Session Soliciting Contributors
This panel welcomes papers that propose new ways of conceptualizing the artistic, geopolitical, and transnational implications of refugee art in light of recent scholarship in critical refugee studies. How do artists compel viewers to think differently about the category of refugee? How is the contemporary art world representing, supporting, and/or circulating refugeeism? Who is the audience for such work? How are ideas of citizenship, belonging, and the nation-state complicated or reaffirmed? We are particularly interested in proposals that engage theories of migration and diaspora; the current geopolitical and climatological conditions driving mass migrations; or theories of the nation, statehood, and citizenship. We welcome projects that invite us to consider new paradigms for understanding the ways refugee art is produced and instrumentalized now.
We invite scholarly and artistic presentations that explore the doubling of beauty and monstrosity, injury and freedom. How does the human and more-than-human ecological porosity of trans bodies transform our practices of figuration, alter the visuality of surface and depth, or shuffle crystallized assemblages of beauty? For example, how can the unruly aesthetics of scarification help us attend to the reparative possibilities that unexpected coagulation and disturbances might afford? How might we think between medicalized, surgical practices and the material engagements of artists? In what ways could aberrations of beauty, perhaps thought first through the human body, be refracted through other bodies of knowledge such as land, archive, text, or inorganic materialities? How do race, ability, and other relational factors inform how we approach these questions?
This session explores contemporary artists’ experiments with new sites or ways of showing their work, as well as their efforts to reach new audiences. An area of special interest will be those approaches that deliberately sidestep the artworld’s usual ambits. Proposals are invited from artists, critics, and art historians with the aim of fostering a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary discussion that embraces practices as well as criticism and theory illuminating them.
Examining interactions between American art and the Pyrocene across time and media, this session invites submissions from researchers, scholars, and artists at all levels who focus on:
- Visual representations of fire in American Art, from the 18th century to the present
- Material interactions between American art and fire (accidental or intentional destruction, fire as creative fuel or co-participant in artmaking...)
- Artistic involvement in the study of fire and fire management
- Artist-led environmental interventions involving fire
- Artistic approaches to Indigenous ecologies of fire in North America
- Artists’ responses to North American wildfires and the climate crisis in our time
This session explores anarchism’s ‘aesthetic of tension’ in contemporary art that is socially engaged, anarchist identifying, and geared toward challenge and disruption. This tension involves self-actualization and transformative modalities. It thrives on qualities of contestation at the same time as it seeks to intensify ruptures that are generative, unleashing imaginative freedoms that find their indexical grounding in the artwork’s relational power and communicative efficacy. What lies at the core of the anarchist tension? Italian activist Alfredo Bonanno characterized it as a relationship of engagement, a continual reversing of theory into action and action into theory which refuses closure. Arising from an ontological positioning that is self-constituted, dynamic, relational, and critical of authoritative origins, this tension aspires to extend the freedom it embodies into the world as a social force. Its paths are tactical and multiple: residing in the flux of contestation, it signals anarchism is an empowering idea, one that orients itself toward the future, rather than atrophying in the present, because the conditions for its realization are ever-changing. Most importantly, it contributes to anarchism’s allure, its means of building affinities that draw others toward a social vision that has no end goal or final reckoning. Thus, anarchism’s aesthetic of tension unfolds along social continuums the activist artist creates, working within society from an engaged stance of immediacy that broaches no deferrals.
Several key themes related to visual anonymity are of particular interest. The face is treated as the seat of recognizability, but other body parts or traits can give away identity. Photography is the medium that is most frequently deemed to require anonymization, but other artistic and cultural media appraised as less “indexical” may slip under the radar of ethical concern. And artistic and gendered considerations have historically been taken into account while anonymizing, even when the act is ostensibly seen as simply a scientific necessity.
While these focuses on the importance of the face, the indexicality of photography, and the influence of cultural tropes on anonymization are important to this discussion, these are not the only relevant ideas. Presenters can consider visualized anonymity in a broad range of materials: contemporary or modern artwork; medical or otherwise sensitive photographs; true crime films or shows; etc. This panel aims to examine with equal weight both the visual and artistic qualities of anonymity as well as the ethical and cultural weight of providing anonymity.
