Reconsidering the Secular in Art

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.