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Session Soliciting Contributors


Animal Subjects
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Margaryta Golovchenko, University of Oregon


The emergence of animal studies as a distinct field in the last twenty years has led to increased interest in treating animals as subjects. While we can never fully grasp the entirety of an animal’s experience and world, as famously argued by Thomas Nagel, animal subjectivity has been taken up in contemporary art and scholarship in part to examine consider how we can cultivate positive multispecies entanglements that respect animal agency. On the other hand, animal experiences in historical contexts like bestiaries and cabinets of curiosities, circuses and freakshows, zoos and menageries are slowly being recentered to recognize how animals regularly had to navigate the systems of colonialism, capitalism, and bio-politics. The supposedly inferior status of animals in the Enlightened hierarchy of being was used to justify the subjugation of colonial subjects, whether through visual and linguistic rhetoric or through physical proximity, while pets and exotic animals in menageries served as extensions of their human owners, reflecting the latter’s power and status. How can we talk about animals meaningfully without falling prey to the binary of human vs non? This panel invites papers that explore animal histories in relation to systems of power, both past and present. Its goal is to recenter animal subjecthood and to ask what it means to write animal narratives, whether this is a form of speaking-for or if doing so is to conduct a critical intervention into the humanist approach to art history.


Art Under Duress: DEAI Strategies for Teaching and Exhibiting Art under Governmental and Institutional Censorship
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

John Corso-Esquivel, Davidson College and Matthew Biro, University of Michigan Art History Department


The United States has witnessed unprecedented attacks on academic freedom in the past year, directly impacting art exhibitions and classroom curricula. Bans on Critical Race Theory (CRT) are underway in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, with at least sixteen other states considering similar legislation. Eight states have passed anti-LGBTQ curricular laws: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas. These attacks on freedom of expression are not limited to the extreme right, as attacks from the left are also being observed. For instance, Hamline University dismissed a well-regarded contingent art historian for showing historically important depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, and the Art Institute of Chicago has received criticism for "straight-washing" the queerness of Felix Gonzalez Torres's work, along with several other institutions that downplay identity politics in explicitly political work.

This panel invites papers that analyze these programs of governmental and institutional censorship. Contributions from art historians, artists, designers, lawyers, and freedom of speech activists are welcome. We are seeking papers that offer strategies to maintain crucial conversations and advance visibility of diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusivity initiatives in our schools, museums, and cultural institutions.



Artist-Led: Cultural Reimaginings in the Art World Today
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Mary McGuire, Mt. San Antonio College


The rise of global art capital in the twenty-first century is marked by a number of trends: expanding art fairs, deepening pockets of commercial galleries; increasing tourism around international exhibitions and biennials; branded collaborations; and civic investments in public art projects and museums. The reach of capital investments in the global art market enters into the urban core and sprawls outward on a global scale.

Artists and scholars such as Julie Ault, Andrea Fraser, Jan Lin, and Susanna Phillips Newbury, among others, have written about the tensions that arise in the intersections of art, capital, urban development, gentrification, and cultural identity formations. In conversation with these and other related projects, this session considers artists and arts practitioners who remain committed to alternatives to blue-chip aspirations. Artist-run spaces, not-for-profit galleries, volunteer-run art events, and warehouse studios maintain interdependent arts communities in cities all over the world, from Seoul to Los Angeles to Mexico City to Johannesburg.

Papers may address the following: How is community cultivated in studios, event spaces, and art centers outside museums and for-profit galleries? What spaces are welcoming to immigrant, BIPOC, queer and trans, disabled, and poor arts practitioners unbeholden to technocratic determinations of diversity and inclusion? How do art fairs, biennials, commercial galleries, and government-sponsored projects interface with or come into conflict with alternative sites? What kinds of ambiguous relationships exist between capitalist interventions and artist-led projects?

This session encourages submissions from a variety of arts practitioners, community-based arts workers, volunteers, freelance writers, curators, artists, and scholars.



Awash in Digital Imagery: what next for traditional art and museums?
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Shelley Kopp, University of Western Ontario , Imogen Clendinning, The University of Western Ontario and Jevonne Peters, University of Toronto


Awash in Digital Imagery: what next for traditional art and museums?
In this panel, we explore provocative questions related to the inevitable shifts that art makes in order to survive and thrive in the digital era. We consider the changes to our perceptions of art this shift enacts. We look for answers to the question of where art history finds itself as a discipline when some argue that art may have lost its Heideggerian thinginess?

The pandemic closed museums, and art viewing was filtered through a screen. Museums post their “collections” to websites and social media platforms, but there are losses of context and curation as we view art online. Alan Kirby notes that in the digimodernist era we are neither alone nor idle. We stream, we tweet, we post, we “like”; algorithms then act and react to encourage us to press on. Where once we moved through books and galleries in a measured, standardized fashion, we now are set free to craft our own paths through words and imagery. When digital media supplies a torrent of images, how does one recall, remember, or distinguish experiential meaning? One is reminded of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality: inundated and thus overwhelmed by instantaneous (and endless) imagery.

Perhaps posting images of traditional art offers new viewership, new participation, and new opportunities for museums, or maybe artistic meaning and curatorial expertise is lessened. Are museums and art in its traditional forms relevant for contemporary society when digital media present new possibilities?



Confronting the Legacy of New Deal Art in the Twenty-First Century
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Mary Okin, Living New Deal and Erika Doss


At the height of the Great Depression, a five-month pilot program called the Public Works of Art Project (December 1933 - May 1934) initiated an unprecedented era of federal work-relief for unemployed artists. Producing over 15,000 works, its success led to artists being hired by other federal public works programs (WPA/FAP, PWA, CCC, etc.), which collectively funded hundreds of thousands of additional artworks alongside art classes, films, exhibitions, archives, and other affiliated projects. Ninety years later, the New Deal legacy continues to impact many fields and organizations represented by members of the College Art Association, encouraging critical self-reflection in the fields of American art practice, art history, and art education. This panel invites papers that explore the downstream history of unprecedented 1930s federal art sponsorship, particularly what followed from both the strides toward greater equity and inclusion that New Deal art programs fostered and the powerful individuals and institutions that resisted creating a more inclusive labor force in American art. Papers on timely topics are welcome, for instance: 1) ideological conflicts within the New Deal era, their complex legacies, and impact on twenty-first-century artists, historians, and educators, 2) examinations of histories and historiography that reflect erasure or suppression of New Deal art and its diversity, 3) controversies involving New Deal art (e.g., its subject matter, censorship, privatization, sale, neglect, and/or destruction), 4) ongoing challenges and legal disputes related to fair use or permissions to study, capture, and reproduce images of New Deal art preserved within federal and non-federal sites.


Creating and Exiting in a Third Space to Avoid the Art of Othering
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Feather Metsch


As an Indigenous Artist of mixed decent I often find myself forced into artistic and academic spaces that were not created for me, or if they were then they were created in the context of othering one part of me that does not equal a whole. I am then often expected to exploit and toggle between the two spaces as needed. I propose a third space that utilizes overlapping communities with immersive and interactive technology to create spaces in which mixed, displaced individuals (and others who are often othered by the institutions we need to thrive) can create our own language of what being authentically represented means. With an eye on Indigenous Futurism and informed by Afrofuturism, I imagine decentralized digital platforms such as virtual reality, gaming engines, and self curated shows in which we could not only exist, but also find some sort of middle ground with institutions in which we are not othered by a Eurocentric lens. I welcome anyone who has experienced feelings of duality that have led to them having to edit themselves and their work in order fit into confined spaces to contribute to this panel. The ideal outcome would be to process ideas for both digital and real life third spaces for both art making and community building that empower us to participate in the world as whole individuals.


Creative Intelligence: The Future of AI in Design Education
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Christopher J. Moore


The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into design education is a growing area of interest for educators, students, and industry professionals alike. The potential benefits of AI in design are vast, including enhancing creativity, automating repetitive tasks, and facilitating design decision-making processes. However, the implementation of AI in design education also poses significant challenges, such as ethical concerns, the need for new pedagogical approaches, and the potential loss of traditional design skills.


This session invites presentations that address progressive strategies to embed AI in design curriculum that problematize and reconcile the use of new technologies in the production of creative outcomes. How might AI be used to enhance and augment design education, enabling students to develop the critical skills and knowledge they need to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven world? What are the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead in shaping a future where AI is a positive force for design innovation and education?



Generalist Pedagogies: Strategies for Teaching Beyond Specialization
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Kristen Carter, Florida Southern College and Marisa C. Sanchez, Ph.D., Lycoming College


With fewer tenure lines, dwindling funding, and shrinking departments, more educators are being asked to cover many bases and teach classes beyond their immediate specializations. This panel seeks to inspire discussion – and new perspectives and strategies – on generalist teaching. How might classes, assignments, and advising incorporate different approaches and skills that cross disciplinary, geographic, material, or temporal lines while still maintaining socio-political, historical, and theoretical specificity? How can educators foster more global, inclusive, and responsible content and methodologies despite relative – or initial – unfamiliarity with a certain topic, medium, or field? What are the values and potential pitfalls of generalist teaching, especially in view of disciplinary shifts away from nation-based, chronological, and/or canonical models of study? What should a generalist curriculum mean and look like, what should it offer, and how can we better equip students and educators for this new reality?

This panel welcomes proposals from graduate students, artists, and educators across various fields, including art history, design, studio, and museum studies. It also welcomes perspectives, experiences, and insights from both junior and senior faculty across all types of institutions (SLAC, community, public, and otherwise).



Guilty Pleasures: Art History and Other Clichés
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Linden Hill, Stanford University and Ron Elizedek Reichman, Stanford University


Leo Steinberg famously asserted that the critic is “the generator of the cliché.” Repellent yet inevitable, clichés are deeply embedded in art history. Under the conditions of neoliberal cultural production, even the most transgressive intervention––theoretical, historical, or artistic––is caught up in a cycle of reproduction and assimilation until it transforms into a consumable commodity that eventually falls out of fashion. From Warhol’s Americana iconographies to projections of Impressionist art in immersive environments, clichés loom large in the precincts of art and consumer culture.

One type of cliché is the guilty pleasure: the art we love to hate. The guilty pleasure is a relatively new category of experience, a complex knot of shame about consumerism and the enjoyment of consumption. Guilty pleasures typically refer to reality television, pop music, and comfort food, but they haven’t been seriously considered in the realm of art history.

This panel approaches guilty pleasures and clichés on methodological and representational levels; we welcome papers that interrogate these terms as productive categories of cultural inquiry as they intersect with art history, criticism, or visual culture. Papers might address: To what extent do clichés overlap with trash imagery, camp aesthetics, and spectacular gimmicks? Can these phenomena subvert art history’s pretense of detachment and elitism? How does acknowledging guilty pleasures signify a return to an affective encounter with art? While the guilty pleasure has been codified as a cultural condition of late twentieth-century America, presenters may engage with the concept as it emerges in any region or period.



New Wave Global Blackness: Black Contemporary Art Without Borders
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Zamansele Nsele


Underpinning the new wave of Global Blackness is a consciousness of the transnational, unconfined operations of antiblackness and systemic racism. This renewed consciousness of the reproduction of racial capitalism at a global scale was rekindled and elaborated by the 2020 movements for Black lives.

Wishing to address the myriad of ways this global awareness is shaping and imbuing contemporary Black art, architecture and performance, this proposal seeks papers that unflinchingly critique and explore the capacious symbolic relations and signifiers of global blackness and anti-blackness. This panel anticipates contributions connected but not limited to: dis/figuration, dis/possession, non/belonging, non/being, un/worlding, presence and absence as they link to the larger framework of global blackness. Global South and North framings of anti-colonialist, pan-africanist and afropessimist perspectives are welcome as this panel seeks to elaborate on contemporary art, architecture and performance that evokes visual solidarities and their limits. While the aim is not to undermine localized geographic specificities and the historical hierarchies that determine geopolitical centers and margins; rather the motive is to deepen an understanding of the nuances, and tensions— by tracking where they converge and diverge. The aim is to illuminate and engage the new wave of global black aesthetic solidarities, imaginaries and their affective consciousness.



Plant Politics: vegetal ecologies and sustainable futures
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Giovanni Aloi, School of the Art Institute of Chicago


Over the past ten years, contemporary artists have engaged with the sessility and silence of plants—the attributes that widely contributed to their historical objectification—in new and challenging ways. Through innovative aesthetic and speculative conceptual strategies, they have endowed plants with an undeniable physical presence, foregrounded the importance of alternative creative models, envisioned collective forms of intelligence and wisdom, and collaborated with plants to remedy ecological degradation. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Critical Plant Studies, this panel aims to deconstruct the foundations of the ideological base that today defines human-plant relations on the grounds of historical processes shaped by colonialist, capitalist, and ecological forces. Informed by Indigenous Knowledge, Black Humanities, Queer Ecologies, and Anthropocene Studies plants today proliferate across artistic media as, among others, emblems or resilience, reminders of past exploitations, indelible markers of cultural identity, or problematizers of social and cultural categories and hierarchies.

This panel invites contributions that critically address recent curatorial efforts as well as artist practices and approaches in which plants feature as agentially charged catalysts promoting positive and actual change.



The Body and the Museum: Empire, Ethics, and New Directions
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Christine Slobogin, University of Rochester


Both the Hunterian Museum and the Wellcome Collection in London recently have been key loci for discussions on displaying the body and medicalized objects in museum collections. After a prolonged outcry, the Hunterian decided to remove the skeleton of Charles Byrne (known as the “Irish Giant”) from display ahead of its 2023 reopening. The long-running Medicine Man exhibition at the Wellcome also closed down, so that the institution could reconsider how medical collections should be shown to the public sensitively, ethically, and holistically. The origins of these problematic displays were rooted in imperialist projects that used museums and collecting to cement power. Alongside these more discrete moments of reckoning with the body and medical collections in museums in the British metropole, of course the British Museum’s treatment of the bodies and artifacts of non-British cultures remains a constant theme and debate in museum studies.

Expanding beyond the above British examples, this panel invites curators, art historians, and other museum professionals to reflect and engage with the imperial legacies of global collecting practices, the ethics of bodily autonomy and medical collecting, and possibilities for the future. While engaging with the breadth of recent work on decolonizing the museum and collecting practices, papers may reflect on the origin and status of a single object, on the strengths and shortcomings of the practices of certain museums or collections, on more conceptual ideas around ethics, or on wider trends within museum studies.



The Material Cultures of Landscape
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Manon Gaudet and Vanessa Nicholas, Concordia University


In the past thirty years, numerous art historians have demonstrated that the North American landscape painting tradition projects Euro-American economic, epistemological, and cultural ideals onto Indigenous land, justifying territorial expansion and fostering national identities. Resource extraction has also become a topic of study as scholars trace the lifecycles of objects like silver soup tureens, taking an interest in the labor and raw materials developed into finished products. This panel seeks to bring together these parallel tracks, inviting papers that consider representations of North American land and landscapes beyond the picture plane and within the broader realm of material culture studies. We hope to receive papers that examine how settler colonial land relations are constituted, contested, and/or complicated by this object category. In thinking through the settler colonial and ecological dimensions of design and material culture, some key questions may include: How do settler colonial land relations figure on a printed textile, ceramic plate, chair, or quilt? How does the dramatic vista manifest in the small, the daily, and the portable? How does the notion of landscape shift or sediment in objects made for intimate use within the home? While the historical landscape painting tradition is largely the purview of white men, we hope that considering landscape more broadly as a cultural resource will invite new objects, narratives, and questions pertaining to race and gender. By bringing two revisionist art histories into dialogue with one another, this panel will consider the intersectionality of land, power, home, labor, and looking.


A Gestural Turn
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Denise A. Baxter, University of North Texas


In 2019 the Anti-Defamation League’s added to its Hate on DisplayTM Hate Symbols Database a hand gesture “in which the thumb and index finger touch while the other fingers of the hand are held outstretched.”[1] Having historically broadly communicated assent or “okay,” the gesture had recently been appropriated by white supremacists to communicate “white power.” What had previously been a clearly communicated embodied symbol had become contextually disrupted.

Recognizing that the readability of gestures is temporally and geographically situated and may be specific to cultural or social groups, this session seeks papers that variously investigate represented gestural expressions. Considerations of period gesture, relationships between gesture, dress, and etiquette, or reflections on the relationship between displayed bodily comportment and subjectivity are equally welcome. How, what, and to whom does the tilt of a head, the manipulation of an object or aspect of dress, or the extension of a leg communicate? This session equally welcomes papers that explore these questions from the perspectives of archaeology, anthropology, art history, or performance art.

[1] “Okay Hand Gesture,” ADL’s Hate on DisplayTM Hate Symbols Database, accessed April 24, 2023, https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/okay-hand-gesture.



Advancing Latinx Art Pedagogies: Promoting Racial Equity in Higher Education
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Gina Gwen Palacios, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley , Joy Esquierdo, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and Dr. Christen Garcia, MFA, PhD, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley


There is little to no scholarship on Latinx-centered art pedagogies in higher education. This is, in part, due to the erasure, stereotyping, and exclusion of Latinx artists and scholars from Western art canons (Dávila, 2020). For example, Chicana art is commonly regarded as “exotic” or “primitive” (Davalos, 2017, p. 11). A Latinx-Serving Institution, mostly referred to as a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), serves 25% or more undergraduate students. According to HSI Scholar Gina Ann Garcia (2019), Latinx-Serving Institutions are reported as underperforming when compared to “white normative standards” in higher education (p. 3). To truly be Latinx serving rather than solely Hispanic enrolling, Garcia advocates that faculty, administrators, staff, and students must work together to provide Latinx affirming pedagogies and instructional frameworks. This panel invites studio artists, art historians, designers, and education scholars to offer pedagogies, art practices, curricula, theories, and scholarship that support Latinx students. Questions to explore include:

  • What assets do Latinx students and faculty bring to their creative and written work?
  • What type of art instructional frameworks can be used to address cultural, linguistic, navigational, and familial capital?
  • How do lived experiences, borderlands theories, and Latinx scholarship guide our fields? How can lived experiences be intellectualized?
  • In what ways can we promote social justice and racial equity in the fields of art, design, art education, and art history?
  • How can the writings of Gloria E. Anzaldúa shape Latinx affirming art pedagogies?



Animal Extractions
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Maura A. Coughlin, Northeastern University and Ivana Dizdar, University of Toronto


The animal turn in ecocriticism offers scholars of the long nineteenth century productive new tools for investigating, critiquing, and disrupting visual representations of our relationship with animals. Visual and material cultures witness the ways we have engaged with, used, and abused animals: from food, clothing, labor, and transportation to scientific research to entertainment and companionship. Aside from the foundational works of John Berger and Jacques Derrida, recent contributions to critical animal studies challenge our inquiries into the aesthetics of human-animal encounters. Rethinking the scope of “natural resources,” this panel examines the extraction of animals and their status as coveted resources; as objects of exploitation, exchange, and profit; and as materials and motifs in the histories of art, craft, and design. How, we ask, is the history of art also a history of our relationship with animals? Why is the nineteenth century a time of change—or crisis—in a long history of living with and alongside animals? How would centering animals force us to reorient the ways we practice ecocritical art history?

