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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.