that artist? These sets of problems dovetail with conservation issues, and raise further questions. A diverse panel of catalogue raisonné authors and painting/and or drawing conservators will present papers on their experiences dealing with these prickly issues, touching upon the many variegated methodologies used by catalogue raisonné scholars and conservationists in determining that will include modes of attribution, connoisseurship, authentication, and conservation.


INCS: Visualizing Incorporation in the Long Nineteenth Century
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies
Nancy Rose Marshall


The Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (INCS) is excited to announce its call for papers to the CAA conference in 2024. The theme of our panel is art and imagery related to the concept of “INCorporation,” broadly construed in relation to notions of embodiment or the unification of parts to form a whole. Possibilities might include visualizations of emergent nationalisms; religious imagery; depictions of spiritualist practices; representations of that distinctively nineteenth-century form, the corporation; new forms of gender or race expressed through the body; or other subjects that portray the coming into being of something. Topics from any country or culture welcome. For more information and abstract submission, please contact Nancy Rose Marshall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (nrmarshall@wisc.edu).


Inclusive Practices in the Art World
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Art Historians of Southern California
Meggie Morris, San Diego Miramar College


The Art Historians of Southern California (AHSC) welcome proposals for presentations and interactive discussion topics revolving around inclusive practices across the art world. We seek to provide a space where professionals across the diverse region of Southern California and beyond can share ideas, theories, case studies, and implemented changes made in their practices in order to make the experience of art more inclusive. These topics could include changes made to presenting art in gallery and museum spaces to include a more diverse audience and address issues of inclusivity, activities and assessments in classroom environments for both in person and online courses to improve inclusivity for students, alterations made in studio or creative practices with the intention of making the process and viewing more inclusive, historical or contemporary cases of other art professionals engaging with the topic of inclusivity, and much more! We hope this session sparks a productive conversation on the topic of inclusivity across a broad range of physical environments and artistic practices, leaving presenters and attendees alike feeling more empowered to consider inclusivity in their own work as well.


Photography in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: The Photography Network
Sarah M. Miller


Whither “photography” in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? The medium has experienced many identity crises since the 1830s, but the current one may be its most urgent. Increasingly, AI can produce images that convincingly mimic the look of photographs and trade on photographic credibility—inducing fears of deepfake deceptions, challenging what constitutes photographic labor and artistry, provoking accusations of copyright and privacy violation in the training sets used for machine learning, and opening both exciting and troubling frontiers in human-technology collaboration. But most existentially, AI throws open the question: what is (now) a photograph?

This session invites scholars and artists to contemplate the status and identity of photography as we enter the era of ubiquitous artificial intelligence. Questions may include: How should we understand AI-generated images that look like, and are received as, camera-made photographs? Ought we to police a boundary between photography and AI, or revise photography’s ontology to encompass AI? Which methodological tools, philosophical debates, or case studies from the history of photography can aid us in navigating this new landscape? Is our field missing historical accounts that would aid analysis—for example, of the digital turn that made AI possible? What concepts might we draw from contemporary art, media studies, and other fields to theorize the desires, possibilities, and dangers attending photographic AI? How do AI algorithms reinscribe—or subvert—cultural biases already established by, or in, photographs? What forms might a critical artistic/photographic practice take now, vis-a-vis AI’s social, ethical, and artistic implications?



Portrait of the Contemporary Artist
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Diasporic Asian Art Network
Sarah J. Magnatta, University of Denver and Yi Yi Mon (Rosaline) Kyo


In Spring 2023, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden partnered with MTV and the Smithsonian Channel for the series The Exhibit, a reality show highlighting the processes and works of seven artists as they competed for a solo exhibition at the Hirshhorn. The final episode asked artists to present their versions of a self-portrait, a seemingly straightforward task that was anything but. In a way, the entire series became an exercise in discursive definitions of self-portraiture as the artists grappled with how to best present themselves to an audience perhaps unfamiliar with their work. Interspersed with the weekly statements of self were issues of social justice, social media, and imaginings of possible futures. Ultimately, Baseera Khan, an American artist of Muslim and Afghani-Indian descent, won the competition through a reinterpretation of traditional South Asian expression of feminine power. Although the series has been criticized for various reasons, the production did require that we continue to consider these intersections and recognize the inherent “self-portrait-ness” of contemporary art. This panel takes this notion raised by The Exhibit as a point of departure to consider how diaspora Asian artists today grapple with issues of process, identity, or social constructions through self-portraiture. How does technology and social media factor into these images? What can we gain by examining and re-examining self-portraiture through the lens of the diaspora experience? We welcome papers which examine conventional notions of self-portraiture as well as those that expand the boundaries of what might be considered a self-portrait.