Topics might include:

  • Intersections among animal extractions, the fur trade, the logging industry, agriculture, and settler colonialism
  • Animal products and materials: fur, feathers, bone, skin, oil, etc.
  • The visual and literary cultures of whaling, sealing, and fishing
  • Animal consumption
  • Indigenous relations to animals
  • Disappearance and extinction
  • Animal labor; animals as machines
  • Animals and mining
  • Animals as luxury materials in fashion and interior design
  • Breeding
  • Domestication and captivity
  • The pet trade
  • Zoological gardens
  • Interspecies relations
  • Animal agency
  • Animal cruelty/welfare movements


Group Work: Art and Feminism
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Rachel Warriner, Northumbria University and Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge


Groups are axiomatic for feminist practice. In many periods, women artists have come together in studios, collectives and through activism to share resources, offer mutual support and develop new ways of working. Group projects have taken many different forms, from artists working together on artworks, to collaborative publications, DIY galleries, scholarly programmes, and international networks. While there has been important scholarship on feminist art groups, the recent resurgence of interest in ‘woman artists’ has tended to obscure the complex contexts in which many artists worked and struggled for a career and an audience. In monographic accounts, these group contexts are often taken to be only a part of a career or diminished as a minor history. In this session, we are interested in what happens when the group is centred.

Focusing on the distinctive importance of groupwork for feminist practice, understood as intersectional, this session invites proposals which present new research on groups, from historical accounts to methodological and theoretical interventions. We are interested in the difficulties and rewards of studying groups. Papers may discuss how to approach dispersed archives, conflicting histories, bad feelings, too much information or too little; or reflect on the productive challenges to disciplinary conventions and divisions, national schools, or ideological affiliations. For periods in which primary sources are lost or limited, how might group contexts provide the impulse to hypothesise alternative historical narratives? And, how might histories of reactionary groups and formations shape what we take to be radical practices?



Landscape and Spatial Imagination in South Asia
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Pooja Sen, Yale University and Tausif Noor, University of California - Berkeley


Recent scholarship in South Asian history has documented the enduring physical and psychic trauma of the 1947 Partition through analyses of newspaper reports, speeches and writings by political leaders, novels, short stories, poetry, oral histories, artworks, films, and television shows. But before this turn to the analysis of political history, literature, and culture, Partition was broadly understood in public discourse as territorial loss. This panel focuses on the artistic representation of Partition’s spatial imaginaries and its environmental effects as they are understood through landscape. In these artworks, landscape—distinct from nature by presence of human intervention—is as much about seeing a place and recording a site as it is about constructing ideas about identity and society, making sense of colonialism, and imagining a future after climate change.

The study of landscape revives basic cultural studies questions about how the oppressions of colonialism, caste domination, and environmental destruction are lived, expressed, and negotiated. How do artists reconsider a system of visual representation that had long been in the hands of British colonizers? Landscapes encourage conversations about the artist’s eyewitness seeing. To what extent are such viewpoints fictional, representing what postcolonial subjects hoped to see? How do landscapes help us join with others in a community bereft of the old sources of belonging? Who is the assumed subject who represents the landscapes of colonial and postcolonial South Asia? Who is excluded, repressed, and erased? How can we make and study landscapes to end structures of oppression rather than reproduce them?



Learning from Trees: Artists and Climate Solutions
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Martina Tanga


“Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.”

–John Muir

Trees are the lungs and beating heart of our planet, a fundamental organism in the earth’s stability and essential in showing us solutions to counter the adverse effects of climate change. Humans and artists have long been fascinated with trees, and they have been featured in the cultural imagination since time immemorial. Now, more than ever-–as we reach a pivotal decade in our human history for the sustainability of our planet-–it is vital that we learn from trees in ways that artists can teach us.

This panel solicits papers that examine how artists have engaged with trees to reveal their unique subjectivity. Trees thrive in cooperative communities, communicate through underground mycorrhizal networks and emit chemical signals, and have a life span that is, on average, five times longer than our own. How can artists help us understand these distinctive attributes to embrace an ecocentric worldview? What do artists see in trees and forest communities that can guide us to live with each other and the world around us so that every living being can survive and thrive? Proposals will be considered that cover any art-making practice from any geographic region, time, and culture but must go beyond representations of trees to address what we might learn from trees. We are in radical need of a new way of life, and trees, the oldest living organisms on earth, may have the answers.



Migratory Modernisms: Race, Ethnicity, and Twentieth-Century Jewish Art of Latin America
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Abigail Lapin Dardashti and Chelsea Haines, Arizona State University


While Jewish people arrived in the Americas as early as the sixteenth century, Jewish migration grew significantly across Latin America during the first half of the twentieth century in response to rising anti-Semitism around the world. This panel invites contributors to consider Latin American modernism by Jewish artists and/or about Jewish-ness in relationship to changing notions of race and ethnicity caused by migration. Being Jewish is an ethnicity as well as a religion that includes many racial identifications. How did artists think about their Jewishness as a marker of identity and/or inspiration for their creative practices? Did artists emphasize, minimize, or erase their Jewish backgrounds? How did they seek to express Jewish culture, migration, trauma, or history in their work? Finally, how have these artists’ Jewish backgrounds been understood in art historiography? Examples may include: Diego Rivera’s declaration that his marrano heritage was central to his art-making and politics; José Gurvitch and Lasar Segall’s modernist meditations on migration and the Holocaust; Jewish refugees in the Caribbean during World War II; the construction of Holocaust memorials in Latin America; contributions of Jewish artists to international exhibitions such as the São Paulo Bienal and the Havana Bienal; and Latin American artists working in experimental practices whose Jewish identity remains relatively understudied, such as Gego and Anna Bella Geiger. We invite papers examining these and related questions through studies of individual artists, or thematic papers that consider the contribution of Jewish artists in twentieth-century Latin America.


Miniature Designs and Worldly Simulations: Questions of Scale in Early Modern Arts
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Wenjie Su, Princeton University and Yizhou Wang, Hong Kong Baptist University


Amongst the growing scholarship on the global circulation and appropriation of early modern arts, the creative manipulation of sizes and scales is one absorbing visual dimension that has received little attention. This session proposes to chart a connected visual sensation centering around miniaturization. From netsuke to folding fans, snuff bottles to pocket watches, a diverse range of small-sized objects were transformed into elaborately crafted luxuries and desirable collectibles across the Eurasian sphere. The global export lives of these miniature arts often departed from the usages and implications in their original cultural contexts. In late Ming China, for example, folding fans functioned as a delicate site where courtesans transformed their self-portraits and sensuality into objects of intimacy ready for public gazes. Such strong connection between miniature portraiture and female subjects’ self-fashioning also resonated with cases in early modern Europe and beyond. Meanwhile, monumental structures from around the globe—ranging from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Chinese pagodas, to Greco-Roman ruins—were similarly reimagined on a miniature scale and collected as not only representations but also simulations of cultural ideas. These are a few examples showcasing how miniature designs might illuminate global networks of novel technologies and contested commodities, the transforming practices of privacy and intimacy, and transcultural visual simulations. By inviting papers that bring to light more objects and scenarios exemplifying thoughtful reinventions of scales, this session explores how miniature designs encompassed new meanings and mentalities that emerged in the rapidly transforming global dynamics of the early modern period.


Museum and Trauma: Theory and Practice
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Amy Nygaard, University of St. Thomas


Trauma is endemic in modern society and art has always played a vital role in testifying to its presence and aiding in recovery. Artists have used their work to address and confront traumatic experiences, including war, genocide, racialized violence, ecological disasters, and personal trauma—among other forms. How should museums contextualize and display such art? Moreover, what, if any, role do museums play in the acknowledgement and negotiation of trauma and post-traumatic recovery? This session invites papers on trauma and its resolution within museums and museum practices. Papers may investigate how museums, somewhat paradoxically, are the loci of trauma but also sites of potential reconciliation through truth-telling, collaboration, and empowerment. The panel welcomes case studies of how museums have utilized institutional critiques, decolonial practices, and community engagement in order to acknowledge and redress harmful practices at the core of these colonial institutions. Some case studies may be successes, and some may not. Additionally, papers that integrate a theoretical analysis of how trauma operates within collection and display practices are of particular interest. Finally, scholars and museum professionals are welcome to submit practicum reports on trauma-informed practices that have cultivated culturally sensitive and agile programming while also repairing and forging new community relationships built on mutual trust and respect.


Never Submit!
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

L Vinebaum, School of the Art Institute of Chicago


Despite earning hundreds of millions (and in some cases, billions) of dollars in revenues each year, multinational publishing conglomerates still do not pay researchers and scholars to publish their works, while charging postsecondary institutions billions of dollars in journal and digital subscription fees. Concurrently, 68% of faculty at US colleges and universities hold precarious, gig economy-like adjunct and contingent appointments. This session explores structural similarities between for-profit scholarly publishing, and neoliberal, corporatized, and financialized higher education. Both rely on labor exploitation to minimize expenses and maximize revenues — profits for shareholders in the case of commercial publishers, and high administrative salaries and endowment revenues in the case of not-for-profit colleges and universities. Yet the imperative to publish or perish persists for faculty across tenured, non-tenured, contingent and adjunct ranks. What does it mean to have to publish (and potentially perish) under such conditions? What are the real costs of providing content to publishers for free? Is the system broken, or is it functioning as it's meant to? Has the time finally come to dismantle the system (or systems), and if so — how? This session seeks contributions that reflect on the current state of academic publishing in the larger context of neoliberalism, and it seeks proposals, case studies, propositions, and presentations that consider or offer practical solutions, new models, alternative visions, actions and refusals, subversive reimaginings, structural upheavals, new beginnings, and more equitable, compassionate, livable, and sustainable systems.


Rebellious Creating: Opacity as Praxis in the Contemporary Caribbean
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Nicole Marcel, Temple University and Malene Barnett, Temple University


Édouard Glissant famously demanded the right to opacity, or the right to be unseen, unknown, or unindexed. Opacity negates the oppressive colonial gaze; opacity allows for wholeness; opacity resists a single transparent reading of a work of art, a way of being, or identity. Opacity is wayward, it is radiant, it is living.

This panel attends to the rebellious and generative methods of creation used by artists, makers, and scholars in the Caribbean and its diasporas. Through these practices—the sharing of stories, myths, rituals, and experiences—the collaborative aspect of making and creating not only disrupts Western linear timelines but also establishes mappable networks of kinship. We welcome proposals from scholars of art history and adjacent fields, artists, and makers at any career stage—students and emerging professionals are encouraged to submit. We envision a range of voices, perspectives, and methodologies to demonstrate the robust nature of creating inherent in the Caribbean. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Contending with the archive (speculations, shifts, revelations)
  • Spectacle, sight, and the gaze (including surveillance and techniques of avoiding surveillance)
  • New methodologies and sources of information/knowledge (embodied, experiential, hauntological, gossip, practice-based)
  • Materiality and process connecting to ancestral and historical memory/memories/re-memory
  • Traditional and “non-traditional” media as tools for liberation (clay, fabric, collage, mapping, digital art, hair)


Revolutionizing Visual Arts Education: The Impact of AI
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Raymond Yeager


Art education is poised to enter an unprecedented period of transformation as AI technologies permeate the artistic landscape. With the rise of AI-powered creative tools and platforms, art educators are grappling with the challenges and opportunities presented by this powerful technology. This session will discuss how AI is being integrated into curriculums, how it's changing teaching methods, and what are the benefits for students. At the same time, it also examines the challenges posed by AI, including issues of authenticity, the role of the artist, and ethical concerns related to the use of data and privacy. Overall, this session strives to provide participants with an in-depth understanding of how to creatively and innovatively respond to fully realize the potential of this technology.


Women and Diplomatic Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Silvia Tita, Michigan State University


This panel intends to explore the multifaceted ways in which women have engaged with diplomatic art in various geographical and temporal contexts. As politics has been for long a domain dominated by men, women appeared publicly rather exceptionally as leaders or influencers. Although relegated to the margins in terms of visibility, women played crucial roles on the political arena in diverse capacities via diplomatic art. This panel seeks papers that employ methodologies at the intersection of feminist, gender, and women studies, on the one hand, and diplomatic art and gift studies, on the other hand, in order to bring to light women as creators, agents, and recipients of diplomatic art. Such particular cases should illuminate on how women internalized and negotiated politics as well as societal rules regardless of prescriptive limitations that coordinated patriarchal societies. Considering traditional definitions of diplomatic art, questions about the necessity to amend them to address women’s nuanced contribution will be posed. This panel is open to all geographical areas and time periods.


50+ Years of A.I.R. Gallery
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Kat Griefen, Queensborough Community College, City University of New York and Kalliopi Minioudaki


Organized as an alternative non-profit space but designed like a white-box gallery with work available for sale, Artists in Residence Inc (A.I.R. Gallery), one of the first all-women’s galleries in the US, began its legendary course in Soho, New York in 1972. Initially, spearheaded by Barbara Zucker and Susan Williams and comprising twenty dues-paying artists, this feminist collective sought to combat gender discrimination through the promotion of innovative work by women artists at a time when 96.4% of artists represented by New York galleries were men and only 18% of US galleries had exhibited a female artist.

For over 50 years, A.I.R. has not only participated in changing the status of women in the arts through exhibitions, public programming and community-building but has offered an influential model for galleries nationally and internationally. Through hybrid fundraising and changing strategies of support and affiliation (such as international exchange exhibitions, DIY workshops and professional development programming and a formative emerging/re-emerging artist fellowship) A.I.R., which today welcomes nonbinary artists and administrators, continues to evolve, succeeding in outliving most alternative spaces of the era, while remaining expansive and artist-run.

Initiating a series of projects leading to a publication that critically celebrate A.I.R.’s legacy, this session invites papers that focus on aspects of the gallery’s history, including exhibitions, programming, reception, governance and related spheres of influence, collaboration, and engagement. Proposals that explore A.I.R.’s connections with other alternative spaces, activist organizations and artistic movements are encouraged. Papers on A.I.R. members or affiliated artists will be also considered.



ACTIVATING FLUXUS, EXPANDING CONSERVATION
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Dr. Hanna Barbara Hölling, PhD, Bern Academy of the Arts and Aga Wielocha, Bern Academy of the Arts


Fluxus of the 1960s and 70s defied conventional notions of art and creativity by emphasizing artistic practice's transient, playful, and participatory aspects. However, the multidimensionality of Fluxus has been flattened out in the rush to exhibit, historicize, and theorize its objects. This session explores the potential of Fluxus events, objects, and ephemera as active material embodiments that challenge established hierarchies in museums and collecting institutions.

Scholars, artists, and practitioners are invited to present papers that address Fluxus forms of activation, including reconstruction, adaptation, and reinterpretation of works leading to new concepts. The central question is: How can we activate Fluxus today without reducing it to static artifacts? How do we redefine a work's identity and embrace its inherent capacity for change? Can a Fluxus work serve as a thinking device to critically recalibrate the meaning of conservation and care?

By exploring these questions, we hope to generate discussions on the creative and critical potential of Fluxus beyond its historical context. We aim to rethink conservation's role in relation to ephemeral and participatory art, and push the limits of its technical focus. Emphasizing Fluxus's multidimensionality, we seek to invigorate its legacy and open new avenues for artistic and intellectual exploration.



Alexander Archipenko in Chicago: New Research
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Alexandra Keiser, The Archipenko Foundation


This session will provide new insights into the creative practice of Ukrainian-born American artist Alexander Archipenko (Kyiv 1887–1964 New York). A pioneer sculptor, Archipenko made a significant contribution to the visual language of modernism that emerged in the early 20th century. He was associated with several historical avant-garde movements, such as French Cubism and German Expressionism. But, he also created a wide range of artworks throughout his life, including sculpture, mixed media constructions, ceramics, drawings, paintings, and prints. Archipenko’s concern with innovation and educating the younger generation placed him at the center of numerous creative networks, and he engaged in cultural exchanges with influential figures in the international art world.

The session will focus on Archipenko's activities in Chicago, where he taught at the New Bauhaus (invited by László Moholy-Nagy) and ran his own art school in the 1930s and 1940s. Among the venues where he exhibited at the time were the Arts Club, the Renaissance Society, the Art Institute, and the Katherine Kuh Gallery. Research presentations about his pedagogy and his students (including Lenore Tawney and Claire Zeisler) are especially encouraged. So are insights into his creative networks, particularly those associated with the émigré and exile scene around Katherine Kuh. In addition, contributions on all areas and aspects of Archipenko's practice are welcome, enriching the Archipenko discourse and contributing to the parallel narratives about modernism.



Photography and Africa: Primary Sources
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Antawan Byrd, Northwestern University , Phil Taylor, George Eastman Museum and Leslie Wilson, The Art Institute of Chicago


Since the emergence of “African Photography” as a subfield of art history in the early 1990s, critics and scholars have increasingly sought to respond to and account for how photographic images interfaced with other technologies of reproduction and circulation. Advertisements, album covers, billboards, books, calendars, ID cards, newspapers, oral testimony, passports, popular magazines, postcards, posters, pulp fiction, textiles, and the surfaces of domestic interiors, bureaucratic offices, and outdoor spaces, have all constituted sources for analyzing the aesthetics, display, and movement of historical photographic images (whether “vintage” or “modern”) in and of Africa. When considered alongside the profusion of contemporary art practices that employ the photographic broadly conceived, it becomes clear that the practice of photography in Africa has and continues to exert enormous pressure on any effort to adhere to “proper” interpretive protocols or research methodologies rooted in the conventions of Western art history and/or anthropology. This panel aims to address and map how scholars of African photography engage primary sources to better understand the medium, including photographic objects that can be construed as unconventional, i.e., that exceed traditional market and museological demand for unique or editioned prints. Key questions include: How do these sources compel different accounts of African photography? How does this engagement shift our understanding of the very concept of “medium” in African contexts? We welcome presentations that consider both historical and contemporary practices, and invite reflections that suggest trajectories for further research.


Queer Monuments
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Blake Oetting, New York University and Nicholas C Morgan, Hampden-Sydney College


In the 1990s, queer theory generated a nuanced framework for considering the intertwined roles of gender and sexuality within, and in tension with, the public sphere. This session considers how these aspects of queerness’s critique of citizenship, the subject and normativity—and its associated prioritization of flux, flow and fragmentation—rub up against the monument, a format associated with both permanence and didactic, authoritative communication.

We welcome papers that consider questions such as: can we speak of the formal aspects of a “queer monument,” and how might these distort received notions of memory and historicization? How have monuments played into artistic responses to the loss or erasure of queer spaces? In the midst of the AIDS crisis, how did artists use and abuse monumentality? Can queer approaches to monumentality dialogue with recent research into monumentality and white supremacy? What lessons do we learn from state-sponsored monuments related to queer sites and struggles versus those produced “from below”?

Papers may consider realized or proposed monuments, ephemeral monuments, monuments to LGBTQIA+ figures or movements, anti- or counter-monuments (as in Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's influential notion of "counterpublics"), or critiques and understandings of monumentality articulated from queer and trans theoretical perspectives. Papers may focus on sculpture, photomurals, or other media; we are particularly interested in the novel and counterintuitive conceptions of monumentality that may emerge from considering a range of understudied queer and trans archives, sites, and historical objects. Papers from all time periods and geographic regions are encouraged.