Possible themes include:
- Negation of the anthropomorphic body (aniconism)
- Role of materials in divine representation
- Relationship between divine images and the natural world
- Symbolic or otherwise non-human depictions
- Visualizations of sacred places
- Replication, relics, authenticity of images
- Architectural settings and contextual interpretation
- Viewing and the diversity of possible responses to representations
The Chairs of this panel were trained respectively in ancient Mediterranean and South Asian art. We welcome submissions from within these fields, but look forward especially to receiving papers from beyond these specializations.
What is the value of working with bilingual typography? In what ways can working with bilingual typography question and reveal canonical binaries within typography and language? How can working with bilingual typography challenge hierarchy, power, and identity?
What does considering philanthropic foundations, endowments, membership organizations, religious charities, and bequests as architectural producers reveal about architecture’s role in capitalist systems of valuation? What did donors gain from these transfers of knowledge and capital–whether ROI, legitimation, or worldmaking? How did buildings provide unique physical and financial structures for cultivating those relationships? Where were disciplinary concerns–favored architects, historical styles, theories of environment–controlled by the “dead hand” of the donor and how have they shaped civic building types, from schools to research centers, housing projects, museums, and libraries? Philanthropists often crossed borders, tethering privatized welfare state projects to imperial building campaigns; what relations of power, hegemony, or supremacy did they construct and maintain? What constitute counter-histories of the architecture of the donor class–as undercommons, sites of occupation, physical alteration, or radical toponomy?
While the session is open to all periods and geographies, emphasis will be placed on expanding beyond—or at least testing the limits of—ideas of repetition in industrial and post-industrial societies. When we cease to equate repetition with efficiency and industrial standardization, it becomes an especially rich concept through which to study the connections between architecture and the intellectual, technological, and aesthetic contexts of its production. Beyond the possible objects listed above, welcome submissions might take the form of historical epistemologies interrogating the vocabularies of architectural repetition, such as the pairings of type–token or copy–original, family resemblance, the “slavish” copy, the counterfeit, etc. How can historicizing the concept of repetition break open historiographic traditions focused on singularity? And what might we learn by studying the construction and maintenance of multiple instances of a single design, whether in one city or different countries?
Their complexity and success confounds the binaries of market and state, of public and private, that structure Anglo neo-liberal 'culture wars'. Yet a visit to any of these places immediately attests to their vitality: from the phenomenal civic, social, and architectural success of Lina Bo Bardi's SESC Pompéia in Sao Paulo (1977-1988), part of the non-governmental social services initiative SESC (El Servicio Social do Comércio), to Friche la Belle de Mai in the poorest district in Marseille (1992-ongoing), and many of the other cultural centers in the Trans Europe Halles (1983-ongoing) network.
This session calls for papers that attempt to make sense of such projects in their particular milieux while connecting them to larger questions of contemporary artistic and cultural consumption and production. It invites close studies of projects and initiatives that treat the city and its cultural/artistic life as living questions rather than as commodities for consumption by tourists and global media. It is especially interested in projects and initiatives outside Europe -- in the Americas, in Africa, and Asia -- to enrich our sense of what is possible.
The panel invites papers on the art, craft, and material culture of fairs. Papers might consider traditional mediums like painting, photography, textiles, and pottery, as well as unconventional mediums like crop art, canning, and butter sculpture. Papers might detail more intimate stories of family and community life that often span generations. Papers might also explore broader creative expressions found on fairgrounds, such as rodeos, pageants, and 4-H displays, or the social production of the actual fairgrounds exemplified by neon and hand-painted signs, parade floats, and colossi like Big Tex’s big cowboy boots. In addition to state fairs, papers can consider county and tribal fairs. We invite reflection on how fairs register shifts in regional art expressions and, more broadly, how fairs help us better understand the formation of identity in American art and culture.
The panel will precede the opening of the exhibition The State Fair at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum curated by Mary Savig and Sara Morris.
Expected topics include but are not limited to:
- Rural and urban labour
- Feminist critiques of labour
- Capitalist and Socialist Realism
- Working and middle class labour
- Affective labour
- Protest Art
- Performative practices of labour
- Environmental issues
- Immigration
- Artistic labour
We aim to bring art-making into dialogue with the historically situated theories, practices, imaginaries of science and medicine, particularly as approaches to reevaluate histories and historiographies of Sinophone art. Who are the subjects of science and medicine discourses, and are they the same as art’s subjects? How might we understand art both as knowledge itself, and as a technology for knowing? Generally, what role does art play in the transformation of epistemic modes from the classical learning (gewu zhizhi) to the modern discipline-oriented kagaku (science) to the contemporary efforts at interdisciplinary knowledge production? Acknowledging the historical and etymological challenges of ideas such as science and art in the Chinese language, we encourage consideration of histories and disciplines in flux.