Rethinking the Landscape: Future Imaginaries in Environmental Art and Eco-Art History
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: International Committee
Uranchimeg Tsultem, Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis and Sarena Abdullah, Universiti Sains Malaysia


While the concept of the Anthropocene has become central to the discourse on climate crises, several scholars have criticized the essentializing use of the Anthropocene thesis, offering alternative terms, such as Capitalocene or Chthulucene (e.g. T. J. Demos 2017, Donna Haraway 2016). T. J. Demos, a leading scholar in environmental art history, considers the issues of climate change as “first and foremost a political crisis (italics are original)” that is perpetuated by colonialist attitudes of “destructive and utilitarian, idealized and exoticized...structuring of nature” (Demos 2016, 12). This panel proposes to examine diverse approaches to the ongoing global environmental crises in addition to critiques of neoliberalism from scholars, artists, and critics. How do we rethink art-historical methodologies, curatorial assumptions or practice-led research to consider Donna Haraway’s post-individualist approach to engage with non-human agents who exemplify interdependent and entangled agencies that are “involved in climate chaos as much as its antidote”? The panel invites submissions that engage critically with such topics as: Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud 1998); planetary health, Land/Earth Art, which has recently inspired Land Art Biennales; landscape or environmental themed artworks and other projects, including, but not limited to, participatory and team-based works such as social practice, performance or film. The International Committee is especially interested in hearing from voices that represent the regions often deemed as peripheral or excluded from art-historical master narratives offering alternative views to the largely western scholarship on the subject of environmental art and eco-art history.


The Art of the Studio Project: A Project Share and Workshop
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Heidi C. Hogden, Foundations In Art: Theory & Ed (F.A.T.E.)


As educators, we must motivate our students to think conceptually while developing technical competency. The topic of this session centers on student experience, amplifying creative problem solving, and fostering intrinsic motivation. This session is divided into two parts: project shares from three participant applications and a workshop where attendees are invited to share their projects and receive feedback from the panel and other attendees. Artists, designers, historians and educators who work in the first-year experience are invited to share projects and assignments that attend to the idea of the multifaceted studio art project.

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) is an organization focused on providing college-level art foundations educators with pedagogical resources, community networking, and professional support while promoting excellence and innovation in curricular development. FATE members are known for actively sharing course objectives, assignments, successes and failures, and projects to support and inspire our community of art educators.



Disaster! Trouble in Eighteenth-Century Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: American Society for 18th Century Studies
Dr. Monica Anke Hahn


In 1748 François-Vincent Toussaint advised the readers of his Les Mœrs... “Affect not an air of content before an afflicted person, who is lamenting over his disasters or losses. You may grieve in private for your own misfortunes: but do not go to fatigue, with your sad lamentations.” The long eighteenth century was rife with lamentable events, both big and small. The global population reckoned with violent rebellions, inter- and intra-national armed conflicts, natural disasters, shipwrecks, epidemics, fires. Problems on a more personal or minor scale could cause big trouble as well: epistolary miscommunication, marital infidelity, business conflict, illness, or household tension, to name a few. This panel seeks papers that examine the ways in which artists depicted or reflected calamities large and small in the global eighteenth century, and contributors who think capaciously about the concept of disaster, considering a broad range of media – painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, printmaking, fiber arts. Especially encouraged are projects with interdisciplinary approaches, and those that consider wide geographical, social, and racial contexts. Proposals from scholars in and outside of academia, and at any stage in their program or career, and artists and curators who have a perspective on the relationship between art and disaster are welcome.


Language and Text in Feminist Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Women in the Arts
Monika Fabijanska


This session will examine artworks exploring text and language from a gendered perspective—a subject that has lacked transnational, intersectional, and intergenerational treatment—to inspire new research in feminist art. It will analyze ways in which women (cis and queer) employ text and language as a means of feminist critique, across mediums—in works on paper, sculptures, neon installations, photography, video, sound art, and performance.