The Painted Page: Medieval Manuscripts Through a Comparative Lens
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Ann Shafer


This session examines premodern illuminated books from the sacred traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam within a larger context of visual influences from other media across time. Often individually studied in a vacuum with very specific aims, these books have nevertheless belonged to fluid and far-reaching communities of makers and readers whose physical and spiritual needs have varied over time and space. This session asks simple comparative questions. For example, how old is the practice of illuminating text, and what can ancient stone carvings – from Guatemala to Assyria – tell us about the role of imagery in the Medieval book? What do ink makers in Japan have to teach us about the devotional aspect of European scribal practices through time? How can contemporary artists in the Middle East show us subtle social and political relationships between the texts and the communities that produced them? Possible research questions in this space of free inquiry are endless, and might dovetail with issues of materials and techniques of production, communal practices of learning and exchange, and the ontological nature of the sacred word. With the aim of bringing together scholars from different fields, we hope to gain new perspectives on familiar texts and broaden the scope of manuscript studies.


The Power and the Politics of Sound
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Mary Mazurek, University of Lethbridge


It could be as loud as a fire alarm or soft as a whisper. Either way, sound has the power to seep into our perceptions while influencing and impacting our actions. However, we often intake sound unconsciously and act automatically in its presence. What is sound? It is a wave form that is perceived by the ear and then interpreted by the brain. One can passively hear or more intentionally listen to a sound. Noise, a subset of sound, is often interpreted negatively. Jacques Attali alludes to noise as an interruption of the message. However, what if it contained a message, and if we listened, what would we hear? In the hands of an artist, sound can become material that can shift a listener’s perception and perspective. For example, Jacob Kirkegaard’s piece 4 Rooms, captures the minute sounds of four abandon rooms in the in Chernobyl’s “Zone of Exclusion,” thus, speaking to governmental negligence and resilience of the natural world. Sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan reconstructs an auditory Foucaultian panopticon from silenced and blind folded political prisoner accounts of the Saydnaya Syrian military prison. A message becomes clear through protest as in the 2017 Chicago Women’s March, which advocated for women’s rights. In an energetic chant, a group of women exclaimed “This pussy fights back!” Artists or not, these women expressed their message artistically through sound. This demonstrates the political and artistic power of sound, and its strength as an artistic medium.


Art and Empirical Inquiry in Pre-Modern China
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Kathleen Ryor and Jennifer Purtle


Long before the “Scientific Revolution” in Europe, Chinese scholars, technicians and artisans explored their world and produced empirical knowledge of it. This aspect of the intellectual history of China has moved well beyond its Eurocentric framing using the term “science,” and instead has focused on the ways in which indigenous epistemologies have generated various forms of knowledge about the world, both abstract and concrete. While narrow studies on topics such as optics have explored the intersection between art and “science” in China, the active role that visual art has played in the production of empirical knowledge (and vice versa) has often been overlooked.

This session invites paper proposals that explore the relationships between any form of art production in China before 1700 in relation to indigenous Chinese empirical knowledge, such as the analogues of astronomy, botany, chemistry, geology, mathematics, physics, or zoology (among others). Some questions for consideration might include: How does visual art enact or collaborate in the investigation of the physical world? What are the interconnections between fundamental concepts within Chinese cosmology, discrete areas of scientific knowledge, and visual imagery? How might the materiality of certain forms of Chinese art or visual culture contribute to concrete forms of scientific practice? How might the visual or descriptive aspects of different types of art act as adjacent or complementary forms of scientific investigation? Ultimately, this panel seeks contributions that advance understanding of how indigenous ways of knowing and representing relate to each other.



Print on Demand: Evolving Tools for the Creation and Distribution of Activist and Extremist Printed Ephemera.
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Alex Lukas, University of California at Santa Barbara


In the run-up to the 2016 election, "This Machine Kills Fascists" stickers were affixed to Risographs, laser printers, and relief presses across the country. Broadsides featuring the phrase were posted in the windows of cooperative and academic print shops alike, and printmakers' social media feeds were peppered with repurposings of Woody Gutherie's famous slogan. Print, the adage supposed, would save democracy.

Flash forward to the first 2020 presidential debate, where then-President Trump urged the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by." Merchandise pairing the phrase with the hate group's name was available for purchase online almost before the debate concluded.

Through a proliferation of direct-to-garment print services and web-based drop-ship companies, right-wing political movements have effectively embraced printed ephemera to advance ultra-conservative ideologies. This panel discussion will examine the uses of print-on-demand and increasingly affordable low-run printing technology as integral to a resurgence of a far-right, authoritarian political discourse.

As these printmaking technologies continue to spread, a medium that appeared firmly in the camp of leftist, progressive, and countercultural movements now feels hijacked. Where has Print gone wrong, and how might print-based artistic practices respond to this proliferation? This panel discussion brings together artists, art historians, and cultural theorists to critically examine the mechanisms through which speedily produced one-off and low-run print-on-demand merchandise has become integral in spreading domestic hate movements and far-right ideology and asks how historically subversive, radical, and far-left printmakers can best position their presses to counteract this printed toxicity.



Rematriation: Indigenous Lands, Return, and the Aesthetics of Turtle Island
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Kristen Dorsey, UCLA and Kendra Greendeer, Oklahoma State University


Rematriation is a term for an Indigenous women-led movement re-establishing Indigenous feminist practice in all aspects of Indigenous culture. While this is a new term, it is based on Indigenous practices before settler-colonial interaction. In art, the aesthetics of Rematriation center on Indigenous women's issues, land, memory, care, and restoring pre-settler colonial ethics.

In this session, we will discuss the needed role of Rematriation in Turtle Island (or North America). How does Indigenous feminist thought influence the art-making process? How is the Indigenous woman and non-binary person depicted in art? What are the more profound implications of material connections to Land? How are efforts of return impacting/promoting/prolonging Indigenous knowledge and practices? What role does rematriation have in art, art history, or museum practices? How have Indigenous artists incorporated aesthetics informed by Indigenous philosophies? How can Indigenous feminist futures be imagined? This session invites contributors that engage with Indigenous arts and practices. Indigenous perspectives are encouraged, as well as contributors informed by queer, critical race, feminist, decolonial, and eco-critical methodologies.



Art that Re-imagines Community and the Commons in the Vacuum of Outer Space
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Ellen K. Levy


Outer Space has become a beleaguered frontier replete with conflicts of goals and ideology. Can art help change this trajectory? Given that the problems we face on earth have become planetary - a global environmental crisis, and also a global inequality crisis - the proposed panel asks how art (through stories, images, sound and curation) can address these collective problems to help ensure they are not repeated in our age of space exploration and coming extraterrestrial habitation. This panel proposes to explore aesthetic models for future space governance that engage with postcolonial approaches to extractivism and to a future that considers alternative outcomes. Examples include Afrofuturists and others who provide creative imaginaries of space exploration; collaborative VR works such as To the Moon (2018) by Hsin-Chien Huang and Laurie Anderson; musical scores such as that composed for Apollo Chamber Players that commemorates the Apollo11 moon landing with Native American poetry; and Saskia Vermeylan’s legal attempt to update the 1967 Outer Space Treaty through curating art. The promise of art is to enable a post-capitalist condition in which outer space can approach a creative commons, enabling an exchange of resources. Pertinent governance models including Graebar and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything and Robinson's Ministry for the Future will be compared to earlier models (e.g., Fuller's Spaceship Earth, Margulis' Gaia hypothesis, Brand's Whole Earth Catalog). The potential of the commons includes open communication systems and cultural heritages that provide a basis for social and ecological cooperation and is central to the art discussed.


Comparative Studies of Modern Colonial Architectures
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Daniel E. Coslett, Drexel University and Mira Waits, Appalachian State University


While modern colonial empires have seen a substantial increase in attention during recent decades, their study remains largely determined by national boundaries, linguistic limitations, and siloed expertise. Laudable ongoing work to diversify and globalize the study of architectural history is noteworthy, but truly comparative studies that cross imperial boundaries remain relatively rare. As calls to decolonize increase, comparative scholarship on modern colonial empires thus presents opportunities for redressing these deficiencies in our understanding of systems and architectures that remain extremely relevant around the world. The potential for new perspectives and unanticipated discoveries offered by this developing approach is substantial.

This panel welcomes submissions that explore meaningful similarities and differences in Europe’s empires in terms of guiding philosophies and architectural practices, and that help reveal the truly global nature of colonialist systems and related historic built environments. It seeks to deepen our understanding of historic empires and the surviving architectural legacies of those empires through a comparative lens. Presented work should therefore engage multiple empires and geographies during the nineteenth and/or twentieth centuries. It should ultimately contribute to our understanding of the intermingled development of imperial systems and/or the postcolonial condition and the enduring influence of inherited colonial-era built environments. Papers that consider the empires of Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and others, and their architectural activities in postcolonies of the Global South are particularly encouraged. Work on material at all scales (e.g., individual structures, building typologies, urban forms, etc.) is welcome, and we invite comparisons that consider architecture and its representation.



Technological Immersions: Visuality, Art, and Ocean Science
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Magdalena Grüner, Universitat Hamburg and Christina Heflin, Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne


Visuality exists as a precarious entity in underwater environments: without artificial lighting, the actual colors of arguably the most colorful fauna on earth – coral reefs – aren't visible to the human eye. In the deep sea, a habitat defined by daylight's absence, bioluminescence has developed in animals not to gain visibility, but rather to become invisible to other predators. Concurrently, organisms inhabiting these abysses can be equipped with skin producing spectacularly iridescent effects – but only if light hits the surface of their bodies. This all-but-paradoxical sensorial disposition of oceanic surroundings constitutes a compelling breeding ground for a critical examination of the submerged visual paradigm. Accounting for the 20th century’s technological advances which expanded human sensorial capacities under the water’s surface, this panel seeks to explore oceanic opticality. Taking the methodological approach of ‘conceptual displacement’, described by Melody Jue in Wild Blue Media – which aims to utilize the subversive potential of deep-sea surroundings as a catalyst for the questioning of long-established paradigms – asking: what does ‘visuality’ mean in a place defined by its very lightlessness? How can the hegemony of the visual in epistemic processes be challenged? How can the oceanic habitat, a fundamentally unseeable place, be made visually available? Where do technologies play a role in expanding this awareness? In what ways can these considerations on visuality serve as subversive vehicles to re-evaluate epistemic and aesthetic principles/hierarchies? How has this been done in the arts and sciences of the late 19th and early 20th centuries?


The Histories of Camps
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Laura Belik, University of California Berkeley


As places of exception and mass incarceration, the camp constitutes a space set apart outside the boundaries of legal and civil rights. Camps are intimately related to the era of colonization and its attendant processes of invasion, occupation, disruption and relocation. They are nodes of state power and spatial manifestation of a society that periodically splinters into distinct categories based on belonging or non-belonging. Created as sites of discipline, camps also symbolize early lessons in social and sanitary control, shaping the principles of modern urban planning. This panel centers its focus on the space of the camp, in an interdisciplinary context, to explore how its ‘architectures’ - the camps themselves, their spatial layout, infrastructure systems and camp-thinking- have operated to shape, detain and enable particular forms of movement. The goal of this project is to forge space for research and debate the different models of encampments and how they shift between various nation-states and periods of time. By tracing and better understanding the multiple histories and iterations of “camps,” we pay attention to the complex mobilities involved in the carceral experience, we broach dichotomies of permanence and temporality, material and immaterial and mobility and stasis. Collectively, we aim to challenge dominant narratives of ‘crisis,’ ‘victims’ and ‘bare life’ by exploring the ways in which camps are transformed, materially and immaterially, through various forms of agency - dissent, resistance, transgression, activism, or submission and dependence - by the bodies that inhabit them.


30 Years of Afrofuturism (and Still Going)
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Kristen Laciste, Fashion Institute of Technology and Aaron Samuel Mulenga, University of California Santa Cruz


The concept of Afrofuturism has gripped the imaginary of creatives from around the globe, from the sonic space travel of cosmic philosopher and jazz giant Sun Ra to Mukuka Nkoloso’s training of “Afronauts” at the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. Since the coining of the term “Afrofuturism” in 1993, there have been an array of events dedicated to examining its history and expression. Examples include the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room (November 5, 2021– present) and the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures (March 23, 2023 – March 24, 2024). These exhibitions explore the expansiveness of Afrofuturism culturally (in art, comics, fashion, film, literature, and music) in the United States and abroad.

As these exhibitions prove that Afrofuturism continues to be a topic of interest through which to consider speculative futures, this session’s chairs take a step back and ask: What is the relevance of Afrofuturism then and now? Why do artists and scholars continue to return to it as a vehicle of expression? Who is Afrofuturism for?

In light of these questions, this session invites contributions from authors and artists to consider Afrofuturism’s continued relevance in our present moment and to apply, define, clarify, challenge, and think with Afrofuturism in various ways: its history, its expressions, its purposes, and its ever-expanding conceptual framework.



3D Worldbuilding: Contexts, Narratives and Pedagogies
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Matthew Doyle, Pasadena City College and Yuehao Jiang, University of California, Los Angeles


Worldbuilding is a popular emerging area of instruction at the intersection of 3D art, media art and game design. Historically derived from fantasy and science fiction, worldbuilding is defined as the creation of an imaginary world for a work of fiction. Now, worldbuilding colloquially describes the open-ended process of designing interactive 3D environments. From Avatar to Zelda, popular culture is dominated by sprawling alternative universes. The demand for technically skilled artists to work within these pipelines continues to grow. Understood thus, worldbuilding is taught through 3D game engines such as Unity, Unreal and Godot. Free to use for students, there is an unparalleled access and ease of use in these industry standard tools for art and teaching.

This session seeks to inquire into how we teach these tools. What contexts and narratives can we present in our pedagogy of 3D game engines? Can our worldbuilding be more inclusive, drawn from a broader cultural context? How do we teach software that blurs the distinction between consumption and production? Do we design our worlds top down, or bottom up? In an era of climate crisis, what are the ecologies we imagine in these new worlds through game design and architecture?

Teachers, artists and designers working in: games, media art, computation, architecture, UI / UX, are encouraged to apply to share papers and presentations of work. We aim to give each speaker a 10-15 minute long presentation time followed by Q&A.



Art History x Urban Humanities
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Lee Ann Custer, Vanderbilt University


What do the urban humanities have to say to art history and vice versa? In their field-defining 2020 volume, Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City, Dana Cuff, et al. describe the urban humanities as a scholarly praxis that marshals “urban studies, design, and the humanities to interpret and intervene in the city through engaged scholarship attentive to the settings of everyday life.” Building on this foundation, 2023 saw the launch of the newly established Urban Humanities Network, a consortium of campuses, organizations, and professionals collectively shaping this emerging field. Given this important inflection point, this session brings together urban humanists and art historians to understand how these two fields speak to each other—and how they don’t. Their commonalities are striking: generations of art historians have examined the city as a dynamic factor in artistic production and have deployed approaches central to the urban humanities such as mapping, microhistory, place-based inquiry, and spatial justice. Furthermore, histories of material space and architecture are germane to both fields. Yet, art historians do not often seek to intervene in cities—a key characteristic of the urban humanities. While thematically and methodologically similar, certain epistemological commitments concerning the practice of research and the nature of evidence separate these two fields. This session seeks papers that, through their content, illuminate the intersections and/or the divergences between art history and the urban humanities and asks how practices from each might contribute toward a broader effort to de-colonize these disciplines.


Ecology vs. Patriarchy: Women Artists and the Environment, 1962-present
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Julia Vázquez, Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History


On September 27, 1962, Rachel Carson published the foundational text of the environmental movement: Silent Spring. In it, she advocated on behalf of the vitality of the natural world, bringing attention to the interconnectedness of all biological systems. Criticism of her work was visibly gendered, with critics establishing a direct opposition between her seemingly effeminate appeal to the life of the planet and the paternalistic principles underpinning the chemical-industrial complex, the ‘all-American diet,’ and nuclear armament. “Isn’t it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs!,” one reader wrote. “As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be O.K.”

This panel takes seriously this opposition between ecology and patriarchy. It imagines environmentalism as a salve to the forces that have shaped our world since Carson’s writing, such as carboniferous capitalism; Baconian conceptions of scientific knowledge and “progress;” and militarism, especially when its result is ecocide. In this view, ecology is conceived not—or not only—as a field of study addressing the way that organisms inhabit the natural world, but as a relational approach by which the ego reabsorbs into the relational systems on which it depends, whether interpersonal (microcosmic) or global (macrocosmic). Taking its cues from ecofeminism, which posits that the oppression of women is motivated by the same forces driving the exploitation of the natural world, the panel specifically asks how women artists have articulated the problems facing the second half of the 20th century, as well as posited solutions.



Latin American Women in Art and Science
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Paulina Pardo Gaviria, California State University Long Beach


With a focus on women artists working in Latin America since the 1970s, this panel seeks to contribute to studies that examine the visual culture of scientific and medical practices from a historical perspective. Interrogating the individual reception and historical repercussions of public health measures, it aims to dialogue with and broaden existing studies whose general geographical and chronological foci are on Europe, its colonies, and the United States at the turn of the 20th century, as reflected, for instance, in the scholarship of art historian Rachael Z. DeLue and Anna Arabindan–Kesson, scholar of African-American and Black diasporic art. Specifically, this panel aims to examine the artistic deployment of scientific aesthetics and methods by joining recent art historical efforts that have brought to light the work of women artists, including the groundbreaking traveling exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (2017–2018). Using different media and engaging with a wide range of aspects of social and medical sciences, the interdisciplinary orientation of Latin American women working on art and science may be expressed in their simultaneous pursuit of scientific careers, collaborations with scientists, and participation in public health initiatives. More broadly, the artistic practices discussed in this panel will speak to contemporary issues including the coronavirus pandemic, reproductive rights, digital surveillance, and the general control of individual bodies by systemic power structures. Together, this panel’s presentations will reveal interdisciplinary connections rooted in the historical engagements with both art and science undertaken by women artists in the Americas.


New Directions in the History of Early Islamic Art and Architecture
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Theodore Van Loan, Washington and Lee University and Alexander Brey, Wellesley College


With the passing of fifty years since the initial publication of Oleg Grabar’s The Formation of Islamic Art, this panel invites/presents papers that reflect on the recent developments in the history of early Islamic art and architecture from the time of the Prophet through the “Age of the Caliphates” (ca. 650–1050 CE). Significant archaeological discoveries, a broader geographical range, and the introduction of new methodological and theoretical approaches have expanded, challenged, or otherwise engaged Grabar’s pioneering synthesis of debates about the first four centuries of Islamic art and architecture. This is a field that was and, in many ways, still is defined by a series of binaries including courtly/religious, continuity/change, public/private, and aniconic/figural. We invite papers that seek to reconsider or deconstruct these dichotomies. Topics may include processes of adaptation from various visual practices of Late Antiquity; new chronological frameworks based on material/socio-technical regimes; new areas of inquiry, including the performative object, space, or gaze; alternative ways of thinking through materiality, spectacle, audience, and authorship; as well as the complicated legacies of colonialism within the field. This panel offers a chance to evaluate how the study of early Islamic visual and material culture have changed since The Formation of Islamic Art and map out new futures for the field.


Sounding Bodies: Exploring the Intersections of Sound, Art, and Practice-Related Research Methodologies
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Dr. Ilayda Altuntas Nott, School of Education, Indiana University- Bloomington


This panel brings together scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines to explore the intersections between sound, art, and practice-related research methodologies. Drawing on practice-related methods and theories the panel will examine how sound can be used as a means of generating new modes of perception and experience. The panel will explore how sound can be used to create immersive and embodied environments that disrupt habitual patterns of thought and behavior, and how sound can be used to create new forms of interaction between artists, scholars, and educators. The panelists will address questions such as: How can sound be used to create immersive and embodied environments that disrupt habitual patterns of thought and behavior? In what ways can sound be used to generate new modes of perception and experience in artistic practice? How can sound art practices be used as a means of generating new forms of knowledge and understanding? How can we create more interdisciplinary opportunities for artists and researchers to collaborate and experiment with sound and other forms of sensory experience? The panelists will also explore the connections between sound studies and practice-related research methodologies, examining how these fields inform each other and how sound studies can be used to examine the social, cultural, and political dimensions of sound and listening. Overall, the panel seeks to explore the potential of sound as a tool for generating new modes of engagement, inquiry, and understanding, and to highlight the importance of embodied and improvisational practices in research and artistic practice.