Potential themes include, but are not limited to:
- Experimental art, avant-garde, and the institution
- Theory and practice of experiment in art
- Affect, experience, and disaffection
- Disease, contagion, and illness
- Health, public health, and hygiene
- Disability and debility
- Reality, truth, and (R)ealism
- Politics of science and medicine
More than had been realized previously, scientific developments in the late 19th century, particularly X-rays, radioactivity, the electron, and the confirmation of electromagnetic waves in the ether of space, played a key role in creating a new cultural focus on invisible realities beyond the human eye. These discoveries not only provided vital support for occultists, but they also stimulated modern artists to explore the occult. With circulating spiritualist journals, translated books, and a network of Theosophical publications, occultism was international, making such ideas readily available, including to af Klint in Stockholm. Now that it is clear that such concepts were not on the margins but were central for many twentieth-century artists and modernism itself, this session aims to showcase recent art historical scholarship in this field from Hilma af Klint to Agnes Pelton.
The continuous annihilation has often overshadowed Palestine's rich cultural heritage and identity. We seek to amplify marginalized voices by foregrounding the perspectives of Palestinian artists and communities amidst broader discourses of art, conflict, and human rights. This panel highlights the importance of preserving cultural traditions, challenging dominant narratives, and the transformative potential of art in fostering solidarity and envisioning alternative futures in the face of adversity. By exploring visual culture as an act of resistance and resilience, attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the enduring impact of this carnage and the enduring power of art to bear witness and provoke change.
Topics might include (but are not limited to):
Artists as collectors and consumers
Artists’ materials
Artists’ homes/studios
Artists’ inventories
Paintings as records of artists’ possessions
Food/Consumption
Objects as a form of payment
Currently, there is little to no direct financial or educational infrastructure in place for artists and collectives who seek opportunities to do this work, and we have seen again and again that if artists don’t have access to information and resources for it, their legacies end up being shaped by others—or disappearing. Agency over this process and outcomes is key to self-determination.
We are interested in sharing Joan Mitchell Foundation’s experience, lessons learned, and most recent thinking around the Creating a Living Legacy Program (CALL), and hearing from colleagues in the field around some of the biggest challenges, opportunities and, above all, the importance of engaging with this type of work. Particularly: what is the responsibility of different artists presenting and supporting institutions, and what are some of the interesting / less known models that could help the field finally prioritize this work once and for all.
Among many other questions, we are interested in how these projects balance tensions among aims that might include preservation (of the building and its interior, as well as works of art), pilgrimage, place-making, tourism, scholarship, and cultural education regarding artworks, the artist’s life course, and context. What disposes a design installation to manifest the interiority of the artist, in contrast to one that more centrally contextualizes the artist and the site historically? Have recent re-thinkings of an artist’s works or career enabled new installation strategies? How in general have museological approaches to such sites changed over time? How are the potentially conflicting goals of maintaining the integrity of the historical, architectural character of a structure versus creating contemporary exhibition spaces resolved?
Contributions addressing these and related questions, including international and cross-cultural perspectives, by art and architectural historians, artists, architects, visual culture critics, and those working in other relevant fields are welcome.
Contemporary artists reimagine relationships between artistic labor and automated processes, human and nonhuman systems, and critique AI in exacerbating biases and unequal distribution of power and resources. Alexander Reben creates bronze sculptures based on text and image output of generative AI; Anicka Yi designs microorganism-inspired machines programed with AI software; Stephanie Dinkins challenged algorithmic injustice and the lack of representation of people of color in the training data of AI systems; Lauren Lee McCarthy critiques the effects of surveillance and algorithms on social life. Other artists explore AI as a new medium in negotiating the power struggle between human intentionality and capitalistic apparatus. In the age of digitization, does the materiality of art still hold value? Does art imbued with algorithms create meanings? The panel welcomes proposals examining AI’s impact on art and human creativity, but also encourages perspectives on how art challenges AI, and how art can contribute to equitable world-making through AI’s word and image.