There is a stubborn belief that feminist art focuses on the image of the body. Yet, the core of feminist art is conceptual or social practice; art that is designed not just to be looked at but also to be acted upon. Text or language-based art—including what Hélène Cixous called écriture feminine—has been its crucial component as women probe their erasure from historical texts, their objectification in law, their experience of speaking a second language as racialized and sexualized subjects, and the male-centrism of language, including AI and the internet. The session will provide the analysis of women’s investigation of language as a tool and locus of their cultural oppression, erasure, and as the signifier and sign of their particular cultural experience.

The session seeks to fill a gap in literature about feminist art focused on language by calling for presentations that privilege transnational connections and multigenerational and intersectional comparisons. It invites scholarly feminist analyses of visual poetry by artists of color, art engaging indigenous oral traditions and spoken poetry, or arising from calligraphy, especially from Africa, Asia, Middle East, and the Caribbean.



Technological Imaginaries: imagined futures, utopian visions, and fabulations of alternative worlds
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: New Media Caucus
Constanza Salazar, The Cooper Union and Rene Alberto Garcia Cepeda, New Media Caucus


Imagined futures, utopian visions, and fabulations of alternative worlds make up recent technological imaginaries that use science fiction, specific cultural cosmologies, and the remaking of technological tools. Based on Sang-Hyun Kim and Sheila Jasanoff’s concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries” which are “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009), I focus on the specificity of technological imaginaries that have and continue to emerge in art making practices that rethink technology away from its “technocapitalist” logic of expansion, profit, and extraction (Villa, 2009). Instead, artists and artist-collectives reimagine technology through Afrofuturist aesthetics and ideals, indigenous cosmologies, ecological perspectives, and alternative uses of technology for artistic ends. In this panel, we seek contributions by scholars and artists that expand on the concept of technological imaginaries to help us envision possibilities, ruptures, and potentialities away from the Global North paradigm.


Who are We Really? Identifying CAA’s Current and Emerging Constituencies
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Professional Practices Committee
Charles Kanwischer, Bowling Green State University and Michael Grillo, University of Maine


Given the evolution in recent years of the professional employment environment for Artists, Art Historians, and Art Educators, the Professional Practices Committee needs develop guidelines and best practices appropriate for these new circumstances. To assist us in broadening the relevance and inclusivity of our work, the PPC invites CAA members to submit proposals for presentations that will offer insights in one or more of the following: 1) support for art professionals working in emerging fields, 2) adapting our disciplines to changing professional, student, audience, and institutional expectations, 3) articulating the importance of the Arts and their histories in our increasingly visual society, 4) expanding professional exhibition and publication to include venues and platforms available to wider audiences, 5) addressing how interdisciplinarity is changing expectations in our various fields, and 6) considering how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will offer opportunities and challenges to our fields. We seek diverse participants representing a broad range of experience in contemporary arts teaching, scholarship and practice, including contingent faculty and those working outside traditional universities and museums.


Activating Academic Art Museum & Gallery Relationships: Art Objects and Experiences in Institutional Collaborations
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Museum Committee
Monica Andrews, Harvard University Graduate School of Education and Rex A. Koontz, University of Houston


This session seeks to explore examples of deep collaborations between academic art museums & galleries and the audiences which they serve and engage. We seek case studies focusing on museum collaboration with one of three groups (universities, local communities, or creatives) that demonstrate the breadth of opportunities for academic art museums & galleries to further engage with campus and public audiences or stakeholders. Our goal is to cultivate a larger community discourse around the ways museums work together with other entities to broaden access to art historical studies & museology and serve as sites for interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange.

To highlight multiple models and deepen the conversation, this session will use the round-table format where contributors offer brief 5-to-10-minute case study presentations, followed by a discussion and Q&A session with the other members of the round table and the audience.

Please note: This session will be accompanied by a workshop with the session chairs and presenters to further discuss and explore best practices and logistical considerations involved in collaborative planning processes.

Case studies that explore collaboration as an opportunity for learning and training for the next generation of scholars/museum professionals, for use of collections and exhibitions in university pedagogy, or for rural/urban partnerships are particularly of interest to the Museum Committee.



