Complete Session
This session explores the ways in which denial and purification catalyzed and promoted creativity in the arts, and how new visual forms emerged within the ascetic habitus. It seeks to understand how practices of asceticism influenced and transformed art and architecture, including landscape and the lived environment and how practices of asceticism moved through and created mutual exchance between different cultures and religions. In addition, the session examines somaesthetics, ascetic practices, and mind-body-soul alignment. Rather than seeing asceticism as a mode of deprivation, this panel seeks to illustrate how it generates new realities related to the individual, the community, and the environment.
“Popular religious painting” has been examined by scholars primarily for its documentary value, disregarding the aesthetic, ethnographic, and religious value it presents for the study of Novohispanic and Mexican history. The theoretical position of indigenized art as neither fine art nor historic(al) document arrests it to a fixed place as “curious” and “naive” expressions of the past. This panel will re-consider the nomenclature and academic positionality surrounding “popular religious painting,” by recentering the study, collecting, display, and making of ex-votos within the context of the spiritual and creative life of indigeneized communities. We posit that, in ways both unlike and similar to their academic counterparts, these paintings conveyed historical and spiritual narratives, demonstrated popular religious practices, depicted surrounding environments and objects, all while offering a means of healing, closure, and spiritual expansion for those who doubted the power of faith.
This panel brings together scholars and curators, who often found themselves at the very heart of these crises, to reflect on what’s at stake for the teaching and display of not only Islamic artworks but global artistic heritage more broadly. The panelists thus connect Art History’s sub-fields while concurrently de-otherizing Islamic art as if it were a “special case.” They also share their experiences and approaches to engaging the full spectrum of images—their meanings, ambivalences, and pitfalls—in our charged contemporary climate.
In Mexican visual culture, the notion of the racialized/indigenized body (El indio, the Indian) and its subsequent encounters with Europe became the agent centering indigeneity as the locus of a mestizo nation. As noted by art historian Shirley Samuels, sentimentality “acts upon the problem of the ‘body,’ what it embodies, and how social, political, racial, and gendered meanings are determined through their differential embodiments.” Sentimentality is here rendered as sentimentalismo, a Latin American artistic methodology that makes possible the understanding of Mexican visual culture as an extension of European enlightened Romanticism. A tactic of the Mexican state to deploy mestizaje as a racial category of sameness by evoking personal feelings. The affective qualities of images ranging from the printed to the cinematic demonstrate the applicability of this methodology and its novelty for the study of Mexican visual culture of the long nineteenth-century and the early twentieth.
As we careen into the post-anthropocence, visions of Earth’s ecology and art’s place in it are as fragile and ever changing as the technology constructing it. This panel invites pioneers who are considering what solutions for the future of our planet lie beyond its terra firma. Projects will be shared by artists Nick Bontrager, Adam Fung, Genevieve Hitchings, Hollis Hammonds, and poet Sasha West whose interdisciplinary artwork and research bring consciousness to our current climate crisis and fragile ecosystems. Artists, educators and researchers are trailblazers, finding new frontiers in media to examine the ways in which technology shapes and informs our understanding of the world around us. The presenting artists and innovators are going beyond our physical world in their work using Big Data, drone photography, AR & VR, LiDAR, and soundscapes with sculpture. Artistic themes blur the line between space and physicality, as well as abstract interpretations of the environment, landscapes, and sustainability. This panel will reveal our impact on earth and tomorrow.
As a counter to the established norm of artists seeking representation and sales through a gallery and curator, this panel focusses on artists and activists forming their own collectives, collaborative projects, and exhibition opportunities. Each Artist will present on and share their motives in taking up the mantle of curatorial practice and/or collective practice. Zines, Protests, Postal Art, Museum Takeovers, Destroying of Books, Rituals, Art Making Parties, and Installations will be discussed as well as non-traditional exhibition venues. The panel seeks to serve as inspiration and guide to other artists thinking of making things happen within their own communities.
The first presentation, "Empathic Encounters: Decoding Human Connection through AR, VR, and 3D-Animated Avatars," investigates the role of mirror neurons in empathic experiences with virtual avatars, demonstrating how these technologies provide insights into empathy's neural basis and foster meaningful connections in the digital world.
The second presentation, "Emotive Environments: Unraveling the Interplay of Space, Design, and Emotion through Virtual Reality," examines opportunities and challenges in designing emotionally evocative VR spaces. In addition, this presentation explores how VR enhances our understanding of the complex relationship between our surroundings and emotions.
The final presentation, "Visual Narratives: Socio-Emotional Resonance through Large-scale 3D Fictional Animations in Korean Society," delves into 3D animation's use for creating emotionally charged outdoor screenings reflecting contemporary Korean society. The panelist will discuss the creative process, the impact on viewers, and technology's role in enhancing emotional depth.
The panel aims to foster stimulating dialogue on expanding artistic expression and research horizons with AR, VR, and digital 3D technologies. Panelists will contribute to vibrant discussions at the College Art Association (CAA) conference, inspiring attendees to investigate further these technologies' interdisciplinary potential in art, research, and human emotions.
