The Black Commonwealth

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 19^th to 21^st 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