What Did Women See? Gender and Viewing Experience in Early Modern Italy
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Sabrina De Turk, University of Maine


In their homes, churches and neighborhoods women in early modern Italy were surrounded with a rich and diverse visual and material culture. Yet, apart from studies of women as collectors and patrons of the visual arts, until recently relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to their experience as viewers. How did women encounter, interpret and engage with the objects around them, whether altarpieces, portraits, public sculpture, devotional objects or decorative household goods? How were those viewing experiences shaped by gender roles and expectations for female behavior? How were they influenced by viewing circumstances, including socio-economic status, age, geography or religious identity? How have our interpretations of early modern Italian art been limited by an assumption of a primarily male audience, particularly for works displayed in the public sphere?

This session welcomes contributions that consider how our understanding of the visual and material culture of early modern Italy can be expanded by foregrounding women’s viewing experiences. These may include analysis of specific works and their known audiences as well as more speculative explorations of the gendered viewing experience in the context of early modern Italy. Contributors are encouraged to consider both publicly and privately displayed works of art, architecture, prints and printed books, and objects of material culture, including textiles, ceramics and furniture. Papers that consider marginalized perspectives including those of older, working, low-income or foreign-born women are especially encouraged.



Art, Aquatic Ecosystem, and History in Global Contexts: Exploring Interconnections and Transformations
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Gerui Wang, Stanford University


Art, Aquatic Ecosystem, and History in Global Contexts: Exploring Interconnections and Transformations Past and Present

Water has been a source of inspiration for artists across time and cultures, and has played a vital role in shaping the histories and ecologies of human societies. In this panel, we bring together scholars from diverse fields to examine the intersections of art, aquatic ecosystems, and history in global contexts.

Drawing on case studies from different parts of the world, the panelists will explore questions such as: How can artistic practices engage with aquatic ecosystems and help to promote ecological awareness and conservation? How have historical transformations of aquatic ecosystems influenced artistic production and interpretation, and how have artists responded to these changes? How do images of aquatic ecosystems inform our understanding of socio-economic history and people's visions of the world they live in? How can interdisciplinary collaborations between scholars of different disciplines contribute to new forms of knowledge and action in relation to aquatic ecosystems?

The panel will feature presentations by scholars in fields such as art history, environmental history, literary studies, and environmental science, and will include a discussion session that invites audience participation. By exploring the interconnections and transformations between art, aquatic ecosystems, and history in global contexts, this panel seeks to inspire new ways of thinking and acting in the face of urgent environmental challenges.



Fractured Mirror: Between Self and State in Global Women's Video Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Helena Shaskevich, Graduate Center, City University of New York


In her seminal 1976 essay, art historian Rosalind Krauss defined video’s condition as a psychological state of narcissism, a continual feedback loop which trapped the artist between camera and monitor. Favoring a formalist concern for medium specificity, Krauss’s characterization of the burgeoning technology disregards not only the volatile social conditions which marked video’s entrance into the market during the 1970s, but also its almost instantaneous use by women artists for political critique. This panel will bring together a series of essays which address the numerous ways in which women artists from the 1970s to the present have subverted and re-channeled the “mirroring” effect of video and audio technology to address political issues across geographic boundaries in a global context.

Potential topics include:

-How have women artists employed an aesthetics of reproducibility, indexicality and disruption to challenge global media’s simultaneous privatization and use by the state for surveillance?

-How did artists' projects address both the fantasy and fiction of a “borderless” global media network popularized by theorists like Marshall McLuhan and artists like Nam June Paik?

-How do these artists address issues of intersectionality, complicating a Western model of feminist politics and accommodating diverse engagements with the state?

-How have these artists employed techniques of performing for the camera to destabilize rigid norms of gender identity and undermine sexual objectification?



Into the center: occupying space, making space, and reconfiguring the narrative
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Vagner Mendonca Whitehead


The panel seeks to gather traditionally oppressed, excluded, and underrepresented artists whose works aim to reclaim and transform spaces (physical, conceptual, intellectual, social, emotional, virtual, etc), that have been usurped by whiteness. During this session we will share narratives that delineate strategies and struggles, as well as celebrate the impact of our often overlooked practices. Traditional and alternative forms of presentations are welcome, as well as interventions and live processes.


Jim Crow, Recontextualized, 1870-1930
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Melody D. Davis, Russell Sage College


Jim Crow, Recontextualized, 1870-1930

What merit is there in researching racialized pictures of the past? Should not the surfeit of racially demeaning images from the Jim Crow era be best left in archives and collections, tucked away from sight? From the years 1870 to 1930, racialized themes flooded the Western visual world, from comic journals to fine art circles. Appearing in drawings, prints, photographs, stereographs, paintings, collectibles, and various other media, themes of the racial inferiority of non-whites saturated the visual culture of the West, palliating fears that white dominance may wane. This session proposes that racialized images of the Jim Crow era are worth our scrutiny, precisely because their effects remain part of a transatlantic collective memory that distorts perceptions of others and the self. The Jim Crow image traumatizes even if it is not seen. This session calls for papers from art historians and artists who engage with recontextualizing the racialized image from the years 1870-1930 in Western culture. Recontextualization may be understood through critical and theoretical research, such as whiteness studies, critical race theory, Black history, and other theoretical models, or by reclaiming exclusionary histories for investigation in art practice. Research into Jim Crow era imagery presents an opportunity for the context of the past and the recontextualized of present inquiry to meet through a joint session of art historians and artists.



Operational Visibility: Trans and Queer Digital Hybrid Art Practices
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Chelsea Thompto, Virginia Tech and Anna Campbell, University of Wisconsin - Madison


In the hybrid ecosystem we navigate as queer and trans cyborgs, drawing on the work of Susan Stryker, Shu Lea Cheang, Mackenzie Wark, micha cárdenas, Paul Preciado, Urvashi Vaid, and others, we ask: How do queer and trans perspectives and embodiment manifest in the generation of digital/physical hybrid art practices? What convergences exist between the emergence of digital ubiquity and queer culture post Stonewall? How do vectors of visibility operate to platform trans and queer people, while at the same time presenting new dangers? How do vectors of invisibility provide cover even as they reintroduce the constrictions of the closet?

LGBTQ communities often use punk / hacker / DIY / DIT approaches to produce community-specific media from the physical (chapbooks, newspapers, zines, and magazines) to the digital (forums, chatrooms, and websites). Operational Visibility draws on these traditions to explore digital/physical hybrid art practices driven by trans and queer approaches, theories, and people. We seek to assemble a panel of practitioners, theorists, and historians whose work addresses mechanical, analog, and IRL interfaces with digital technologies and environments. We are excited to focus on: work born out of our increasingly marbled experience of the virtual in everyday; investigations of the digital not as display conduit but as logic itself; intersectional interventions by BIPOC artists and theorists and their accomplices; the (re)consideration of influential early digital art works; and processes and workflows that loop between/through the digital and physical.



Radical archiving for radical art histories: against a positivist rhetoric of discovery.
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Prof. Hilary Robinson, PhD, Loughborough University


Complex narratives around art's production and reception can emerge from studies of studios, art schools, artist-fellowships, collectives and milieux. But these histories often rely on dispersed collections and perspectives, including archives of artists, collectors and critics. Independent, grassroots, liberatory and radical thinking has developed archival practices for recording and preserving histories often overlooked in authorised heritage organisations (Flinn, Stevens, Shepherd 2011). This has highlighted the non-neutral and political aspects os archives, and the activist potential of archiving, as a 'process of selecting, ordering, and preserving the past - in short, of making history.' (Latimer, 2013).

Prompted by Feminist Art Making Histories (FAMH), our oral history project to archive stories from UK and Ireland, 1970s-90s, this panel focusses on the political considerations that underlie inventing, making and organising an archive. It will explore how repositories represent radical organising in, around and adjacent to the visual arts. We seek contributions that address questions or offer case studies arising from different political and methodological engagements with the production of archives and art histories. How can the discipline Art History learn from the decades-long practices of radical archives that have preserved histories overlooked by authorised heritage organisations? How can radical practices of archiving impact canon-formation? How can archives make visible interconnections across their collections using digital media? How might we write more complex histories of artistic and political movements and their interrelations, or biographies that take into account changing alliances, affiliations and solidarities across a lifetime? What does radical accessibility to archives look like?



Visual and Material Surfaces in the Ancient Americas
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Anthony Joshua Meyer, Dumbarton Oaks Research Lib & Collection and Catherine H. Popovici, Johns Hopkins University


Surfaces are everywhere. They create textures that invite touch, radiate sheens that dazzle the eye, and cover interiors to protect them. Historiographically, surfaces have been interpreted through formal and material analysis that understands these layers as untethered exteriors. But a surface can also transform a thing by way of additive, extractive, and grafted means. Indeed, in the ancient Americas, natural and manmade surfaces could animate and change what lay below, as well as extend into and interact with the world around them. Masks worn on the face could transform performers into sacred figures; glyphs carved into rocky outcrops could create haptic texts; impressions from stamps and cords could generate topographic ceramics; and woven cloth hung on architecture and draped over rocks could localize the sacred. But what and where are the contours of a surface? For instance, is a carving a surface, or does it simply modify it?

A surface, therefore, is a juncture: a constitutive part of the object, natural or manmade, that can be experienced and/or manipulated but that also reveals intentionality, ideology, and greater world. This panel seeks to confront surface as an apparatus and plumb its depths, namely in how ancestral Indigenous communities have historically distinguished and understood these visual and material layers. In taking the ancient Americas as our geographic and temporal scope, we seek scholarly and interdisciplinary interventions that uproot, redefine, and engage with the concept of “the surface” outside of Euro-American conventions.



When Worlds Collide or Converge: Portraiture and Visualizing Identity in the Spaces of Cultural Encounter
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Jaiya A. Gray, University of Victoria and Roger J. Crum, University of Dayton


Taking the kaleidoscopic diversity and cultural interchange of Chicago as model and metaphor, this panel will explore portraiture/visualized identity in spaces where cultures collide, converge, or contest presence. We ask: what exactly is portraiture/visualized identity, especially when produced in the spaces of cultural encounter? What results from that liminality of ideation or commission, facture, and reception? What genres and definitions bear on our understanding of these works? This panel seeks case studies of objects forged in the spaces that are either circumscribed by geographic or cultural boundaries or defined by racial, social, and gender categories. The goal is to give primacy to how such encounters catalyze new forms of visualized identity and both disrupt and reconstitute categories and conceptualizations within art history and visual culture, past and present.

Portraiture has traditionally been defined in relatively narrow and positivistic terms. This panel aims instead for expanded perspectives and invites relativity by engaging with overlooked objects or familiar objects examined anew through contingent, even conflicting art histories and worldviews. By focusing on portraits and visualized identity across time and around the world, contributors will look to understand how the circumstances of representations that defy or blur geographical, aesthetic, theoretical, and material boundaries also produce new visual forms and, eventually, new modes of critical enquiry. Interventions are encouraged from art historians, artists, designers, architects, curators, and others interested in what could be a nascent formation of a new genre of non-canonical art history and visual culture from the spaces of cultural encounter.



Wood: Medium Specificity in the Global Early Modern Period
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Geraldine A. Johnson, University of Oxford and Tatiana C. String, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


Wood is one of the most readily available of materials, deployed in objects of everyday use and sacred veneration, for public purposes and private aesthetic pleasure. The present session takes wood—as a ground for panel paintings, sculptures and woodblocks; a matrix for household objects and architectural structures; a subject of collecting, conservation and eco-criticism; and a symbolic referent and global commodity—as its central focus.

More than half a century ago, Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany became a landmark publication on medium specificity. We welcome papers that expand the consideration of wood beyond Baxandall’s temporal, geographic and genre boundaries. We invite contributions that explore a much wider range of objects, functions, makers and beholders and works produced not only in European contexts, but globally, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in order to reconsider wood’s significance as a medium.

We encourage submissions that investigate wooden objects in artistic theory and practice, their original reception and uses, as well as their later collection, conservation and long-term sustainability. Whether a life-sized statue or diminutive figurine, a mask for public performances or furniture for private spaces, a base from which a broadsheet was printed or on which an image was painted, a carved utensil or supporting beam, an object that highlights the grain or renders the underlying material invisible—we are interested in the role played by wood’s physical and metaphysical qualities in the making and meanings of objects in the global Early Modern period.



Beyond the Shutter: The Art of Photographic Manipulations & Materialities
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Alex Fialho, Yale University and Marina Molarsky-Beck, Yale University


This panel welcomes papers with a capacious understanding of photographic processes—from the 19th century to the present—to think through artistic interventions in how the photographic image is constructed, how the print is developed, and how the resulting object is presented.

Sadakichi Hartmann’s landmark 1904 “Plea for Straight Photography” emphasizes that the medium should favor “legitimate photographic methods,” those “natural to photography.” His conception objected to “the use of the brush, to finger daubs, to scrawling, scratching, and scribbling on the plate,” among other techniques that strained the medium’s specificity. In developing the photography collection and exhibition program at MoMA, Beaumont Newhall further cemented “straight” photography’s central position for fine art photography. This panel seeks to celebrate, instead, methods Hartmann might have deemed “illegitimate”—modes of making that subvert traditional notions of the photographic process, emphasizing not the sanctity of the negative but photographic materialities and manipulations.

This panel addresses photographic making beyond the shutter, moving towards an expanded understanding of photography’s capacities and limitations. We invite papers that consider photographies that resist traditional modes of making, favoring play and experimentation.

Possible topics could include, but are not limited to:

-Alternative techniques for constructing the photographic image, including photograms and camera obscuras

-Darkroom processes of manipulation and distortion

-Atypical materials deployed in and out of the darkroom

-Queer and intersectional genealogies beyond the photographic canon

-Intermedial artworks that incorporate photography

-Digital interventions using Photoshop and other editing tools

-Nontraditional photographic display strategies



Changing Viewpoints, Shifting Narratives: Tangled Stories of Renaissance Objects (1300–1600)
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Talitha Maria G. Schepers, Harvard Art Museums and Serenella Sessini, Victoria & Albert Museum


Museums and galleries across the world are facing numerous financial, ethical and practical challenges, and curators and collection managers are expected to use these opportunities to transform and adapt permanent collections and exhibition displays in order to cater to diverse audiences. The study of cross-cultural interactions during the so-called Renaissance period has led to the re-telling of narratives from more inclusive viewpoints by scholars and curators alike. By bringing stories of global encounters into the foreground, as well as analysing the circumstances that led to the acquisition of Renaissance objects, curators can engage in a more meaningful way with non-traditional audiences and local communities, while simultaneously emphasising the relevance of Renaissance collections in today’s world.

Our panel session will explore how curators can navigate the challenges of current curatorial practice, and how to facilitate meaningful interactions between Renaissance objects and audiences. We welcome proposals for papers that share examples of museum work that opens Renaissance collections to a wider public. We invite 15-minute papers that explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  • Contemporary responses to Renaissance objects
  • Decolonising/Decentering Renaissance collections (provenance and collecting history)
  • Community engagement projects
  • Educational programmes
  • Use of modern technologies such as VR, AR, AI, immersive experiences, video games
  • Foregrounding transcultural and transhistorical narratives

This session seeks to provide a platform to exchange ideas on how to reinterpret Renaissance collections. It also offers an opportunity for speakers to share personal experiences and insights into audience engagement.



Image and Story: Narrative in the Ancient Americas
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Margaret A. Jackson, University of New Mexico and Beth Wilson Norwood, University of New Mexico


Storytelling plays an important role in societies throughout the world, yet in ancient indigenous American societies, visual expression, pictorial images and performance contexts seem to have enjoyed relationships that differed in significant ways from those commonly articulated in Europe and elsewhere. What were some of those stories? How were they expressed and how were they meant to be understood by interlocutors and audiences? While some visual traditions may have developed modes of expression employing phonetically informed structures of signs and symbols, for example codices and inscribed texts, others were pictorially based, depending on oft-repeated icons, architectural contexts or systems of broadly understood social cues for transmission of information. Such narratives might be expressed as pictographies or as symbolic repertories integrated with costuming, special events and public performance elements. This session seeks papers that address the topic of narratives in Ancient American art. Papers may approach the topic of narrative in a variety of ways, including the identification of particular narratives in the Ancient Americas, the examination of graphic systems used to record narratives, the relationship that narratives have with oral traditions and performance, and the roles narratives and their retelling played within the larger community. We welcome papers from scholars working in all areas of the Ancient Americas through the early Colonial Period.


Transnational Collecting: Objects Crossing Borders, Objects Transformed
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Julie Codell, Arizona State University


What happens to objects when they cross borders and enter collections located beyond the cultures or nations in which they were produced? Objects don’t have fixed meanings, and collectors are a vital source of redefinitions and revaluations of objects they collect. Collectors translate and appropriate objects to their cultures, personal tastes, social milieux and ideologies. Objects crossing borders challenge notions that works have autonomy or transcend time and place, eliciting important questions about collectors’ roles in valuation and signification. Walter Benjamin described collecting as “the most profound relation that one can have to things.” In his view, collectors hide behind objects, glorify them, fetishize them and confer on objects "only a fancier's value, rather than use-value," turning objects into art (Charles Baudelaire, 168). Such comments raise important questions that panelists may consider:

  • Why do collectors seek artworks or objects from other cultures, nations or time periods?
  • What do collectors know or imagine about objects’ original meanings or cultural worth?
  • How do collectors appropriate objects, translating, de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing them in new personal, national, cultural and even historical contexts?
  • What affect, or memories, or imaginings, or valuations, or narratives or de/re-contextualizations are part of collectors’ glorification or fetishization of objects?
  • What might it mean for collectors to hide behind objects in their collections?
  • How do collectors transform transnational objects from commodities into art for objects that cross spatial or temporal borders and thus undergo displacement, re-signification and new aesthetic and economic values in cross-cultural exchanges across time, space and cultures?


AI in the Studio Art Classroom
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Bryan Robertson


Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a topic of great importance in society. AI can aggregate the totality of human information within thirty seconds. AI will be increasingly integrated into artistic practices and creative workflows, playing an increasingly important role. With readily- available generative AI, such as Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Craiyon, people from all walks of life can take their ideas and see them translated into images or entire news articles. These conditions prompt questions about the future of art and design education.

The ease of content creation and copyright violation has seen an outcry from the traditional artmaking community. However, the fear of widespread adoption replacing the need for a firm foundation in art and design principles and fundamentals is unfounded. Instead, these tools should be seen and adopted as other photomechanical and computer-generated versions before them and leveraged to provide new models for artists to improve their workflow.

We will hear from various people integrating AI into their art and design curriculums during this presentation. We will present a model for other art and design departments seeking to integrate AI into their courses through a practical use case and example assignments. Results indicate that using AI in the creative generation process creates numerous results and emotions as students reconcile different components of their imagination. Ultimately the current research suggests the principles of art and design will continue to be necessary for student success.