Chairs:
Stanley K. Abe, Duke University
Michael E. Yonan, University of California, Davis
The commonplace definition of sculpture is that it is art made in three dimensions. In this respect it contrasts with the two-dimensional arts of painting, drawing, and printmaking, and of course complex manipulations of space that are the realm of architecture. Yet complicating this commonplace definition are the many ways in which two-dimensional art evokes or abuts the sculptural, and the many ways in which architecture can function sculpturally. This panel seeks papers that interrogate the boundaries of what can be called “sculpture,” either through case studies of sculptural or quasi-sculptural objects, historiographical studies that illuminate different conceptions of sculpture in the discipline’s history, or explore how sculpture is understood in different cultural settings across the globe. Is the commonplace understanding of sculpture increasingly too limited for today’s globalized art history? Does sculpture require rethinking at this historical moment, considering art’s increasingly reliance on digital technologies? And are older art forms better understood as engaging in complex ways with sculptural form? This panel seeks to interrogate what sculpture can be and invites inquiries on how to complicate the “noble simplicity and silent greatness” traditionally associated with it.
For Muñoz, brownness has been obscured and yet “...to become attuned to the brownness of the world is to see what is here but is concealed.” Enacting “brownness” has the potential to disrupt rigid categorizations of identity including race, gender, sexuality, and nationality to create new modes of understanding. At Whittier College, “Narrative, Community, and the Transformative Possibilities of Brown Storytelling” is a three-year campus initiative dedicated to amplifying stories that celebrate the complexity, friction, and expansiveness of a “brown” identity in the US. In this panel, we seek to expand this conversation to investigate the historical roots, evolution, and utility of the term in relationship to artistic practices across diasporas and in the United States.
This panel asks: How can “brownness” help transgress categorizations of identity? In what ways does situating “brownness” illuminate obscured histories? What utility does the term “brown” offer artists, storytellers, and cultural producers in the United States? We invite papers and presentations from art historians, artists, and curators that engage with brownness in relation to identity politics, decolonial futurisms, diaspora, and aesthetics.
We invite papers that consider how the Belle Époque’s global circulations were made possible by local practices of material production. Spanning diverse geographies and imperial contexts, case studies might include construction sites, bronze foundries, textile factories, rubber plantations, or jute mills—each contributing, in different ways, to the Belle Époque’s mythic splendor. Drawing on perspectives from the “material turn,” we welcome approaches that deflate the period’s narratives of universal progress by instead highlighting the situated frictions, failures, and local resistances that emerged within its global networks. Moreover, taking inspiration from Deborah Silverman’s reappraisal of the Belgian Art Nouveau, contributions might destabilize the era’s iconic aesthetic forms by foregrounding “unseen” forms of labor, technical know-how, and capital involved in the production of art, decorative arts, architecture, urbanism.
Initially conceived in Western archaeological discourses as passive recipients of influences from the more complex societies to the north (i.e., the Aztecs, Mayas, and their predecessors) and the south (i.e., the Incas and their predecessors), AIAO was previously described as a “counterfeit paradise” and “the Intermediate Area”—intermediate both in its geographic location but also in its social and cultural development.
In recent decades, archaeologists have conducted extensive research in these areas that are reshaping scholarly perceptions. But where are the art historians at?
This panel seeks to bring together art historians of ancient American art focusing on AIAO. How can art history contribute to the interpretation of archaeological data or provide methodological pathways in its absence? How does AIAO art history critically engage notions of provenance and repatriation? How does it challenge Western concepts and categories such as monumentality, durability, sculpture, and architecture that have remained mostly unquestioned in Mesoamerican and Andean pre-Columbian art history?
We invite papers focusing on the pre-Conquest or early colonial periods. Of particular interest are papers that historicize their research in the context of the development of pre-Columbian art history and its connection with anthropology and archaeology.
We solicit papers from scholars and practitioners concerned with the intimacies between synthetic materials, bodies and landscapes, and their attendant histories of production, consumption, and waste. We encourage presentations that engage with the entanglements of toxic media from interdisciplinary perspectives, including ecofeminist and queer ecological theory, disability studies, Black and Indigenous studies, and science studies. Together, we ask how an attention to chemical intimacies might foster modes of unlearning and worldmaking within art history and practice.