CHOICE TACTICS: Art, Abortion, and Bodily Autonomy Today
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: The Feminist Art Project
Miriam Kienle and Connie Tell, The Feminist Art Project


How do contemporary feminist artists, art historians, critics, and curators address current legal restrictions to abortion access? How do they draw from or push against historical precedents for art about reproductive choice and bodily autonomy? Although acknowledging the tremendous historical harm done, much present-day art about abortion draws on old visual tropes of clothes hangers and irrevocably marred bodies that has little resonance to the risks posed by the criminalization of abortion today. This imagery not only ignores how ending pregnancy is far safer than it was 50 years ago due to widely accessible medications for menstrual management after abortion became legal, but it also inadvertently echoes anti-choice propaganda that emphasizes self-harm as integral to abortion. Therefore, one must ask: How do feminist artists today visualize bodily autonomy, self-managed menstruation, and abortion in ways that refuse inaccurate, outdated, and punishing representations in favor of ones that are accurate, informative, and supportive (perhaps even playful, joyous, frustrated, outraged, or irreverent)? How might they forge intergenerational solidarities by re-activating historical modes of resistance that avoid nostalgia? How do they educate both menstruating and non-menstruating publics to transform political discourse on abortion? How can they help empower abortion seekers to have their physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, and/or legal needs met? This panel seeks presentations that investigate the visual and material tactics of feminist art that tackles abortion, particularly those that attend to the complex gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, geographic, historical, medical, legal, and/or economic implications of abortion today.


Guarino Guarini: 400 Years
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society of Architectural Historians
Branko Mitrovic, NTNU and Elwin Robison, Kent State University


Guarino Guarini: 400 years

The erudition of a polymath makes Guarino Guarini an exceptional figure among the prominent architects of the Italian Baroque. A Theatine monk, theologian, mathematician, and architect, Guarini created some of the most extraordinary buildings of his era. He was also the author of three treatises on astronomy, a commentary on Euclid and a massive philosophical treatise, the Placita philosophica. Well-travelled but solitary, a defender of scholastic Aristotelianism who also avidly followed the latest scientific breakthroughs, a baroque architect who was a keen observer of Islamic and Gothic architectural monuments, Guarini is an unusual figure that gathered and sought to resolve in his intellectual life an exceptionally wide range of contradictory intellectual trends of his era.

The 400th anniversary of Guarini’s birth provides an opportunity to review recent scholarship on his architecture, works and publications. Until recently, Guarini’s intellectual life has been difficult to explore, since the authors that he cites and the books that he read are often little known today and difficult to access. The digitalization of seventeenth century books, however, has made many of these sources widely accessible and has resulted in a number of breakthroughs in the understanding of his views and works in recent decades. We thus expect that the session will provide the opportunity to present interesting new research and discuss future possible directions of Guarini scholarship.



The Work of American Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Historians of American Art
Emily Clare Casey, The University of Kansas and Juliet Sperling, University of Washington


How have shifting institutional hiring priorities and labor conditions informed the work of American art? The expanded narrative of American art that has taken shape over recent decades is impossible to separate from a parallel contraction and compression of employment opportunities in museums and academia. Every three years, the AHAA-sponsored CAA panel assesses the state of the field for practitioners of American art history. In 2024, we are soliciting perspectives that will take stock of funding and hiring patterns across the venues and institutions in which American art is studied and interpreted. This panel asks how the state of the job market is shaping the state of the field.

We invite contributions that will directly engage current efforts to re-conceive AHAA's mission, vision, and values to better serve a diverse community in the present and future. A limited amount of funding is available to offset barriers to participation in the CAA component of this project, which will also be paired with virtual and open-access platforms for dialogue and feedback. Contingent and tenure-line academics, museum workers, editors, independent practitioners, and other cultural interpreters are encouraged to submit proposals for short provocations that will foster a robust roundtable discussion.


'Women Artists?' The Future of Art History and Gender
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
Sarah Elisabeth Lund, Harvard University


In 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson overturned the right to abortion, undermining bodily autonomy and privacy. Reproductive care has come continually under attack, as has the rights of free speech and healthcare of homosexual and transgender people. As black feminist and queer scholarship has shown, studies of gender must always be intersectional. How do discourses of intersectionality, sexuality, eroticism, and bodily autonomy shape our understanding of the nexus of art and gender? The long eighteenth century has been a key arena in the historiography of feminist art history, studies of gender, and research on women artists. This panel aims to ask a following question: “Why study ‘women artists’?” What are the productivities and shortcomings of a term like ‘women artists’ in 2024, and what is the future of art history and gender?