Breaking it down to expan(DAH) Digital Art History
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Theresa Avila, California State University Channel Islands


Digital Art History (DAH) is an emerging approach to research, study, and creation of Art using digital tools. Existing digital public facing platforms offer Digital Art History and digital humanities projects after a point of completion with a focus on digitization, mapping, and visualizations complete. Furthermore, DAH projects can be challenging to capture in print as the development of a project's development is nonlinear, and outcomes extend beyond a visual or published product. Additionally, the digital aspects of DAH often presented are overly technical, which can be difficult to understand if not familiar with such tools. These types of presentations do not necessarily encourage engagement. Rarely is project management nor finance addressed in publications about DAH projects. Even with all the new developments around digital humanities there are still major gaps in guidance, dialogue, resources, and purposeful models that encourage Digital Art History in the broadest sense. Presenters will address Digital Art History projects at various stages of development, as models and to encourage others to engage with digital tools in their research and study of Art. In addition to introducing a wide range of projects, the presenters will elaborate on key aspects of their projects in terms of collaborative partnerships, project management, fund development, and a range of approaches to digital tools and methods.


Copies That Talk: New Perspectives on East Asian Painting Tradition
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Anran Tu, University of California San Diego and Yifan Zou, University of Chicago


Copy-making plays a variety of roles unique to the painting traditions of East Asia. Xie He’s “Six Laws” (c. 550 CE) of Chinese painting—an influential text across East Asia—has one law that emphasizes the importance of "transmission by copying." Making copies and imitating the style of earlier masters have been crucial means of self-training for artists, as well as important ways to preserve images and classic styles, and establish genealogy. Consequently, museum collections of East Asian paintings abound with copies that invite new methodological frameworks for further interpretation.

In the past decades, art historians mainly approached "copies" as either tools to authenticate originals or with macrohistorical concerns regarding lineage, canon formation, and antiquarianism. In contrast to these two approaches, this panel seeks papers that examine copies and the artist's "reproductive hand" from a micro-historical and object-centered perspective. The goal is to unfold the conditions of their production and reception so as to reveal the art-historical agency of copy-making. We welcome contributions that respond, but are not limited to, the following questions:

  • How can close copies help map out artists' working processes beyond the general framework of workshop practices?
  • In what way did the practice of copying complicate authorship and authenticity in East Asian painting traditions?
  • How was a specific type of “copy” consumed in relation to the culture of collection and connoisseurship?
  • How do "copies" embody the social context or historical consciousness of the time of their production?
  • Cross-cultural comparison on copy-making in Chinese, Japanese, and/or Korean pictorial tradition.


Ecocritical Perspectives on Art from the Americas and Caribbean
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

William Henry Schwaller


This panel seeks to provide a space to bring together scholars and topics that take ecocritical perspectives towards art and artistic practices from across the Americas and Caribbean to highlight new research, reflect on methodological issues, and revise or reorient art historical narratives. Ecocriticism has been latent, arguably, within the historiography of the art from the Americas and Caribbean, much of which centers on the impact of the continents’ geography and natural resources on art and artists. Yet how might the methods of ecocriticism or the environmental humanities provide opportunities to open the canon and strengthen or alter existing narratives and art histories? The region’s shared experiences of resource extraction, destruction of ecosystems and cultures, and the introduction invasive species and colonizers through colonization and imperialism testify to the passive and active impact of the environment historical events, so how might centering the landscape, climate, and ecosystems as influential actors in human culture reframe the art histories of this region?

Of particular interest is how Latinx, indigenous, or non-Western epistemologies and traditions might challenge, nuance, or complement the methodologies of ecocriticism that have been developed largely within the Anglo European academy. This panel encourages submissions on topics from all periods of study and creative fields including visual art, architecture, urban and graphic design, and the performing arts. Special consideration will be given to scholars and topics that are under-represented in the field.



Slavery and the Architecture of the United States
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Rachel E. Stephens


Michele Obama’s declaration at the 2016 Democratic National Convention that, “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves,” was a watershed moment in American history. From a national platform, her statement forced widespread consideration about the origins of the US built environment. For many African Americans however, this was not new information. Speaking of the central role of African Americans in the building of the country, AME Bishop Richard Allen declared in 1829 that, “we have enriched [America] with our blood and tears.” Drawing on Allen’s declaration, this session seeks to address the following simple question: In what ways did enslaved people help build the United States? Further, how have enslaved people been omitted from consideration of the US built environment, and how can architectural histories provide due credit? What does the archival record bear out regarding this history? This session invites papers that consider the role of enslaved people in the architecture of the United States (broadly conceived). In an effort to expand inclusive scholarship, this session seeks papers that have researched and identified the role of enslaved people in building projects. Studies that shed light on the origins of particular buildings, geographies, or city infrastructures are welcomed.


The Pacific as Agent: Beyond Atlantic-centered Narratives in the Contemporary Art of the Circum-Pacific World
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Hyeongjin Oh, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities


There is no doubt that American art history, with few exceptions, is oriented toward the Atlantic, tied to European artistic traditions, and indebted to its historical methodologies. The northern Atlantic’s historical movements and artistic exchanges have provided universal models for modern art histories of North America and other societies across the Pacific world. This is so even for contemporary art history, which has claimed for some time to be concerned with globalization and empire and challenge Eurocentrism in Modernist narratives. We see this in monographs such as Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art and in textbooks such as Art Since 1900. Even Terry Smith’s globally-conscious Contemporary Art: World Currents begins with the Euro-American avant-garde before setting off for Europe and Russia and eventually arriving in Asia. Such texts routinely omit, marginalize, and exoticize the Pacific Ocean, ignoring the Ocean’s profound agency that has shaped American imperialism and globalization and the critical roles played by Asians and Pacific Islanders in the peopling of the Americas. This panel invites papers that address the exclusion of the Pacific in art histories and reorient our gaze to a different horizon. It welcomes papers engaging such questions as: How can we picture the Pacific as an agent rather than the mere background for modern/contemporary art history? How might we remap continental and colonial geographies across the Pacific world? How can we move beyond tokenism to situate the work of Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and diasporic subjects in American art history?


Beyond the brush: bodily engagement in East Asian art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Amy Huang, University of Iowa


When Nam June Paik dipped his head in ink and “drew” a line at the Fluxus Festival in 1962, he didn’t just connect his experiments in performance art to Asian calligraphy. Paik’s Zen for Head called attention to the key role of bodily engagement in the Asian ink art tradition. In East Asian painting and calligraphy, the brush is regarded as an extension of the artist's body and mind. Noted calligrapher He Shaoji (1799-1873) remarked on the physical rigor of his process: "the energy of my whole body is concentrated in the fingers, and then I move my brush. I would be soaking wet with sweat before the work is even half finished." All the training and conditioning of the body goes into manipulating the brush into creating the “ink traces” that manifest the artist’s vision. But what happens when an artist discards the brush and creates art directly with their body? And how does the physical aspect factor into artistic practices and discourses on art?

This session invites papers that explore bodily engagement in the visual art of East Asia. Topics include but are not limited to finger painting and calligraphy and its intra-regional transmission; finger painting and calligraphy and its relationship with the artistic canon; discussions on the physical aspects of painting or writing; illness and disability and how they affect artistic practices; modern and contemporary forms of ink art that emphasizes bodily engagement.



Blackness, White Liberalism, and Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Bridget R. Cooks, University of California, Irvine and John W. Ott, James Madison University


This panel will address the "soft racism" of white liberal artists who have inadequately tried to address white supremacy and anti-Black racism in their work. Whether in the guise of multiculturalism, color blindness, or particular strains of post-racialism, these artists have often perpetuated what cultural theorist Stuart Hall called “a kind of difference that doesn't make a difference of any kind.” We seek papers that take up case studies of neo/liberal representations of race produced within the United States across media from the nineteenth century until today.


Feminist Contemporary Arts Activisms and Gender-based Violence
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Basia Sliwinska, Universidade Nova de Lisboa


The adoption of Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (1993) was a significant moment recognising women’s right to a life free from violence as an international issue. And yet, recently we have observed an intensification of gender-based violence, igniting arts activist interventions to raise consciousness, protest and advocate. Los Zapatos Rojos, a collaborative project (realised since 2009) by a Mexican artist Elina Chauvet is a potent example. It involves laying out hundreds of pairs of red shoes in urban spaces across the world to mark the absence of women who lost their lives to gender-based violence.

In ‘Understanding Patriarchy’ (2004) bell hooks writes, ‘Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation’, reinforcing mechanisms of control and dominance through diverse forms of violence. hooks argues, ‘Feminist thinking offers a solution’. Violence is a multiple oppression paradigm, as demonstrated by ‘El Violentómetro’ (Violence Meter), a tool developed by a Mexican scholar Martha Alicia Tronco Rosas. It is a simple graphic measuring and manifesting the spectrum of gender-based violent acts of power enacted by subtle means through to femicide, the majority of which remain hidden and silenced.

This session invites contributions engaging with specific case studies of feminist contemporary arts activism to bring awareness of human rights violations that are gender-based. It seeks to address emotional, physical and sexual abuses, practices of coercive and financial control, sexism and victim blaming; and explore the envisaged by hooks potential solutions founded in feminist thinking.



How do feminist artists care?
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Keren Moscovitch, School of Visual Arts


Feminist care is an ethical position grounded in personal, ecological and political concerns. With the shifting ontologies of a world shaped by pandemic, climate catastrophe, artificial intelligence, and regressions in reproductive freedom, feminist artists have recalibrated what it means to care. Artists approach these urgent questions through the radicality of material practice, reshaping the world as they reshape both object and discourse. Care is transmuted into action, inquiry and relationships that are revealed in aesthetic interventions. What do we pay attention to when we center care in our art practice? In what ways do we take responsibility or demand accountability from others? How do we respond to diverse, pluralistic communities living through very specific contexts that may be historically marginalized, oppressed and ignored? How do we bring our communities together while maintaining necessary bounds of protection? This session inquires into how feminist artists care in the new era, and posits perspectives that may overturn long-held assumptions about the ontology of womanhood, femininity, and feminism itself. The panel seeks to open up a dialogue amongst a diverse set of voices that, collectively, suggest new directions for feminist ethics and the possibilities of radical aesthetic and poetic strategies of care.


Makeshift Historiographies: Case Studies in HIV/AIDS Cultural Archives
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Kyle Croft, Visual AIDS and Jackson Davidow, Harvard Art Museums


For hundreds of artists who died of AIDS-related causes, only scant traces of their work—if any at all—exist in institutional archival repositories. Therefore, art-historical work revolving around the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic has often called for inventive archival methods that blend traditional forms of research with community work and emotional labor. Over the last fifteen years, scholars and activists have contended with the gaps and erasures in such archives as well as the geographic, racial, and gender biases that have characterized many historical projects. In so doing, many have necessarily drawn on and even created community-based repositories, personal collections, and oral history initiatives. The precarity and preciousness of such archives are central topics in recent scholarship, including Marika Cifor’s, Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (2022), Jarrett Earnest’s Devotion: Today’s Future Becomes Tomorrow’s Archive (2022), and Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr’s We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (2022).

Indebted to these texts, our panel calls for papers focused on case studies elaborating on archival methods related to art histories of HIV/AIDS. Seeking to acknowledge the efforts of scholars, curators, and archivists who have worked to complicate this emergent canon and reimagine the terrain of AIDS cultural production, we welcome papers that reintroduce artists or their legacies into public and scholarly discourse, detailing the journey from discovery, inquiry, analysis, and sharing. We are especially interested in papers offering methodological reflections that might be of use to individuals engaged in parallel projects.



Moon is the Oldest AR (A Response to Nam June Paik)
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Craig J. Saper, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Hannah B. Higgins


Moon is the Oldest AR (A Response to Nam June Paik)

Hannah B Higgins & Craig Saper

University of Illinois Chicago (IDEAS) & University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Language Literacy and Culture)

“Moon is the Oldest TV” (1965) is the name of an early video installation by Korean Fluxus artist Nam June Paik. For this benchmark video installation, Paik formed a circle of TV screens each showing one part of the lunar cycle. Standing in the middle, the rotation of the viewer animates the cycle. Paik was clearly interested in provoking disruptions to normally passive spectator behavior. This panel invites artists and scholars to address Paik’s moon, or any other work by the artist, from a variety of undertheorized perspectives including, but not limited to, the perspective of augmented reality technologies that predate or postdate TV, of intellectual challenges to the Enlightenment's artificial clarity, of his idea of a University of Avant-Garde Hinduism, or shifting definitions of the augmented real. Paik would not want his work to sit still in the confines of its historic moment, rather this panel instantiates how some media experiments cycle eternally like the moon. "Moon is the Oldest AR" seeks papers, performances and presentations in any format.



Notes on the Archive: Alternative Assemblages and Fringe Imaginaries
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

April Nicole Baca, University of California Los Angeles


This session solicits contributions that foreground alternative archival practices with particular emphasis on artistic interventions into traditional institutional collecting spaces. The notion of the archive has inarguably been expanded in recent decades from physical storage spaces to virtual desktop institutions. The hyper-sanitized objects and ephemera that line the shelves and storage containers of physical archival spaces now have virtual avatars at the ready, including jpegs, pdfs, and dead links, leaving what Douglas Crimp described as an “enclosure of decaying and dead objects” in the museum (On the Museum’s Ruins, 1993). Despite its myriad institutional shortcomings, the virtual archive has similarly provided novel models for using and understanding the archive, its contents, and allusions towards an objective and collective memory. New media artists such as Elisa Giardina Papa, for instance, draw on the personal archive as a novel forum for fringe knowledge production. The personal archive is understood in this context as a temporal assemblage and forum for intimacy; an archeon that houses both personal proclivities and professional obligations. Here, the archive acts as an enclave for ghosts; memories compounded by time that were founded through a “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive” and what it might offer. How do alternative archival practices, including those that are paradoxically both extant and obsolete, elicit the opportunity to rethink traditional collecting practices, archival assemblages, and memory-making practices? This session will argue for the urgency of personal and alternative archival practices as a critical forum for collective memory, fringe knowledge, and authorship.


Poverty and Practice
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Andy Campbell


This roundtable dialogue seeks to engage a group of artists and art historians who can illuminate how structural and circumstantial poverty has delimited, and continues to delimit, the way that artists make a life in art in the United States, its territories and sacred lands. The terms under which artists meet this reality while retaining creative agency--a sometimes delicate, sometimes brutal negotiation--is something we might call practice. Understanding how (artistic) practices have been responsive to poverty’s deprivations is critical in at least two ways: first, to support those who seek to make their way in art by offering some insight into how practice might be shaped in response to poverty’s terms, and second to articulate what could be gained when we, as artists, researchers, and educators integrate more holistic understandings of poverty.

While there are cognizable strains of art history that value Marxist methodologies, this panel especially welcomes contributors whose work, research, or writing suggests other frames. These may include, but of course are not limited to: the poor people-led skolarship of Lisa (Tiny) Gray-Garcia; a capabilities-based approach, developed by economist/philosophers Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum; or fictional/speculative worldings, such as those offered by Ursula K. Le Guin or R. F. Kuang, among others.

Panelists should plan to prepare a 10-minute presentation considering a singular project or artwork, a methodological intervention, or an aspect of practice, to be circulated to co-panelists in the weeks prior to CAA. Presentations will be given in the course of a longer, semi-structured dialogue.



Radical Roots: Rethinking the Imperial Imaginary Through Plants
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Andrea Rager, Case Western Reserve University and Lindsay Wells


How might the history of art and empire in the long nineteenth century be reimagined through the history of plants, not merely as symbols or decorative adornments, but as active agents of change and environmental witness? This panel welcomes papers that propose new ways of conceptualizing the artistic and botanical legacy of imperialism in light of recent scholarship in critical plant studies. How have plants, plant cultivation, and horticulture shaped national and imperial imaginaries, from the nineteenth century to now? How have plants signified the exoticized other or served as indigenous markers of home and memory? How have plants operated as drivers of industry, as well as indexical markers of ecological destruction? While functioning as extracted resources fueling the imperial circulatory system, how might plants also suggest alternative networks of resistance, resilience, restoration, and renewal? As raw materials transmuted into pigments, woven into textiles, molded into supports, and applied as ornaments, how have plants shaped artistic practice in and through the operation of empire? This panel seeks to disrupt accepted narratives of imperial history, identity, and art by centering plants and vegetal life. Particular consideration will be given to papers that adopt ecocritical methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches to the environmental or plant humanities. We also welcome submissions with a broad geographical scope and across a range of media. This panel advocates for an expansive definition of art and empire that acknowledges the urgent need to enact decolonial strategies to confront this past and its ongoing consequences.


The Black Commonwealth
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

julia Elizabeth Neal, University of Michigan and Janell B. Pryor


Investigations of place have prompted radical reconsiderations of social and artistic geographies of visual culture. It absorbs and reflects psychosocial views and cultural relationships between communities and sites. Place is discursive across the disciplines: Tim Creswell, an anthropogeographer, situates place as a "meaningful category,” whereas Lucy Lippard, a feminist curator, describes it as "the locus of desire,” and artist Renée Green discursively engages notions of place and site-specificity in “Peripatetic at ‘Home’.”

With the objective to contribute to increasing microhistories–local, transnational, and global–reframing art historical inquiry, this panel will convene around Pennsylvania and its role within Black art production. A colony, the second state to join the Union, and a commonwealth implicated by the myths of the nation, Pennsylvania is a microcosm of the United States. How does it shape histories of artists from Henry Ossawa Tanner and Meta Warrick Vaux Fuller to Raymond Saunders, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Benjamin Patterson, and more, from the past to now?

We invite submissions related to Pennsylvania's role in the profiles, practices, networks, institutions, and histories, of artists of African descent from the 19th to 21st centuries. Graduate students, adjunct, tenure-track and tenured professors, curators and arts cultural workers are encouraged to present.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

* Placemaking

* Politics of Identity and Blackness

* Gender Politics

* Respectability Politics and Whiteness Studies

* Andrew Carnegie and Institutions

* Labor Histories and Art

* Philadelphia, Pittsburgh

* Deindustrialization

* Archives and Documentary Histories

* Museums, Galleries and Race



Unsettling Methodologies of Indigenous Art History
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Yvonne N. Tiger, University of Lethbridge and Noah Mapes, Cornell University


In the 2023 publication White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness, Nicholas Mirzoeff alludes to the field of art history as the study of representations of whiteness, a conglomeration of ideologies undergirded by colonial, imperial, and racial violences. Contrary to the dominating practices of such an art history, this panel aims to further conversations regarding the advancement of Indigenous art historical methodologies. Specifically inspired by the work of Scott Lauria Morgensen, Unsettling Methodologies of Indigenous Art History, rests on the foundation that Indigenous methodologies galvanize the knowledges of sovereign, decolonized peoples while simultaneously unsettling the ontology of enduring coloniality. This panel will bring together art historians, curators, and artists focused on Indigeneity to critically engage the visual and material cultures of global Indigenous Peoples through communities’ respective cultures, values, knowledges, languages, stories, modes of governance, ceremonies, and beyond. The intent of this panel is to take a reflexive look at the hegemonic, colonial modes of art historical scholarship and to demonstrate ways of terminating coloniality through the process of Indigenization and the enactment of decolonial and anti-colonial practices of researching, writing about, and publishing on Indigenous art.