How does the study of female collectors challenge and expand existing scholarship? Who were these women, and how and why did they collect? How and in what ways did women live, work, influence, and collect in community with others? How do women’s philanthropy, art collecting, and collecting as activism intersect in and out of the museum? We invite papers that open conversations about feminist curatorial practice of the past and present, offering new methodologies for the study of collecting and women’s curatorial practice. We encourage scholars who may be early in their careers, those who may come from underrepresented backgrounds, or those who study multiply marginalized women.
We welcome papers that address both the connectivity and disconnections within this region, utilizing art historical methods as explanatory tools. Submissions that focus on marginalized ethnic groups, artists, and their artistic products are particularly encouraged, addressing this critical research gap. Potential topics include but not limited to the mechanisms of cultural and artistic exchange between Central Asia and other regions; the impact of political and social changes on artistic production and architectural development; case studies of marginalized groups and their contributions to Central Asian art and architecture; reimagining Central Asian art history through novel sources and methodologies.
Through this panel, we aim to foster dynamic discourse among scholars pioneering new epistemological and methodological approaches to understanding Central Asia's cultural landscapes. We encourage submissions from underrepresented scholars and non-Western academic traditions.
Scholars like Philip Deloria, Paul Chaat Smith, and Diana Taylor have analyzed the phenomenon of “playing Indian” but relatively little art historical scholarship has addressed how settler artists have conflated and complicated Indigenous materials, processes, and imagery into a universal source for creativity. We invite papers that explore artists’ desires for cultural authenticity, constructions of Indigeneity, and/or their strategic negotiation of cultural expectations around marginalized identities. This panel sits at the intersection of visual culture, art history, and Indigenous studies, and will explore perceptions and reflections of “Indigeneity” in art produced by both settler and Indigenous artists of the twentieth century.
This session seeks to open a broad and rigorous discussion about the anti-colonial pedagogies and artistic strategies that evolved from within the Bauhaus, VKhUTEMAS, and the Mezhyhirya Artistic-Ceramic Technical College that thrived outside Kyiv in the 1920s. Such strategies were present for example in the teachings of László Moholy-Nagy and Béla Uitz, both emigres from the Austro-Hungarian Empire working at the Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS respectively, Leninist-Internationalism and other socialist theories espoused by participants at all three institutions, and in works like the anti-colonial pottery the Mezhyhirya students derived from Ukrainian folk art. Contributors may focus on these and other anti-colonial practices in the historical schools or their global legacies as they evolved throughout the twentieth century via students and former teachers, and through the dissemination of objects and texts. Contributions focusing on Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Central Asia are especially encouraged.
We welcome submissions that approach gardens as part of what Malcolm Ferdinand describes as decolonial ecology — imagining alternative ecological futures that reconcile the struggles of oppressed peoples with that of the environment for an emancipatory way out of ecological crisis. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: decolonial explorations of garden designs; art/ artists critiquing the imperial histories of garden cultivation and/ or imagining gardens as spaces of resistance; or ecocritical readings of gardens in the contexts of interspecies destruction and climate collapse.
As a reflection of the profound inequalities and social hierarchies of the region, the notion of modernism in Latin America has generally been limited to the aesthetic production of dominant urban groups, excluding that of indigenous, rural, Afro-descendant and diasporic groups. In this session we emphasize artistic processes developed in the Andes from the mid-20th century onwards that critically complicate the predominating perspectives of modernity.
From a postcolonial perspective, which recognizes alternative modernities and the asynchronicity in the processes of Andean modernity, we aim to bring together proposals that study the tensions and intersections between urban centers and indigenous or rural territories, between constructed ideas of modern art, crafts, and folk art. We are particularly interested in narratives that probe how migration, gender inequality, and extraction practices affect the conditions of artistic production and the dynamics that occur during the transition from modern to contemporary art.
We invite papers that look at Library and Library Room design and decoration in Renaissance Europe. How did descriptions of ancient libraries inspire monastic, private, university and/or public libraries during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries? How did the design and decoration articulate the function of a specific library? What architectural or iconographic elements were common? Were spaces and furnishings adapted to accommodate the printed book? Was the catalog incorporated in the design and/or indicated in the decorative elements? Was the library part of a larger cultural complex, to whom was it available, and how was it intended to function?