Within this impossible context, a new College of Art + Design (KyCAD) with a mission to “promote a creative and productive life through an undergraduate education in the contemporary arts” must build a framework of learning that brings the student the ability to assimilate, understand, examine, evaluate – and above all, achieve – the resilience and knowledge needed to succeed, transform, and thrive.
Art students today think of themselves as leaders, problem solvers and change makers. These roles demand an education that builds on the traditions of the cannon while also moving beyond the confines of established models of arts education that focus solely on skill-based and material learning.
The legacy of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain college centered the arts in cross-disciplinary experimentation and a conversation that led to a democratic collaboration of discipline and idea. This was the foundation for a new arts pedagogy that has allowed the artist to engage with society in new ways.
A small, dedicated faculty and staff team have come together in Louisville, Kentucky, to design a student experience that promotes an understanding of the potential of the artist/designer in an uncertain and changing world.
In 2006, Tarana Burke started the #MeToo Movement to increase awareness about sexual harassment in the workplace. In 2017, the movement gained significant traction among the general public when news reports of sexual abuse by American film producer Harvey Weinstein flooded the press. Many more stories followed, uncovering the patterns of abuse and silencing women and girls had experienced while working for (or with) people in positions of great influence and power including: Dr. Larry Nassar, Bill Cosby, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Private stories became public testimonies. Behavior that had gone unchecked and had silenced women for years was finally exposed.
In “The Target Shoots Back,” panelists will present art works that use visual and narrative art forms (including durational performance, film/animation) to highlight the courage of individuals who report assault and abuses of power despite overwhelming public scrutiny and skepticism. Focusing on the targets and victims of gaslighting and misogyny (rather than the perpetrators), the artists will re-examine and re-present the testimonies of Christine Blasey Ford, Anita Hill, and others, to provide new strategies for understanding and critiquing the media’s interpretation of these events.
In this session, three recipients of the Marilynn Thoma Postdoctoral Fellowships will share the research they conducted while being awardees, how their fellowship impacted their scholarship, and what is at stake for future publications and exhibitions in the field. Moderated by Aaron Hyman, the discussions will revolve around historiography, the construction of the Inka imaginary during the viceregal period, regional Andean art, and the production of new artworks in religious and secular contexts in the Spanish Americas during the Early Modern era. The participants of the session will discuss the state of the field of colonial art, new publications generated from these fellowships, and the importance of first-hand object study supported by the Thoma Foundation and other institutions in the US and Latin America. These conversations at this 2024 conference in Chicago, where the Thoma Foundation’s collection is housed, will contribute to CAA’s mission to advance innovative methodological and theoretical frameworks as well as hemispheric and international dialogues among scholars and artists.
The papers in this session stage encounters between nineteenth-century U.S. whaling and the art, methods, and theories of the 21st century. First, Maggie Cao examines whale ivory’s uses for white whalemen and Indigenous Fijians to understand Western and Indigenous ideas of time––as well as animal rhythms––to argue that scrimshaw registered tensions between multiple, conflicting temporalities. Marina Wells uses whaling art by Daniel Ranalli, Courtney Leonard, and Duke Riley to conceptualize how contemporary artists' media reckons with the trans-temporality of oceanic destruction. Finally, Jamie Jones looks at Wu Tsang’s 2022 digital installation, “Of Whales”––a panoramic experience of a whale’s underwater perspective––to understand the affordances of moving pictures as they render the imperial and extractive violence of whaling. Together, these papers present new ecocritical approaches that demonstrate how whale art, media, and archives highlight the urgencies of an increasingly uninhabitable world.
The curator Okwui Enwezor takes a critical stance on the notion of proximity to “the West” as the paradigmatic interpretation of non-Western Modernisms since this idea contributes to the depoliticization and decontextualization of art production. Instead, Enwezor suggests a “postcolonial response” to the emerging fields of global Modernisms because, “in its discursive proximity to Western modes of thought, postcolonial theory transforms this dissent into an enabling agent of historical transformation and thus is able to expose certain Western epistemological limits and contradictions.” (Okwui Enwezor, Manifesta Journal, 2002, p. 113)
This observation leads to broader questions: How can we redefine concepts of Modernities and Modernisms? How can one write Modernities histories while being aware of “The darker Side of Modernity” (Walter Mignolo, 2011) such as colonialism, imperialism, and universality? The foundational notion of Western Modernity as the universal norm rests on the problematic and paradigmatic presupposition that “the Modern is just a synonym for the West,” which often understands Modernity as the intellectual property of enlightened Europe. As a decolonial option of knowledge production, this panel seeks to examine discursive shifts, historical experiences, and alternative descriptions of Modernisms and Modernities.
We welcome papers that foreground decolonial theory, heritage and preservation critiques, digital applications, and other current approaches. We also welcome teachable case studies that represent under-studied areas, present well-known sites in new ways, and offer precedents for the art of other empires addressed in the art history curriculum. We invite colleagues with a broad range of specializations to contribute to the panel's concluding discussion about the shared challenges and opportunities of rethinking the Roman Empire for the classroom.