Walls, Blockades, and Barricades: Art at the Margins of the New Enclosures
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Leah Modigliani, Temple University and Noah Randolph


We are living in an era of walls. Not only physical walls, which have exponentially increased since the ballyhooed fall of the Berlin Wall, but boundaries made of identities, economies, illnesses, and politics that seem impenetrable. By 2021, 72 border walls covered 31,000 kilometers of the Earth’s surface, 56 of them built after 9/11 and 32 after the Arab Spring. The rigidity of the border wall appears as an ironic indicator of the fear of the loss of state sovereignty, performing what border theorists call a theatrical presence to assuage the anxieties of an internal population.

It’s also striking that the image of a wall, barricade or blockade is formally, but not actually, at odds with Capitalism’s reorganization of space over the last four decades. The latter is consistently described by a wide range of scholars as deterritorialization; a process by which surplus labor and capital is deployed to new regional locations to accumulate. This panel considers how artists work in, around, and against political, geo-economic and environmental barriers to question these social relations. What are the solutions and provocations that artists use to confront and unsettle spaces of control? What new imaginaries and speculative futures do such artworks engender?

Topics may include (but are not limited to) case studies of artworks that resist or redeploy space as political tactic; temporalities of walls; intersections between art and critical geographies and urban studies; art’s ideological marking of territory as monument or gentrification; connections between art, activism and time-based media or performance.



"How am I going to catch this experience in a painting?": Rethinking Art in the Palestinian Diaspora
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Rachel Winter, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University


Inspired by the life and career of Palestinian painter Samia Halaby, this panel investigates art made by those in the Palestinian diaspora in dialogue with local, regional, and national art histories. The panel coincides with Halaby’s first two American survey exhibitions: Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy (Eskenazi Museum of Art, Feb. 10-Jun. 9, 2024) and Samia Halaby: Eye Witness (MSU Broad Art Museum, Jun. 28-Dec. 15, 2024).

Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Halaby is one of the most important painters of her generation. Halaby moved to the US from Lebanon in 1954 following her family’s 1948 flight from Palestine. Her education was significantly shaped by American Midwest institutions. An influential university educator, she taught throughout the Midwest before becoming the first woman to be full-time faculty at Yale. Halaby settled in New York in the 1970s where she actively creates colorful, energetic, and innovative large-scale, abstract paintings. She is also a pioneer of digital art, utilizing computer coding to generate kinetic paintings.

Building on these themes, we invite presentations that consider the work of Palestinian artists in diaspora throughout the 20th and 21st centuries in any medium. We are particularly interested in questions that attend to the impact of artistic peripheries, such as but not limited to the American Midwest, and the role of diaspora or exile in shaping one's artistic practice. The result is a reconsideration of the ways Palestinian artists, who are often overlooked, innovate their own visual languages while engaging in a dialogue with different art histories.



A Critical Globality: Transculturation and Potential Histories of Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Karin J. Zitzewitz, University of Maryland and Birgit Hopfener


In Can Art History be Made Global? Meditations from the Periphery (2023), Monica Juneja argues that an understanding of “global art” as universally constituted through unbounded global exchanges and circulation processes “threatens to foreclose more nuanced explorations of the cultural field.” She advocates instead for “a critical globality” that can “empower a rethinking of the global in the domain of art, and its theorization as a new ‘cosmopolitics of resistance’, as a resource for countering the logic of neo-liberal capital and neo-nationalist cultural politics.” For Juneja, the keystone concept of transculturation grounds an art history not reliant on fixed frameworks, which instead examines histories of transcultural encounters and negotiations and accounts for complex structures of knowledge and power. Juneja intervenes equally decisively in art historiographical debates in Germany and those engaged with the Global South, by drawing on literatures from the early modern period to the present, particularly in her field of South Asian art. She ultimately seeks a “potential” art history, which she describes “as a way of bringing unasked questions about the past, suppressed or elided possibilities to the forefront of art-historical narratives.”

This panel solicits papers that engage Juneja’s thought and/or explore the potentialities of transculturation as concept and method. Of particular interest are challenges to naturalized disciplinary assumptions and practices, to the discipline’s reliance upon national histories, to understandings of the global as an effect of global capitalism, to models of center and periphery, and to cultural or ethnic essentialisms.



Beyond ownership: Resolving disputes over the care and display of multivalent objects of art and cultural heritage
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Anne Hilker, Independent Scholar


In the fall of 2022, philanthropist Leonard N. Stern donated his collection of Cycladic antiquities to a group of nonprofit entities controlled by the government of Greece—which agreed to their long-term display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Twenty-two years earlier, the American Museum of Natural History and the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde Community of Oregon agreed to terms governing the care and display of an object they recognized simultaneously as the Willamette meteorite and as Tomanowos, an embodiment of a spiritual visitor. These incidents are not outliers, but guideposts, examples of contracts that anticipate or resolve, rather than trigger, ownership disputes. As the continuing debate over the Parthenon Marbles shows, courtrooms and their application of property law may not be conclusive arbiters of claims to things that lie in serial or simultaneous value systems. Works of art and art objects transported from their place of creation ignite cultural and political controversies; polysemic artifacts lie within competing systems of social, religious, and legal governance that prescribe or proscribe their use, destabilizing the application of a single standard. This session invites studies of objects subject to these competing systems of governance to identify and predict areas of conflict, and to model solutions. Consideration of these issues within the setting of museums will be particularly welcome.


Ekphrasis and Artificial Intelligence: Text-to-Image Generation in Theory and Practice
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Amanda Wasielewski, Uppsala Universitet


AI text-to-image generation tools, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, were introduced to the public in 2022 with great fanfare. This initial burst of excitement has subsequently been tempered by growing concerns regarding copyright, privacy, and the threat to creative industries they may pose. These multimodal artificial intelligence platforms require little to no specialized technical knowledge or equipment to use, which means that just about anyone can quickly generate a diverse array of images from text-based descriptions. Combining large language and diffusion models, these generators are highly flexible and, some have claimed, highly creative. The text-based descriptions used to create images on such platforms could be considered ekphrasis, but instead of describing an artwork or object that already exists, they invite users to describe images into existence. They actually create images by means of description. This session seeks contributions that both theorize the paradigm of image creation these new tools represent and describe their uses in artistic practice or academic study. What is at stake for art history and art practitioners in using multimodal text and image AI? Possible topics may include theory of the image, reflections on text and image study, history and theory of photography, issues of appropriation and authenticity, the use of such tools or the images created by them in cultural heritage or digital humanities research, applications in architecture and design, and reflection on art practice or discussion of artists’ work using text-to-image AI.


Love Conquers All: Visualizing Love in Ancient Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Anthony F. Mangieri and Rachel M Foulk, Ferris State University


The Augustan poet Virgil claims, "Love conquers all" in his tenth Eclogue. This is no small boast in the Roman world where warfare was commonplace. In ancient Greece and Rome, a goddess ruled over matters of love and sexuality, and representations of Aphrodite/Venus and her retinue were popular in art. Love dominates ancient culture, from romantic poetry and magical love spells to erotic paintings and commemorative inscriptions. In myth-history, longing for Helen prompts the Trojan War. Achilles' love for Patroclus consumes the Iliad.

While scholars have acknowledged the impulse of love as central to religion, literature, and myth-history, there is more we can learn from representations of love in ancient art. Images reveal new manifestations of this most human emotion for historical people. This session invites papers that explore how works of art create meaning around the concept of love. Especially welcome are papers that expand our understanding of the multifaceted aspects of love in the ancient world. Topics may include new interpretations of familiar works, identifying new representations of love, and analysis through interdisciplinary approaches. A broad understanding of "love" might include papers that discuss familial love, patriotism, romantic love, sexuality, erotica, same-sex love, marriage, and friendship.

Papers may examine the visualization of love in ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Aegean, Greek, Etruscan, or Roman art. We hope that this session will contribute to a reassessment of love in antiquity. By examining the materialization of love in art, we can understand more fully how ancient people experienced and expressed love.



Remedy and Remediation in Chinese Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Quincy Ngan, Yale University and Aurelia Campbell


Jadeite carved in the shape of a bronze vessel, an ink rubbing of a stele preserving remarkable calligraphy, and a handscroll depicting craggy scholar’s rocks in lifelike detail. What these three instances have in common is remediation, or using one medium to represent a medially different art. Considering the linguistic root of the word, “remediation” is also a “remedy” for counteracting or eliminating the limitation of a medium. While a robe dyed with safflower will quickly lose its color due to sun exposure, a painter can use cinnabar, thanks to its lightfastness, to remediate and capture the allure of the scarlet textile. When writing out a poem, calligraphers employ the visual form and the semantic meaning of words to better express themselves, demonstrating the power of “imagetext.” To remedy the emperor-patron’s desire to convey limitless wealth and opulence, interior furnishings of tropical hardwoods, lacquer, mother-of-pearl, and marble are represented in an illusionistic manner on the imperial palace walls. In this case, pictorial illusion circumvents a material shortcoming in that the actual furniture is much more costly than painted representations of it. The aesthetics of these remedial practices are as much transmedial as political. They evince the visual and material intrigues of simulacra and call up the dictum "medium is the message." We welcome papers that seek new understanding of the historical contexts, theoretical complexity, and material dimension of remediation in any period of Chinese art.


Sprayed Paint
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Cynthia M Schwarz, Yale University Art Gallery


The history of sprayed paint application begins around 30,000 years ago with the cave art site Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, where, in a self-referential gesture, artists sprayed pigment using a hollowed bone or reed over their outstretched hands. Throughout history, artists have used a variety of techniques to splatter and otherwise diffusely apply paint droplets, but industrial developments from the 19th to 21st centuries firmly brought sprayed paint into the painter’s lexicon, where it continues to develop as a medium and language. In 1888, the atomizer was patented and was soon adopted for spraying paint. 1949 saw the patent of the aerosol spray can, with artists such as Hedda Sterne and David Smith adopting its use soon after. From the late 1960’s through to the present day, graffiti artists have embraced spray paint and it has become a part of the urban vernacular. A uniting characteristic of artists who chose to pick up spray as a tool is that the artist needn’t even touch tool to canvas (or wall), maintaining a distance and thus using body language – moving closer and further, in small and large gestures, to observe an image develop before them. This session will call for art historical research on artists who use this tool, artists who engage with spray paint themselves, and those undertaking technical research on sprayed paint applications.


Surrealism's Queer Methods
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Alex Zivkovic, Columbia University


Is there a queer surrealism? The 2022 Venice Biennale’s “Milk of Dreams” made a convincing case for the feminist and ecological lessons to be learned from the work of women surrealists. This panel similarly picks up on the political potentials of mining surrealist praxis in the context of queer theory and trans epistemologies today. The recent Art Journal publication “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History” by Che Gossett and David Getsy offers a potential roadmap for revisiting surrealism’s toolkit of visual strategies, particularly around key terms they highlight including language, flesh, bodies, representations, visibilities, opacities, materialities, forms, and collectivities.

Papers might address the work of queer surrealist affiliates like Claude Cahun and Jean Cocteau or explore more speculative resonances and possibilities. Can we trace a genealogy from the deconstructive potentials of Georges Bataille’s “informe” to Eliza Steinbock’s Shimmering Images? Is the “exquisite corpse” trans*? Are Eileen Agar’s more-than-human constructions “queer ecologies”? What political potentials exist within René Magritte’s de-coupling of word and image? And, importantly for combating today’s rising anti-trans fascism, what lessons might we learn from the collaborative art/activism of Cahun and Marcel Moore in Nazi-occupied Jersey? By critically revisiting surrealist ideas and practices, this panel seeks to find untapped queer potentials latent in this historical movement and to propose these re-politicized techniques for queer activism and production today.

Inspired by the 2021–22 exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” this panel hopes to present topics across a geographically-expansive map of surrealism's aesthetic and political influences.



The Art of Magic in the Afro-Iberian Atlantic World, 1400-present
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Sophia Kitlinski, Yale University and Nathalie Miraval


This panel explores the expressive cultures of magical practices in the Afro-Iberian Atlantic. Across time and space, institutions claiming moral authority—from the Inquisition to Central African colonial missions to contemporary police bureaus—have targeted magic for suppression. While often dismissed as superstitious, fraudulent, and fetishistic, magical practices remained central to the spiritual lives of millions from La Paz to Luanda. Its performances harnessed the heritage of diverse aesthetic traditions toward dynamic new ends; its materials served as spaces of correlation for trans-Atlantic systems of belief. And its practitioners continue to attract individuals from different racial, ethnic, and social backgrounds—a testament to magic’s enduring efficacy.

By interrogating the expressive dimensions of magic, this panel seeks to emphasize the fluid ontological nature of images, materials, rituals, and forms. Under the stewardship of African diasporic spiritual practitioners, images became relics, as occurred with a watercolor of Saint Martha in New Spain. Drawn seals, transcribed in trial records, summoned ancestors in Cuba. Meanwhile, in Central Africa, figures and vessels called minkisi authorized pacts between humans and spiritual forces. The panel uses these and other magical practices as a means to reframe art historical inquiries into the nature of Afro-Atlantic images and objects. What role do aesthetics play in magical practices? How do we contend with the plasticity of images and objects, and their resulting social and cultural meanings? How are images, objects, and materials invested with spiritual power? In taking magic seriously, this panel centers African diasporic epistemologies and experiences in the Iberian Atlantic.



The Rapprochement Between Art and Anthropology: The Artistic Research Turn and Experimental Practice
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Michele Feder-Nadoff, Independent anthropologist, artist and curator


This hybrid panel will address the growing rapprochement between anthropology and art through the practice of "artistic research." This is especially evident in how anthropologists are drawing upon experimental artistic practices and methods, on the one hand, and on the other, how art departments have increasingly incorporated the language of making, and artistic research into their curriculums. Dr. Ben Spatz [https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/persons/ben-spatz] will be our discussant. The concept of “making” in itself has created a continuum between art-making (in all media /modalities) and writing, such as Parsons first year curriculum describing writing as a form of making. How has the design area been transformed? Where exactly does this humanist intellectualism lead us? As exciting as these crossovers might be, what are the pitfalls, problematics and advantages, insights involved? What impact has this on social practice methods? How has this turn effected not just the self-reflection of the disciplines themselves, but also the ethical aspects of these new research projects and practices? Most especially in its most popularized form: ethnography? How can we read Hal Foster’s 1995 essay “The Artist as Ethnographer?” today? In this essay Foster stated his doubts about the praxology combining art-making and research. But now almost three decades later what has changed or stayed the same? How has anthropology influenced or re-shaped the field of art? Is artistic research only a reaction to the institutionalization of the arts, a self-defense mechanism as a field that needs to justify itself as scholarship, a discipline worthy of PhD’s?


Transnationalism of French Colonial and Post-Colonial Visual Culture
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Marie-Agathe Simonetti, University of Wisconsin - Madison


France was the second-largest colonial Empire after the British Empire. While a plethora of research has been conducted on visual culture in the latter, few studies have focused on visual culture in the French Empire. Two recent books, Visualizing Empire: Africa, Europe, and the Politics of Representation and The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary: Photography between France and Africa, 1900–1939, highlight the emphasis on the African continent when dealing with French colonization. In contrast, Asia was part of the “colonial imaginary,” as attested by the multiple representations of Angkor Wat, which became the symbol of the French Empire during the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exhibition.

To go beyond a siloed understanding of the French Empire's practices and visual cultures, more research needs to be conducted on the interactions between its diverse territories across continents. Contemporary artists, such as Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, with the 2019 video installation The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, are going in such direction in dealing with colonial subjects and colonization’s aftermath in Senegal and Vietnam. To develop a more complex understanding of the artistic production within the French Empire and its postcolonial legacies, this session seeks to emphasize the transnationalism and cross-cultural artistic exchanges between its diverse territories from the nineteenth century to the present. Presentations dealing with interactions between Asia, the Caribbeans, the Pacific, Africa, and Europe within the French Empire or between different Empires are solicited.



U.S. Imperialism, Extraction, and Ecocritical Art Histories
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Zoe Weldon-Yochim, University of California Santa Cruz and Katie Loney, University of Pittsburgh


Ecocritical art histories have expanded over the past two decades, with studies attuned to diverse geographies and temporalities exploring how art and ecology connect with extraction, politics, economics, technology, law, and more. However, art historians have been slow to examine the ways in which U.S. imperialism operates in tandem with extraction and how visual productions uphold, complicate, or challenge such dual operations. As art historian Maggie M. Cao has explained, imperialism “is a fraught term in the United States” as it clashes with the nation’s self-fashioning “as a republic” (Panorama, Spring 2020).

This panel seeks papers that address the entangled terrain of U.S. imperialism and extraction in histories of American art broadly defined. Geographically, we consider the U.S. Empire to include its claims to water, land, and air across the Americas and at sites throughout the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, including military bases beyond and within the state’s borders on occupied Indigenous lands. We encourage proposals that approach the U.S. as a formal imperial power in its territorial and ideological expansion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This panel also welcomes papers that consider how the U.S.’s informal imperial networks—defined by capitalism and an extractive economy that facilitates the removal and flow of human and extrahuman bodies, food, energy, and raw materials across the world—have shaped and been shaped by visual and material culture. The co-chairs are committed to anticolonial work and strive to foster discussions that interrogate U.S. imperialism and extraction to add new insights to ecocritical art histories.



Art Censorships on Campus
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Amy B. Werbel and Andrew Wasserman, American University


Censorship comes in many forms: direct or threatened acts of removal or vandalism of artworks, explicit or implicit restrictions on exhibitions or course content, social censorship arising from shaming, threats to employment and funding, and self-censorship as a result of “chilling effects” of legislation. In recent years, academics have taken positions both in support of and in opposition to suppression of art on campus. Proposed “divisive concepts” legislation in many states suggests that the pressure to censor potentially controversial art will grow in future years. This panel seeks papers discussing recent censorships experienced on campus: in classrooms, studios, museums and galleries, and public spaces beyond the “protected” walls of formal exhibition spaces. How can and should academics and other campus professionals respond to pressures to censor art and art pedagogies? What weight do defenses of academic freedom hold in actual rather than theoretical cases of censorship? What constitutes the boundary between self-censorship and self-editing? How do the realities of contemporary contingent academic labor complicate matters, if at all? Who can and will have the responsibility and authorization to decide these questions?


Art Collections of Academies of Sciences
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Viktor Oliver Lorincz, Art Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences


While collections of academies of arts are rather well studied, less consciously, academies of sciences established art collections as well comprising portraits of the founders and members, emblems, allegories, collections bequeathed by former members, and also buildings with interior and exterior decoration. Some scientific collections may have artistic value as well. Sometimes belonging to the library of the academy, or to another organizational unit, these collections are less institutionalized and less studied. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences will celebrate its bicentenary in 2025 but the Art Collection of the Academy was founded only 30 years ago. Even if the Budapest headquarter inaugurated in 1865 already came with a huge exhibition area by Friedrich August Stüler, who gained experience on museum buildings (Alte Nationalgalerie and Neues Museum in Berlin, and Nationalmuseum in Stockholm). Shortly after the foundation of the Academy, Friedrich von Amerling painted the portrait of the founder, and Johann Nepomuk Ender finished the emblem or allegory of the Academy itself. On the occasion of the anniversaries, this panel seeks contributions on similar art collections of academies of sciences, including portrait galleries, emblems and other symbols, representations of the academies, internal and external decoration of the buildings including e.g. the allegories of sciences. Recently, scientific objects, instruments and collections with aesthetic or historical value also have been added to our collection, and we also welcome submissions dealing with similar special cases.