Individual examples of extant libraries and library rooms are particularly welcome.
Please submit an abstract and a cv according to CAA guidelines.
A history of the relationship between design and disability must acknowledge the significant ways in which design has contributed to the disabling of individuals and communities. Examples of design ingenuity and DIY innovation have always existed, but it was the twentieth century before disability began to enter mainstream design discourse. These early debates via the work of Victor Papanek, have since been challenged through critiques of universal design (Guffey, 2023) and critical access studies scholars.
Through the lens of crip theory (McRuer, 2006) initial insights from the social model of disability, including critiques of ableism and the systemic barriers of inaccessibility, have been extended to critique the logic of assimilation and highlight the intersectional nature of disability. Crip technoscience posits an alternative model of expertise, recognising that “disabled people are [...] designers of everyday life” (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019:2).
This panel explores the changing nature of how design and designers engage with debates on disability. In doing so we hope to navigate these interdisciplinary intersections where the influence of areas such as critical disability studies, cripistemologies, and crip technoscience converge with design in opening up new spaces for practice, action, and reflection.
We welcome a range of potential topics, including but not limited to:
- Shifting approaches to access-making
- Positionality of the designer
- Material cultures of disability
- Disability design exhibitions
- Crip activism as design practice
- Role of technology in assistive practices
- Histories of crip adhocism
- Methodological insights in and outwith design
- Cripistemologies and design
The legacy of drawing the outdoors in the Americas raises the question of how contemporary artists across the region use drawing to contend with topics of the land, territory, and environmental crisis. Through discussions of contemporary drawing (c. 1970 to present), this panel asks why and how artists in the Americas use the practice of drawing to engage with ecological topics. We welcome papers that address historical approaches to drawing today and expand the definition of drawing to three dimensions or performance. Art historians, curators, artists, and interdisciplinary thinkers are invited to explore ideas that include but are not limited to: artists who use the genre of landscape drawing, subvert it, or disregard it in favor of their own cosmovisions; art that evaluates and critiques the historical tradition of record keeping as a technique of conquest and environmental racism; and practices that incorporate materials of the earth into the medium of drawing.
The point of departure for this session is the launch of the Speculative Index, a material and digital expansion of the Index of American Design (IAD). As a federal work-relief program that employed around 1,000 artists between 1936 to 1942, the highest achievement of the IAD, according to critic Louis Filler in 1952, was “the democratic shock of recognition experienced by a cross-section of Americans employed on the Project.” The main output of the original IAD program are 18,980 drawings at the National Gallery of Art documenting a range of objects, from folk art and family heirlooms to fashion and furniture. Expanding on the IAD, the Speculative Index is an interdisciplinary curriculum, communal history project, and design democracy piloted in 2023 at the Corcoran School of Art and Design at the George Washington University.
We invite artists and art instructors, historians, and professionals engaging with archival and museum collections in their practice to give presentations addressing the “democratic impulse” of their work.
In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the need to correct the historical erasure of Asian American artists in the narrative of American art. This panel brings together representatives from significant museums and established scholars to discuss the efforts undertaken by art historians and museums to expand their scholarship and collections of Asian American artists.
Drawing on their diverse experiences and institutional perspectives, panelists will explore the challenges and opportunities encountered in this endeavor. They will discuss the importance of acknowledging the contributions of Asian American artists to the American art canon, as well as the impact of this recognition on broader discussions of identity, representation, and cultural heritage, and how this dovetails with significant efforts to build collections. The panel will also examine strategies for effectively incorporating Asian American art into museum collections and exhibitions, including collaborative curatorial approaches, community engagement initiatives, and digital platforms for sharing stories and artwork.
Through these discussions, the panel aims to foster greater awareness and appreciation of Asian American art and artists, while also highlighting the ongoing work needed to address historical gaps and promote a more inclusive and equitable art world.
This roundtable seeks to reimagine the boundaries of the very idea of creation to be more capacious. In particular, we seek to facilitate a conversation about examples of ongoing or continual creation, many of which were performed by Indigenous and Black people (either as individuals or collectives) across colonial Latin America. Potential topics for the roundtable might include but are not limited to: Indigenous or African concepts that trouble the idea of a single punctual act of creation, the constant modification of miraculous imagery, or durable relationships between communities– such as confraternities– and artworks that reshaped the artwork over time. We welcome other contributions that would creatively expand the definition of continual creation to help write new and more inclusive histories of colonial Latin American art.