This panel invites papers that explore the stakes, methodologies, limitations, and promises of research on gender and art history. Papers could focus on new approaches to study of (an) individual artist(s), analysis of images that complicate gender binaries, the gendering of materials, investigations of masculinity or femininity, concepts of the queer and queering, or a take a historiographical approach, amongst others. This panel welcomes papers that nuance gender as an identity, theoretical category, and methodological approach. The format of the panel will consist of three or four 15-minute presentations followed by Q&A that I hope will provoke a robust discussion. Kindly email sarahlund@g.harvard.edu with any questions.



Blanks No More? Digital Art History and the Unknown
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Digital Art History Society
Max Koss, Leuphana University Lüneburg and Lynn Rother, Leuphana University Lüneburg


Absences and gaps in the surviving historical record have been a driving force for art historians to engage in archival research, trying to fill in what is missing. After all, if the historical record is a function of chance and happenstance, how trustworthy can deductions from such a porous, unreliable archive be? With the advent of digital tools in the humanities—and art history specifically—scholars have begun to critically reexamine the chase for missing bits of knowledge. Facing the reality that much missing knowledge cannot ultimately be recovered, they have reoriented their attention to make the gaps themselves speak. Digital tools and methods can help infer meaning through technology-driven contextualization of the lacunae in the information at our disposal. Complicating the issue further, Joanna Sassoon has noted that the “absence of records can, in itself, be seen as evidence, and there comes a point in the research process where it may be more telling to explain erasure than continue searching for records.” This panel invites submissions from any art historical field, offering theoretical reflections and practical solutions to address gaps in knowledge through digital tools and methods. Are all gaps equal? Can they be put in the service of an active, reconstructive engagement with what we do not know? And if so, how? Ranging from textual gaps to fragmentary artworks and ruinous architectural structures, the panel aims to showcase the conceptual and methodological diversity of digital approaches to the known unknowns and possibly evenunknown unknowns of art history.


A Case for Arts in a Time of Crisis
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Education Committee
Alysha Friesen Meloche and Dr. Francesca Molly Albrezzi, PhD


In many parts of the U.S., disciplines which encourage critical thinking are facing (administrative and political) interference, parameterizing how learning should happen in classrooms. Additionally, art and design departments are having to continue to prove their worth in the general higher education curriculum. In Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative by Ken Robsinson, there is a clear argument that the creative skills taught in arts classrooms are invaluable across disciplines and increasingly important within a world that is driven by fast innovation. Despite mounting pressures, resilient educators continue to strive to provide the best for their students using creativity and care. Some of the most uplifting stories that humanity has to offer can be found buried within the oppressive mountain of doom news. This session wishes to create a space to promote these stories, replacing the crisis narrative with optimism and idea sharing.

This call invites proposals from educators and practitioners to address:

  • Effective pedagogies despite teaching restrictions
  • Supporting academic integrity and faculty liberties at an administrative level
  • How teaching visual cultural theories is a productive interdisciplinary approach
  • Increasing accessibility in fields that are inherently ableist
  • Pedagogies that promote radical inclusivity in the face of political polarization
  • Adjusting curriculum to meet societal standards of inclusivity, global citizenship, and advocacy
  • Using the arts to teach critical literacies
  • Rising mental health concerns among student and faculty populations
  • Mounting student anxiety about global climate events

This call especially welcomes autoethnographic accounts from professionals and students, evidence-based classroom research, and sample lessons.



Medieval Ritual Representations: Model of or Model for?
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: International Center of Medieval Art
Robert S. Nelson and Alice Isabella Sullivan


This session considers illustrations of medieval secular and/or religious rituals in any media and from any region or religious group. The goal is to understand the function and agency of representations, starting from the opposite poles of model or model for, as Clifford Geertz interpreted ritual. Some images may be evidence of “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” as von Ranke put it, and the reality of medieval performances; others may be aspirational, describing ideal rituals overlayed with the ideological and political. How can we discern the function of medieval illustrations? How faithful are illustrations to textual sources or they to representations? To whom are these images addressed? Who sees them, when, and how? In sum, why illustrate medieval rituals? Papers may address representations of rituals from any corner of the medieval world, from all parts of Europe, the Mediterranean, and beyond, and from any religion, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and others.


Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts: Envisioning Version 2.0
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Intellectual Property
Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Wesleyan University and Nate Harrison


In 2015, the College Art Association released its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts: https://www.collegeart.org/programs/caa-fair-use/best-practices. The Code aimed to help scholars, educators, artists, and museums better understand and defend uses of existing creative works under the U.S. Copyright Act’s fair use doctrine.

Much has changed since publishing the Code. Court cases like Cariou v. Prince and Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith have forced reassessment of fair use’s “transformativity test,” asking to what degree commentary or criticism are necessary in a fair use assessment, or whether aesthetic repurposing alone meets the threshold. Artificial Intelligence (AI) across the spectrum of cultural production is raising serious questions about authorship, and stands to further destabilize fair use criteria. Additionally, attitudes concerning cultural appropriation and restitution of cultural property have evolved, yielding new sensitivity to the limits of fair use. The growth of artists’ estates and artist-endowed foundations has led to greater control over IP after an artist’s passing, extending an artist’s involvement over the uses of their work.

This panel invites submissions that propose updates or revisions for a “Code 2.0.” How has our field’s understanding of fair use changed in the last decade? In what ways has it coalesced, or become more fractured? How have the stakes of fair use determinations changed? How might a revised Code address labor rights, economic rights, and the ethics of fair use differently? Do all stakeholders need the same protections? What new issues should a revised Code address?



Contested Art Histories and the Archive in Britain and the British Empire
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of British Art
Yuthika Sharma, Northwestern University and Holly Shaffer, Brown University


Art histories are shaped by the archives on which they are based; this panel asks us to question

the history of British Art as a field as well as how the stories within it are told through or against

archives. It asks for new methodologies and approaches that engage with and destabilize British

archival histories to recover the agency of non-dominant artistic forms and ideas in shaping

notions of British art. Are there subjugated art historical knowledges that emerged in relation to

or in contestation with dominant archival narratives of individuals and institutions in Britain and

the British colonial world, such as in relation to enslavement, class, ethnicity, gender, religion,

materials, environments? How might they reveal the importance of ritualistic, performative, multilingual,

multi-sensorial, and non-textual ways of archival thinking that informed perceptions of

British art? At the same time as the panel seeks papers that reveal varied types of archival

histories from diverse regions, the panel also calls for problematizing the archive’s canonical art

histories that privileged a particular view of art over subaltern ways of knowing and creating art.

We encourage participants to engage with new ways of thinking and conceptualizing the art

historical archive as both material and imagined history that can question and reconfigure

notions of British art during the age of empire.



Fugitive Ecologies in Contemporary Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society of Contemporary Art Historians
Allison Young


For historian Sarah L. Lincoln, the term “fugitive ecology” describes a range of subaltern relationships to the land, soil, and planet enacted in response to conditions of alienation and dispossession. As she indicates, fugitivity not only suggests “modes of being, knowing, and acting on the run, perpetually mobile, lacking a legal or official relationship to place” but also “oppositionality to a system predicated on the ‘fixing’ of bodies.” Yet even under the duress caused by the tangible spatial violence of enslavement, apartheid, colonization, reservations, prisons or plantations, such transgressive practices of tending the earth have persisted as strategies of both resilience and care.

This panel asks how “fugitive ecologies” have been proposed or theorized by contemporary artists, particularly in the wake of climate catastrophe. It considers the many resonances of the “wake” offered by Christina Sharpe – as visible disturbance, as a view towards the past, as openness of mind, or care in mourning – which are made manifest amidst present ecological breakdown.

Responding to environmental crises of industrial, nuclear, and colonial origin, artists have served as documentarians and activists, gardeners and radical botanists, and community archivists. What possibilities for decolonizing our relationship to nature are envisioned or demonstrated in contemporary art? How have artists drawn from alternative, Indigenous and subaltern onto-epistemologies when engaging with natural materials or landscape representations? How have artists responded to the collapse of world systems in the wake of the pandemic - alongside calls to action on the fronts of climate change and social justice?