Atlantic Slavery and the Arts
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University and Inês Barreiros, Universidade Nova de Lisboa


Art historians, curators, and artists have demonstrated an increasing interest in the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. This recent attention is motivated by the growing field of slavery studies and the protests challenging the ways these two human atrocities are memorialized in societies where slavery existed. This trend also responds to the recent developments in the discipline of art history in which European painting and sculpture have been overrepresented in scholarship. Considered the greatest forms of art, paintings and sculpture rarely represented enslaved peoples and when they did, bondspeople were frequently portrayed in submissive positions. More often, enslaved peoples were depicted in mediums considered minor arts such engravings and cartes-de-visite that neither deserved to be studied by art historians nor should occupy a visible place in art museums. But this landscape has changed. Artists such as Romuald Hazoumé, Grada Kilomba, Kara Walker, Rosana Paulino, Nona Faustine, Charles Fréger, and Jota Mombaça have been addressing slavery in their works. Curators have also embraced this vibrant production in exhibitions such as Afro-Atlantic Histories (Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2018) that traveled to Washington DC, Houston and Los Angeles, and Slavery (Rijksmuseum, 2021). Likewise, museums such as the National Gallery in London started to gradually expose their own ties to transatlantic slavery. Drawing on this new dynamic scholarship, artworks, and exhibitions, this panel invites submissions focusing on visual representations and artworks engaging histories of slavery, as well as curatorial projects and museographies addressing slavery and the slave trade.


Deceit by Design: Colonial Fabrications of Care and Countercolonial Subversions in North Africa
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Nancy N.A. Demerdash, Albion College , Maia Nichols, Bennington College and Lacy A Murphy, Washington University in St. Louis


It is axiomatic to say that the cultural politics of legitimating the modern colonial enterprise depended on the discourses of paternalistic care and protectionism. In the territories of French colonial North Africa, the rhetoric of care and benevolence surfaces pervasively across the archival and material record. This panel will examine the ways in which the material cultural, bureaucratic, militaristic, infrastructural, and spatial operations of French paternalistic care were intimately bound up with acts of deception, in convincing indigenous populations that the actions of the French administration were tantamount to protection. The language of paternalistic care was often the public-facing mask obscuring the economically exploitative extractions at the heart of colonization. Simultaneously, the historical record asserts examples of autochthonous peoples' skepticism, suspicion, and distrust of French protectionist claims, embodied in acts of subversion. Deceit also worked as a strategic tactic in mobilizing decolonization. How is it that institutions, systems, or infrastructures of humanitarian import--social housing, medical facilities, or schools--worked to discipline and snuff the possibilities for self-determination or sovereignty? And inversely, how did colonized North Africans work to undermine these disciplinary frameworks that structured their everyday lives, through visual and material culture? How can we see these interventions operating within decolonization, broadly? How might we reframe colonial and decolonial histories by reading against the grain of the archival sources, material culture, or the architectural record? This interdisciplinary panel welcomes contributions from scholars working with diverse media: art and architectural history, photographic history, urban studies, design history, and the history of science.


Embedded Materiality: Decorative Inlay in Asian Lacquer
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Helen Glaister


Lacquer has long been valued for its decorative sheen and glossy surface which elevated the status of objects, their functionality and aesthetic appeal across Asia and beyond, to the markets of Europe and the colonial world. While historical studies have focussed on the surface properties of lacquer, this panel seeks papers which explore the role of inlay - in shell, silver and gold wirework, coral and other natural materials - in transmitting design innovations throughout Asia, reflecting patterns of intraregional trade, the movement of natural resources and the role of lacquer as a vehicle for design transfer.

The materiality of inlaid lacquer, frequently incorporating precious and at times exotic materials, spoke of access to a diverse array of natural resources on land and sea, procured through a complex web of trade and diplomacy. As distinctive regional styles and specialisms emerged, so too did sophisticated methods of manufacture which drew upon long established and ancient traditions. Decorative themes and design compositions responded to and reflected contemporary trends in the pictorial arts, printing and book culture as well as ornamental patterns and motifs found in textiles, decorative carvings and metalwork, highlighting the intermediality of such objects. Luxury items were produced not only for elite use but can be found in Buddhist contexts, connecting religious communities and practise throughout the region.

This panel explores topics which interrogate the role of inlaid lacquer from a range of interdisciplinary approaches and emphasising inter-Asian connections.



Fugitive Conceptualisms
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Adair Rounthwaite, University of Washington Dept. of Fine Arts and Ellen Y. Tani, Rochester Institute of Technology


In subordinating the art object to the idea, Conceptual Art in the late 1960s introduced new and innovative relationships between artist, artwork, audience, and world. And yet, conceptualism still functioned as a dominant mode with its own boundaries and norms. Eve Meltzer and Nizan Shaked have offered reframings of conceptual art’s history through its perceived incommensurabilities, foregrounding the importance of subjectivity, narrative, and the politics of identity to this arena of practice. In the 1990s, amid broader revisitings of the era, artists were doing the same: Charles Gaines asserted conceptualism’s “hidden project” not as the reinvention of the idea of art “but the reinvention of an open-ended aesthetic/political space of subjectivity, narrative and meaning.” And Adrian Piper agreed that political consciousness was the most significant legacy of conceptual art’s self-interrogation: “the confrontation of racism, sexism, and economic exploitation—that is, xenophobia—became the last outpost of the avant-garde.” Non-western conceptualists such as Mladen Stilinović and Gordon Bennett offered self-conscious rethinkings of its strategies to address the politics of labor and representation that pertained to totalitarian and colonial legacies in their own countries, while others engaged conceptual vocabularies to convey experiences of global movement and migrant identity (e.g. Miljenko Horvat, On Kawara, Marta Minujín, or Teching Hsieh). This panel considers conceptualisms that reflect conditions of diaspora and displacement, but also conceptually-informed practice “in refuge” from conceptualism’s own histories or modes of analysis. We welcome papers that examine minoritarian conceptualisms; international networks; curatorial strategies; lost processes; and innovative contextual frameworks.


Impressionism and the Longue Durée of Empire
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Alexis Clark, North Carolina State University and Simon Kelly, Saint Louis Art Museum


While French Impressionism will undoubtedly be fêted with due fanfare in 2024, marking the sesquicentennial of the first independent exhibition of these artists, research has lately highlighted the degree to which Impressionism crossed national boundaries to become a transnational or global phenomenon. Spurred by postcolonial theory, calls to decolonize art history, and the urgency of the present, more recent discourse has interrogated Impressionism as a translatable and flexible stylistic language, operating within the wider context of empire and colonial expansion. Impressionism here served as an idea of modernity circulating in Europe and the United States but also in the Global South, including parts of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.

Building on these current interests in studying Impressionism beyond its typically circumscribed geographical boundaries, this panel questions:

  • How was French, British, and American Impressionism critical of but also complicit with imperialist projects?
  • How did colonized artists adapt or otherwise embrace Impressionism as a stylistic and iconographic language? How did these artists use Impressionism to campaign against imperialism? How was their art locally received and globally circulated?
  • How did Impressionism, as an artistic style and increasingly circumscribed canon of artists and artworks, come to be implicated in the European and United States culture of colonialism through institutionalized arts education, temporary exhibitions, and permanent museum collections?


Reframe, Recast, Rewrite: Sculpture and the Historical Narrative
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Christine Garnier, University of Southern California , Kate Sunderlin and Kelvin Parnell Jr.


In his work Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), Alan Michelson (Mohawk) projects videos onto a replica of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s iconic neoclassical bust of George Washington to question how sculpture participates in fortifying cultural icons. Dustin Kline’s coordination with Black Lives Matter to reclaim the Robert E. Lee Monument also transformed the work from looming figure to projection screen, from an unfiltered symbol of the Confederacy to one on which a more inclusive history was being played out. Alternatively, Elizabeth James-Perry (Wampanoag) and Ekua Holmes’s garden in response to Cyrus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit at the MFA-Boston placed the presumed permanence and immobility of bronze in stark relief with other ways of marking space. As communities and institutions continue to grapple with the power of sculpture in both public and private spaces, this panel invites conversation around how installation has helped rewrite a history of sculpture. How are artists, institutions, and communities mobilizing installation to adapt histories around sculpture across the globe? What strategies are being developed and executed to challenge how we think of sculpture as a permanent art? Can these animations or extensions help shape scholarship and revise our expectations of sculptural studies going forward? We invite papers by historians, critics, educators, and artists who are thinking through this tension between past assertions of sculpture’s permanence and the dynamism of installation across time and space to reshape both academic and public discourses around sculpture’s many histories.


Unsettling the Artistic Legacy of Albert Bierstadt
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Elizabeth Spear, Museums at Washington and Lee University


This panel seeks new perspectives on the artwork of nineteenth-century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt. While Bierstadt’s name has occupied a significant place in American art historiography, frequently appearing in survey books and on museum walls, the list of major monographs devoted to the artist is surprisingly brief. With the most influential and comprehensive English-language publications appearing between 1973 and 1991, the interpretation of Bierstadt’s oeuvre that remains mostly-dominant in art historical scholarship was forged during the decades of peak influence of postcolonial studies. A notable exception is 2018’s Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West, in which late scholar of western art Peter Hassrick assembled five essays probing various unexplored facets of the artist’s career and legacy, including a contribution by Hassrick revisiting aspects of his own prior scholarship. As he noted, “Modern historians have portrayed Bierstadt as a hopelessly ambitious social climber, a scheming self-promoter, and a pictorial conjurer who perpetuated myths of equal proportions to his vast spreads of canvas.”

This session asks what new stories may emerge when the previously-imagined figure of the artist no longer haunts our understandings of his artwork. Especially welcome are: papers that consider what it might mean to apply a decolonial lens to Bierstadt’s work, including reinterrogating the role of Native peoples as related to his oeuvre; those that highlight the relevance of photographic imagery, including his work with Eadweard Muybridge; and those that engage with his post-1870 work and critical reputation. Perspectives from Native and Indigenous scholars are particularly encouraged.



Art and Architectures of Decolonization
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Devika Singh, Courtauld Institute of Art and Maureen Murphy


At a time in which debates on art, architecture and decolonization are as pressing as ever before, this session proposes to analyze pivotal moments of post-independence nation building in the Global South. It argues that a transnational perspective on the history of modernism must be rooted in the excavation of the anti-colonial struggles and nation-building efforts. The session focuses on the relation between art and architecture and particular social and political developments happening in the postwar decades. It challenges the common historiography on globalization, by offering new ways of thinking the ‘global turn’ and returning to Cold War-era dynamics that played out in so-called Third World countries. It interrogates how the study of anti-colonial struggles and of artistic movements from the Global South can contribute to rethinking modernism and decentralize art history.

What role did art and architecture play in the complex processes of decolonization and in articulating political visions and aspirations? How were the arts harnessed by newly independent nation states and transnational networks (whether it be the Non-Alignment Movement or more circumscribed alliances that often used exhibitions or festivals as dissemination tools)? How did individual artists and architects affirm their creative license, at times against the state establishment, and how did inventive visual vocabularies emerge? These are some of the questions that the session will address. Papers will adopt a thematic and/or theoretical approach that cuts across different geographies, as well as examine sites ranging from Casablanca to Dakar and Delhi and the art and architecture they nurtured.



Fashion: tissue, textile, toile
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Leah Durner, Leah Durner Studio and Jorella Andrews, Goldsmiths, University of London


“Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world since the world is flesh?” Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible

Tissue is a word used for both the flesh of the human body and for cloth - the stuff in closest daily contact with us, touching, protecting and adorning our bodies. The conceptual, linguistic, and material intertwining of the human body with fashion and textiles in all their layers will be the subject of this panel.

Textiles are made by the action of human beings and then fabricated further into fashion – from “high” to “low;” – into a substrate for paintings onto which the image is applied; and into tapestries in which the image and the weave are totally integrated.

Toile (from the Latin “tela” web and also toil) is the final stage before a garment goes into production – serving, in effect, as the garment’s sculptural cartoon – and also refers to painting on canvas – huile sur toile. Human action – fashioning, making, and artifice – is a mark of the highest level of value and artistry in the highly skilled hand-sewing of haute couture, the hand-madeness of painting, the weaving of tapestries, and more.

We invite panel participants to address fashion: tissue, textile toile and the wide-ranging, multi-layered relationships among the materiality and action of the human body, the linguistic overlapping of words referring to both body and fabric, and the materiality and making of fashion and art.



Genres of the Vernacular: Drawing, Comics and Zines in Indigenous Contemporary Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Jonah Gray and Madeleine Reddon, Loyola University Chicago


This panel is interested in the mediation of popular visual idioms in North American Indigenous contemporary art. Imagined as a "shared language," pop culture offers Indigenous artists a set of mediums, forms, and figures for representing shared experiences of survivance across disparate and distinct transnational and tribal contexts. Prior to its “discovery” and appropriation by metropolitan modernists in the 1920s and 1930s, Indigenous material culture circulated commercially in the early 1900s. Creators of this material culture navigated market appetites by introducing innovative designs often through new mediums. The unfolding of this complex genealogy in the first half of the 20th century, in which Indigenous art fluctuated from being considered mere “handicraft” to being recognized as “modern art,” anticipated a deliberate rejection of the division between high and low art among many artists in subsequent generations. Since then, Indigenous artists in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s have reworked tropes and formulas from advertising and other mainstream visual cultures to voice their own desires, anxieties and fears and turned towards mediums and materials that offer more flexibility than prestigious “high art” would allow. Some examples of artists working in “vernacular arts” might include Edgar Heap of Birds, Alootook Ipellie, G. Peter Jemison, Brian Jungen, Rachel Martin, Annie Pootoogook, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun.

We welcome papers on:

Zines, comics, cartoons,

Drawings, sketches

Ledger drawings

Works-in-progress, “incomplete “ or

“unfinished” works

Version histories and image iterations, copies

Archival ephemera



Nuthin' But a "G” Thang: Branding Hip Hop
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Sam Romero, Florida Southern College


Over the past 50 years, the influence of Hip Hop has been seen and heard around the world. It’s sound has evolved, along with its visual language. Who is responsible for shaping the way we view the culture of Hip Hop? Who are the designers that created some of the most iconic record label logos, album covers, and posters? How do we teach the complexity of its culture? This panel seeks proposals that critically examine the visual language of Hip Hop. Proposals may include case studies, discussions of design professional’s own work, or design pedagogy practice, among other topics.


Objects, Ritual, and Personhood in Ancient Ritual Worlds
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Lindsey Mazurek, Indiana University and Patricia Eunji Kim, New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study


What roles did visual and material cultures play in facilitating ritualizing actions and extending personhood in ancient worlds? This session seeks to understand how objects enabled and enacted ritual, religious, and divine experiences within sacred spaces from different cultural contexts in ancient worlds. Over the past two decades, scholars like Alfred Gell, Donna Haraway, and Catherine Bell have turned towards non-human objects and their agency, prioritizing questions of materiality over form. More recently in 2018, Milette Gaifman, Verity Platt, and Michael Squire co-edited a special issue of Art History, expansively examining the embodied object in ancient Greek and Roman contexts and rethinking the boundaries between “bodies” and “objects.” Similarly, scholars (e.g. Jörg Rüpke) have started to consider the implications of object-oriented approaches on studies of ancient religious texts, considering material agency to better understand the phenomenological world of religion.

Building on these robust conversations, this panel welcomes global perspectives that examine the role of objects in extending personhood within sacred spaces. Case studies would ideally examine objects across a variety of materials and media; engage with the various temporalities of objects; and consider multiple kinds of engagements that ancient peoples could have with objects, from making and tinkering, to (be)holding and dedicating. By foregrounding the ritualizing work that material and visual culture could do, the panel also invites contributions that analyze the stakes of such methodological frameworks on our current understandings of ritual and its relationship with matter, individual and/or collective identity formation, and sacred encounters in ancient worlds.



Post-Rational Visuality
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Ted Hiebert, University of Washington Bothell and Duncan G. Mackenzie, Columbia College Chicago


“Reason, n., an imaginary process onto which the responsibility for thinking is off-loaded.”—Rene Daumal

This panel invites a look beyond the rational and towards the use of artistic method as a form of knowledge creation not bound to conventional metrics of thought. We are interested in panelists who seek to reinvigorate the relationships between art, politics, philosophy, and play as tools for moving beyond the confines of the real in order to create new possibilities for thinking about art, imagination and social context.

In our view, a post-rational conceptualization of visuality offers to rejuvenate contemplation, to carve out space for the suspension of disbelief in a contemporary climate marked by suspicions of proof and disregard of evidence—holding space for alternative worldviews. This is “post-truth” not as a way to confuse or make dangerous political claims but as a harkening back to aesthetics as a strategy for sharing unrealized social and philosophical possibilities. At stake is the possibility of a form of contemporary art that is informed by intuition, play or irrationality, gesturing beyond the over-determining tendencies towards a totalizing sense of rationality.

We invite proposals from those interested in exploring what it means to engage in aesthetic practice after the so-called end of truth. We are particularly interested in those working with alternative aesthetic forms including but not limited to: Afrofuturism, Novelty Bio Arts, Contemporary Absurdism, Bureaucratic Realism,, Comedic Objects, Queer Visuality, Play Based Aesthetics, and practice that uses aesthetics to seek possibilities, rather than reinscribe stable value.



Re-Imagining the Black Atlantic
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Crystal am Nelson, University of Colorado at Boulder


In 1993, Black British scholar Paul Gilroy published The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, which highlighted “the paradoxes and overlooked narratives of modernity” (Tanya Barson) by positioning the Black experience not as solely African, American, British, or Caribbean, but as a Black Atlantic culture that exceeds ethnicity and nationality. And this transculturality of the Black Atlantic makes modernity readily comprehensible. Furthermore, it is Black expressive cultures, in part, that bolstered this Black Atlantic structure; however, Gilroy was primarily interested in music and the role it played in the creation, articulation, and reproduction of the counterculture. Yet, images have long held powerful roles on both sides of the Atlantic in defining the inseparability of modernism and Blackness. This is strongly evidenced by the groundbreaking 2010 exhibition inspired by The Black Atlantic called Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic. In honor of Gilroy’s book, this panel invites reconsiderations of The Black Atlantic that center visual culture. Submissions may address but are not limited to the following questions: How does visual art fit into the overall discussion about the Black Atlantic? What role does the concept of diaspora play in Black Atlantic visual cultures in a post-Black Lives Matter, post-COVID moment overdetermined by social media? What are some characteristics of Black Atlantic visual expression that distinguish it from dominant conceptions of modernity? Finally, how are Black artists negotiating the terrain in the remaking of the Americas and Europe in view of new global migratory movements?


Reinterpreting Buddhism in Contemporary Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: Virtually

Mina Kim, PhD, University of Alabama


Since Buddhism appeared around the 5th century B.C., it has gone beyond the role of religion and established itself as a discipline that gives philosophical teachings to many people. After the 20th century, Buddhism has gone beyond being a representative ideology of the East and continues to be a social and cultural inspiration for many people worldwide. This panel intends to examine in detail how traditional Buddhism contributes to the universalization, conceptualization, and communication of contemporary art. The reinterpretation and visualization of Buddhism, which began in earnest as Fluxus, one of the pioneer artistic trends in contemporary art, expanded into a concept for universalization and induced sympathy for new globalization. It also explores how Buddhism is being reinterpreted and visualized by contemporary artists today, becoming a work of art for the public, not art for the few. For instance, the works of contemporary Korean artists, such as Jeong Hwa Choi, Kimsooja, and Do Ho Suh, do not start from the political and economic leadership but the personal life stories of artists living as one of us. Thus, this panel provides how contemporary art shows humanist, participatory, empathic, diverse, and global aspects, connects with people’s long-familiar religion, and conveys multilayered messages. This expansion of art today also provokes the value of human dignity and the importance of the world as one community.