While much discussion of climate and cultural heritage has focused on contemporary crises, the importance of land in the construction of myths and meanings long predates our modern moment. This session invites inquiry into the role of the environment in medieval culture across the globe, but with a localized lens. How did humans manage the challenges posed by their natural surroundings, and how is their experience reflected in the land forms we inherit today? What narratives–visual, oral, or material–did people construct around local natural phenomena? In a time when the natural order is in flux, what lessons can we learn from medieval symbioses between humans and their environments? Papers outside canonical medieval geographies are especially encouraged.
Potential topics include: medieval environmental stewardship, localized natural knowledge and its transmission, the protection of sites of religious importance, pre-modern agricultural practices, rupestrian and earthwork architecture, and medieval responses to changing climates.
This panel aims to delve into the intersection of kitsch and spirituality, exploring how the divine is portrayed, commercialized, and consumed through a broader lens of kitsch. Despite lacking Benjaminian aura, kitsch possesses a unique ability to invest objects with significance, prompting questions such as: How does kitsch facilitate spiritual devotion in the Americas? How has it been racialized? Can kitsch serve as a critique of religious and governmental establishments?
We welcome submissions exploring various topics, including: the aesthetics of kitsch and its impact on religion and spirituality, the expression of syncretic religious traditions through kitsch, the role of kitsch in supplanting organized spirituality, its function as a source of joy and communal celebration, and the significance of kitsch-inspired religious objects in contemporary culture.
Contributions challenging conventional perspectives on kitsch, especially those addressing its intersections with race and regionalism in America, are encouraged.
A current research initiative, occurring from 2024–2026, How do you throw a brick through the window... comprises a symposium, artist-led workshops, and exhibitions, co-organized by Tufts University Art Galleries and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center exploring forms of embodiment within sculpture, installation, new media, and performance informed by disabled, cripped, sick, mad, and healing frameworks. These methodologies consider expanded notions of public space and embodiment.
Building upon this research premise, this session calls arts workers, artists, archivists, organizers, curators, and academics to offer papers engaging disabled forms of protest within grass-roots Internet-based projects; circulating publishing initiatives; and care-giving collective work. “How do you throw a brick through the window... : Expanding Publics and Embodiments” ultimately posits questions such as: what public spaces remain unconsidered and how might reconsideration open new avenues of advocacy and protest? How might innovation or technological advancement help or hinder the development of cooperative and accessible space? How do disabled communities provide models for collective world-building?
Many Afro-Caribbean artists wrestle with issues of colonialism, displacement, and marginalization. Some adopt the medium of performance to unravel, challenge, and center Blackness, using their bodies as a site of confrontation and as a way to become visible in a world where they have been largely erased, dismissed, and silenced. Two such examples include Haitian Jean-Ulrick Désert whose work is characterized by “conspicuous invisibility” and Cuban-transnational Carlos Martiel whose practice exposes issues of race, isolation and injustice. Rather than attempting to blend in and assimilate, Désert and Martiel confront and center Blackness using their bodies, demanding to be seen and to provoke consideration of issues such as identity, discrimination, and marginalization. Yet this is not work to be done by artists alone. We propose this panel out of the conviction that art histories must continue their current work of troubling traditional cartographies, definitions, and boundary lines to make apparent what has long been overlooked. This panel invites scholars and practitioners whose work is focused on performance, Afro-Caribbean artists, identity, invisibility, and assimilation/resistance.
Proposed topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Exhibitions and collections of Indigenous art
- Indigenous perspectives on museum, exhibition, and collection practices
- Labeling of Indigenous art (e.g. popular, folk)
- Pre-colonial art
- Indigenismo
- Commercial galleries
- Global Indigenous art
There is a stubborn belief that feminist art focuses on the image of the body. Yet the core of feminist art is conceptual or social practice; art that is designed not just to be looked at but also to be acted upon. Text or language-based art—including what Hélène Cixous called écriture feminine—has been its crucial component as women investigate language as a tool and locus of their cultural oppression: probing their erasure from historical texts, objectification in law, the experience of speaking a second language as racialized and sexualized subjects, or the male-centrism of language, including AI and the internet.