Where Do We Go from Here?: Museums and Latin America’s Indigenous Heritage
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Mary Miller, Getty Research Inst


This session explores the future of curating pre-Hispanic Indigenous arts of the Americas in museums. Some questions that might be explored include the following: How do museums of various kinds envision the future of their collections, especially in light of their histories, with acquisitions at times assembled haphazardly or subjected to the interests of individual dealers, collectors, or curators? How do curators today imagine new configurations, categorizations, or juxtapositions in their curating practices, and what implications arise from such experiments or innovations? What role has the international loan exhibition had in shaping the relevant fields of study and museum practice? Can relationships be developed with private collections that now face obstacles to donation at many museums? Conversely, what does it mean when museums deaccession pre-Hispanic art collections? Also, how do these practices align with or diverge from the curating of art from other regions of the world? Finally, and of particular interest, we encourage presenters to probe the issues that curators face today in installation and interpretation, and to discuss the 21st-century decisions that contribute to shaping our views of the pre-Hispanic past.

This is a companion to the proposed session, “Histories of Collecting, Displaying, and Caring for Pre-Hispanic Art.” Both should be scheduled for the same day.



Between History and Recollection: Asia-Pacific War Memory in Contemporary Japanese Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Ayelet Zohar, Tel Aviv University and Patricia Leandra Lenz, Art Historical Institute, University of Zurich


On the 50th anniversary to the end of war in 1995, Japan’s Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, gave a declaration, for the first time expressed responsibility and remorse for Japan’s conduct during the war years. Japanese politics had withdrawn from this statement early on, and trends of revisionist historiography took its place in Japan’s national discourse. Despite the wide-spread denial in official narratives, many Japanese artist have since created art projects that directly look into the multiple issues concerning this dark chapter in Japanese history.

In recent years governmental institutions and political representatives try to silence this discourse by actively harming museums' operations, closing exhibitions, and attacking artists personally.

This debate concerns the tensions between official history and those who listen to personal memories and testimonies of their experiences during the war years, bringing to the fore a possibility to create a new phase of attention, compassion, and remorse.

Projects of contemporary artists have become central in Japan’s art scene, bringing manifold concerns under the scrutiny. Papers in this panel will look at the art projects that fearlessly engage with these painful subjects. We seek to include papers concerning (but not limited to)

  • occupation and colonization of territories in East Asia
  • architecture of War Museums in Japan
  • photographic projects relating to the atrocities committed by Japanese military
  • Okinawa’s civilian resistance
  • censorship of artworks questioning Japan’s responssibility
  • Discussion of artworks reconsidering the role of the emperor,
  • Art works representing the issue of ‘comfort women’
  • Kamikaze pilots and their presence in contemporary discourse


Black Pasts – Black Futures
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Marissa Baker, School of the Art Institue of Chicago


This panel explores how Black artists have reimagined temporality and historiography through the twentieth century to today. The legacy of Transatlantic slavery poses distinct challenges to the historicity of the African diaspora in the so-called New World. Since the New Negro Renaissance, Black artists have variously sought to reconstruct Black histories and reclaim an African racial heritage in order to resist historical erasure and articulate a Black modern self-consciousness. However, these efforts often required artists to negotiate the traps of primitivism and racial authenticity. More recently, cultural movements such as Afrofuturism demonstrate how Black artists explore the intersection of technology and race to envision a liberated Black future. As an aesthetic and narrative framework, Afrofuturism has come to encompass the complex dynamic among the past, present, and future in Black expressive culture. These cultural experiments suggest that simple oppositions between past and future ignore the more complex ways that Black cultural practitioners challenge notions of progress and reimagine the historical continuum. To explore this complexity further, this panel asks: How do the dilemmas pertaining to the historical representation of enslavement complicate the reconciling of Black pasts and Black futures? How can reinventions of the past and tradition signal more expansive futures? How might a re-examination of experimental forms of Black historiography challenge dominant aesthetic and historical frameworks such as modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism?


Histories of Collecting, Displaying, and Caring for Pre-Hispanic Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Megan E. O'Neil


This session explores the histories of collecting, displaying, and caring for pre-Hispanic Indigenous arts of the Americas in private collections and museums. Questions that might be explored include the following: How have collectors or museums of various kinds differed in their practices, whether in one period or over time? What words have been used to categorize these items (e.g. art, artifact, cultural patrimony, ancestor’s belonging), and what have their connotations been? When and why has collecting or displaying certain items been promoted, critiqued, or prohibited, whether due to taste, legislation, or dialogue among curators, museum leadership, activists, collectors, donors, and politicians? What role has the art market played in creating or shaping collections? Since such collections were often launched ahead of professional curatorial expertise, how did acquisitions influence practices, including academic training, and how did a new field for curators develop? Finally, what light can understanding these histories shed on the future of this increasingly broad and complex field? We encourage presenters to consider how pre-Hispanic art provenance studies might make new meaning for Latin America’s Indigenous Heritage.

This is a companion to the session, “Where Do We Go from Here?: Museums and Latin America’s Indigenous Heritage.”



Queer Visual Practices of Southwest Asia North Africa
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Anne Marie Butler, Kalamazoo College and Andrew Gayed, OCAD University`


Queer visual practices of Southwest Asia North Africa are achieving unparalleled global visibility in the 21st century. However, increased visibility is not equivalent to nuanced perspectives, recognition of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, or embodiment of methods and practices from Global Souths. This panel seeks to answer arising and ongoing questions about queerness in material and visual cultures from the SWANA region, such as how artists and visual creators negotiate invisibility and hyper visibility, cultural relativism, and social norms, and histories and present experiences, within the “glocal.” Kina and Bernabe contend that “the very real material and political stakes of representation and misrepresentation” are in operation whenever scholarship aims to ask difficult questions not only through [queer] content and analysis, but also through considering the meanings and circumstances that permit or encourage coalescence around certain topics (4). This panel seeks to discuss these new frameworks for queer[ed] artistic and cultural practices in a SWANA, Middle Eastern, and Arab context.

To queer is to work at an angle to, or sideways, as in crossing (Sedgwick, xii); to be queer is to embody or identify with this approach. Neither in direct agreement nor direct opposition with dominant norms, queerness exposes the reification of hegemony bound up within binaries and offers alternatives. This panel investigates how art can use approaches that exist at these sideways intersections by drawing on anti-assimilationist modalities such as queer, feminist, and decolonial theory, to foreground queerness, deviance, perversity and the like in queer visual practices from the SWANA region.



Realism in the Anti-Colonialist Century
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Özge Karagöz, Northwestern University and Pujan Karambeigi, Columbia University


What promises did realism hold for artists during the anti-colonial movement? Building on the recent urgency to decenter histories of twentieth-century art and the debates in epistemology over post-colonial interconnecting versus “decolonial delinking,” to use Walter D. Mignolo’s term, this panel invites contributions that rethink realism through its entanglements with histories of anti-colonialism. At the same time, this panel hopes to draw attention to the internal multiplicities of anti-colonialism, understanding it not just as a struggle for national independence but more broadly as a crucial ingredient of various socialist, anti-imperialist, internationalist, and federationalist projects, ranging from Négritude to the Non-Aligned Movement and Pan-Arabism. Realism has been divergently understood, among other descriptions, as a social critique; an affirmative aesthetic; a specialized skill set; a measure of reality; a style; a relentless portrayal of everyday life; a choreography in allegorical typification; or a prophecy of an idealized future to come. This panel asks questions such as: How did anti-colonialist embraces of realism relay and reconfigure its nineteenth-century (chiefly French) precedents? What were the infrastructures through which realism circulated across nation-states, cultures, and ideological divides? How did the import and export of realism relate to the project of modernization and the concomitant discourse of modernism? What are the ways in which attention to affects and feelings can reframe accounts of realism and its political methods? With an aim to foster comparisons across cultures, ideologies, and regions, this panel solicits submissions that conceptualize realism from a broad array of geographies and contexts.


Reconsidering the Secular in Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Nathan K. Rees


Scholars of religious studies have complicated the superficial binary of “religious” vs. “secular,” revealing how constructions of the secular have been employed to define a specific range of cultural practices as acceptable in a modern pluralist world, while castigating other practices as inimical to secular modernity. While maintaining the boundary between secular and religious is critical to separating church and state, the semantics of secularism frequently naturalize hegemonic religious views and practices in ways that make them invisible as religion, while suppressing the public expression of the practices and perspectives of marginalized groups. Although religion has long been a focus of art-historical inquiry, scholars have devoted less attention to the secular in art.

This session seeks papers that explore the tensions animating constructions of the secular in historical and contemporary art. How have public artworks promoted religious viewpoints while framing their content as secular—or how have artists navigated the constraints of the secular when representing religious subjects in civic commissions? Where is the line between simply representing religion vs. advocating it, and what consequences have artists faced in crossing it? Most studies of the secular in art have focused on the US and Western Europe, but how is “secular” understood in colonial or non-Western contexts? When has valuing secularism helped promote underrepresented voices—and when has it silenced those voices? Reconsidering the secular in art offers an opportunity to provide a more nuanced view of the contested intersection of art and religion.



Reimagining Connections with Communities: Socially Engaged Curating & Teaching
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Megan Arney Johnston, Century College


We live with change–the pandemic, social unrest, discrimination, displaced populations, migration, and rapid global consumerism. In response, the landscape of art making and art historization in museums, organizations, and higher education have shifted. No longer are institutions assumed to be neutral. For curators, artists, and educators, we now are part of a seachange in how and what we do. Communities–in the most diverse, broad and deep understandings of the word–are at the core of what this shift means. Our communities (audiences and students) are asking to be included in our work. Some institutions have responded to the sociopolitical landscape with programming. And socially engaged practices and what has been called the educational turn in curating is now commonplace. Higher education has been transfigured. Calls for inclusion, equity and anti-racism initiatives are now an imperative and radical pedagogy is becoming more accepted. Social justice, equity and inclusion are part of our daily work. But have these approaches been embraced by institutions? How do we conduct this work? What strategies can we use to encourage a new way of working within institutions? This session calls for presentations by curators, artists, and educators on how care, anti-racism, social justice, compassion, and reciprocal relationships can be engendered and reimagined with audiences, communities and students. We hope to share ideas, projects, courses, and other examples. Papers based on case studies in the field of museums and higher education are encouraged, however, even conceptual, imagined proposals will be considered.


Sinophone Art in the Global Cold War
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Jennifer Lee, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Jin Wang, The Graduate Center City University of New York


The concept of "Sinophone'' describes Sinitic-language cultures and communities around the world, without homogenizing a singular category of “Chineseness” as implied in the “Chinese diaspora.” This panel anchors the exploration of “Sinophone art history” in the global Cold War when geopolitical conflicts, intertwined with struggles of decolonization and nation-building, were quite visually manifested in ideological and physical battlefields around the world. By “Sinophone art history,” we interpret the Sinophone not so much through linguistic commonality but multimodal forms of art that escape, exceed, or complicate languages. We also consider, in the Sinophone context, how the apparatus of empire and coloniality, with historical contingency and contemporary relevance, might operate in different spaces, times, and forms. By situating Sinophone art within the burgeoning Global Cold War discourse, we challenge previous Cold War scholarship that privileged the agency of Western actors who mediated between institutions and resisted imposed ideologies, while making connections in the three “worlds.” Meanwhile, Sinophone actors of the same period were assumed to be either supporters of Communist China or compliances with the new authoritarian regimes. Instead, we recentralize previously marginalized areas, complicating the Sinophone Cold War experience in Art History while emphasizing the transnational and cross-cultural perspectives. Focusing on Sinophone art history, we welcome discussions that see the global Cold War as an event where transnational vectors shape artistic productions, or even a method of approaching global art history via under-discussed routes, networks, and relationality.


Sparkle, glitter, gleam, glow: Reflective/Refractive Optical Mediums and Effects in Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Mary Elizabeth Howie and Stephanie R. Miller


Glitter and luminous effects can fuel awe-inspiring devotion and promote other-worldly sensations, or in other circumstances may reflect the wealth, opulence, and social hierarchies of the terrestrial world. From Neolithic stone monuments embedded with quartz to reflect moonlight, to Fra Angelico’s San Marco angel’s wings shimmering with silica mixed into the plaster, to Mickalene Thomas’s paintings glittering with rhinestones, art across time and cultures has sparkled and gleamed. Human attraction to glossiness may have evolved from the necessity of locating water. Materials that reflect light may evoke protection from darkness, both literal and figurative. When used in art, the meanings of sparkles and glitter become unstable and paradoxical. Twinkly effects may convey value, disguise cheapness, or pronounce worthlessness (in the case of kitsch, for example). Sparkly trinkets have been implicated in colonial exploitation. Glittering embellishment has signified gender in a range of ways. A glittery appearance may convey brokenness (fractured glass) or refinement (a cut gem). What role do sparkly effects play in situations of devotion or ritual? How do they relate to experiences of wonder or the spectacular? How do human-made sparkles (glitter) compare to natural ones (mica, gemstones, insect wings, water)? Can the effect of glitter be captured in reproduction, or does it have to be experienced in person to be effective? This panel seeks papers that explore sparkles and glitter from a range of mediums and purposes throughout the history of art making. Papers may focus on a single artist or period, or a more theoretical overview.


The Double: Identity and Difference in Visual Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

James S. Meyer, National Gallery of Art


This session explores the theme of “doubling” in the visual arts. Doubling is a grammar of resemblance and difference involving the combination of forms that appear alike and unalike. In works of doubling, the presentation of two shapes, images, or bodies, often in a symmetrical format, forces us to compare them. We are made conscious of our binocularity—the fact that we are endowed with two eyes that reconcile distinct impressions, allowing us to perceive depth. The art of doubling splays and divides vision; it causes us to “see double” and to see ourselves seeing. Ultimately, a viewer’s body and psychic self are the subject of these works.

Papers could explore one or more doubled formats: works that repeat an image or form; works that incorporate reversal or mirroring; works that stage perceptual “dilemmas,” making it impossible to choose between two possibilities; or works that explore a psychological or bodily double such as a mirrored or shadowed self, persona, twins, or pairs (lovers, artist duos, etc.) Doubling is found in pre-modern, early modern, and modern and contemporary art, and in Western and non-Western traditions; papers will suggest the extraordinary variety of doubled formats. The panel extends the chronological and geographical scope of the exhibition The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900 held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2022.



The sketchbook as a site of artistic invention, workshop collaboration, and the production and transfer of knowledge
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Larissa Mohr, Universität Wien and Daniel Tischler, ETH Zurich


Departing from the recent exhibition Gribouillage / Scarabocchio (Scribbling and Doodling) at the Villa Medici in Rome and the Beaux-Arts in Paris, this session focuses on the sketchbook as a site of artistic invention, workshop collaboration, and the production and transfer of knowledge. It aims to examine how sketchbooks were used by individual artists for experimentation, planning, and exploration, and how they served as a means of collaboration in and beyond workshops. While the sketch sustains its position at the center of a classical take on artistic individuality and autonomy, the medium of the sketchbook lends itself to a more differentiated perspective to better comprehend the material and heteronomous conditions of artistic production.

This panel invites papers that consider sketchbooks as multivalent actors. We encourage studies of non-canonical materials and interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate methods from fields such as art history, history of science, cultural studies, visual studies, and media theory.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Case studies of specific artists and their sketchbooks
  • The relationship between sketchbooks and executed works
  • Collaborative practices, copying, and the role of sketchbooks in the dissemination of artistic ideas
  • The practice of studying from life, observation, and the significance of artists’ sketchbooks in the history of science
  • The materiality of sketchbooks and the role of paper production
  • The role of sketchbooks in artistic education and training
  • The function of sketchbooks in the broader context of visual culture


Toward a Unified Africa: A Concept, a Reality, a Promise
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz, University of Texas at Austin and Colleen Foran, Boston University


In Africa Is Not a Country (2022), Dipo Faloyin states, “A continent motivated by a collective rejection of the designated ethnic divisions of the past may choose to shape itself into something that ... looks curiously, productively, like a country.” Inspired by Faloyin’s notion of Africa as a concept, a reality, and a promise, this panel considers the potential, and perils, of the continent as a unified space in art history. While the African continent has long been marked by linguistic, cultural, and administrative divisions, as seen in the 1884 Berlin Conference, it has also been a site of unity, such as the 1963 establishment of the Organization of African Unity. Today, the continent remains divided along an imaginary line, with the Sahel serving as the boundary that separates the Maghrib from the remaining territories. Visual iconography from south of the Sahara has defined “African art” at the expense of the full spectrum of Africa’s arts. Meanwhile, the political and cultural power of Pan-Africanism has been reinvigorated by citizens of Africa and its diasporas.

With these complications in mind, this panel is organized around two questions. First, what approaches and strategies can we identify that have either reinforced or challenged these divisions and/or desires for union? Second, could the notion of a unified Africa offer a framework for interpreting African art that foreground congruities and shared threads without sacrificing local specificities? By fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue, the panel seeks to explore the scholarly stakes of visualizing a unified Africa.



Unnatural Disasters in the Long 19th Century
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Kaylee Alexander, University of Utah and Alexis Monroe, Villanova University


Between 1876 and 1902, the Global South faced three massive famines that left over ten million
dead. Historians have long referred to these as “El Niño famines”—droughts resulting from the
natural rise and fall of ocean temperatures. In Late Victorian Holocausts, historian Mike Davis
argues that these famines not only coincided with, but were actually the direct result of, the
introduction of colonial capitalism in the Global South. British photographer Willoughby Wallace
Hooper documented one of these famines in unflinching images of the emaciated bodies of
people in “relief camps.” The commercial publication of these images in Britain reveals how the
commercial exploitation of famine victims through the colonizer’s camera mirrors the economic
mechanisms to which Davis attributes such “natural” disasters.

The purpose of this panel is to investigate the visual culture of other “natural” disasters in the
long nineteenth century. What do such images, particularly of and about marginalized communities,
reveal about the ways in which human and environmental destruction have been “naturalized” in
historical narratives? How do images conceal or reveal the impact that systems of oppression
and extraction have on landscapes and their inhabitants? From Käthe Kollwitz’s haunting
Weavers’ Revolt cycle to Winslow Homer’s anodyne Bahamian watercolors, this panel
welcomes papers with any geographic or material focus.


What does Justice look like?
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will present: In-Person

Sandrine Canac


With iconographical roots in Ancient Egypt, western representations of Justice have typically taken the form of a blindfolded woman holding a pair of scales and a sword. This solemn allegory, which often adorns the walls and buildings of institutions administering justice, remains a powerful symbol that must be interrogated. Legal scholars and art historians have questioned the adequacy of such a demiurgic conception of justice and described how this image synthesized various judicial processes or yielded conflicting interpretations. More recently, art historians like Sarah Elizabeth Lewis have sought visions of justice in different kinds of images such as photographs of Civil Rights era protests. Building on these robust precedents, this panel seeks contributions examining how artists have attempted to portray justice in different historical and geographical contexts. Whether allegories, utopian visions of peace, images of struggles against injustices, or representations of punishment, this panel contends that a just society cannot be achieved without a clear picture of what justice looks like. Ultimately, it seeks to demonstrate how the visual arts can play a generative role in shaping visions of justice for the twenty-first century.