The session is part of a broader research that seeks to fill a gap in literature about feminist language-based art by privileging transnational, multigenerational, and intersectional comparisons, globally. A sister session in 2024 provided a rare comparative perspective on the Middle East and North Africa. Part II in 2025 seeks scholarly analyses and artists’ presentations with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Latinx diasporas. Of particular interest are proposals regarding artists who represent cultures where oral expression and poetry may dominate the written (Indigenous, Afro-Latinos, African-Caribbean, etc.); both sound-based and text-based projects.
We invite proposals from any discipline that addresses this new field. Litigator Gale Elston and ecoartivist Aviva Rahmani, will moderate to explore how and why artists can impact social and environmental justice when they engage with the legal system as an extension of an art practice and what challenges they may encounter when they do. In 2018, Rahmani and Elston collaborated to win an injunction against a fictional fossil fuel company in a mock trial at the Cardozo School of Law, NYC.
Gale Elston is a prominent art law attorney, and author of, "Art Law For Creators," (pub. Archive Press 2024). She has litigated art law for 40 years. Ecoartist Aviva Rahmani, is the creator of Blued Trees, the author of Divining Chaos; The Autobiography Of An Idea and co-author of Ecoart In Action; Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities (both pub. New Village Press 2022).
Building on such efforts, this panel seeks to gather new approaches to Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and modernist realism. We seek papers that work both immanently—by attending to the conditions that structured Hartlaub’s and Roh’s claims—and expansively, by tracking the afterlife of each term within the art of Europe and Latin America. Contributions might also address the development of fascist and socialist aesthetics among these milieux, dialectics of documentary and fantasy, caricature and typology, and the longue durée of figurative aesthetics into today. Assessing these formations and their (overlooked) signal texts alongside their wide receptions will both clarify and reactivate them at this centennial moment.
This panel welcomes papers that explore the variety of methods of teaching research used in art history, art education, museum studies, studio art, and design undergraduate courses. In particular, we are interested in considering how educators conceive of undergraduate research in their courses and how they have promoted the development of their students' scholarly and artistic practices inside and beyond the classroom.
This panel asks what happens when Neoclassicism moves outside of its traditionally understood geographies, namely Western Europe. It examines the introduction, promotion and application of Neoclassicism in these non-western geographies in order to construct a global understanding of the movement. This panel also considers how Greco-Roman traditions intersect and interact with local archaeological legacies, as well as the relationship established between Neoclassicism and imperialism across the globe. We welcome papers that expand, complicate and contradict traditional narratives of Neoclassical architecture, from the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum until the first decade of the twentieth century. These might explore topics related to the circulation of Neoclassical design through colonial intervention, photography, pattern books, architectural treatises, or the prominence of the École des Beaux-arts. Examples could include but are not limited to governmental buildings, libraries, financial institutions, religious monuments, private residences, unrealized projects, and theoretical writings.
In a present that has diverged from the ambitions of the Afro-Asian world-making that emerged through the Bandung Conference (1955) and Non-Aligned Movement (1961), this session seeks paper presentations that propose, examine, and respond critically and creatively to the following: what can historical and contemporary visual cultures tell us or belie about transracial ‘stand-ins,’ Black, African, and Asian diasporic solidarities, and survival economies under post-colonial re-ordering, marginalization, and erasure?
From Virtual Reality to Artificial Intelligence, new technologies are proliferating that enable Art historians to interact with the past in new ways. The manipulation of photographs and the employment of photogrammetry have created new avenues for hypothetical reconstructions and enhancements. LiDAR scanning and architectural software programs offer opportunities for exploring extant structures and the recreation of demolished ones. Both approaches permit specialists, students, and the general public to navigate through spaces, visualize objects as they currently appear, and consider settings that have been reconfigured digitally as a result of traditional research tools – often in ways impossible to accomplish otherwise and with greater accessibility. Scholars of Italian Renaissance Art have been particularly responsive, and this session investigates how new technologies help change our understanding of this art and its experience. As opposed to traditional documentary panels dedicated to the discussion of amassing collections of images for review, this session explores the next steps of using emerging technologies to further our intellectual discourse about art historical analysis. How can these tools help us in our scholarship and teaching as we evaluate the past? What challenges must be addressed by the digital art historian? Are there methodological questions that distinguish this approach to image analysis from those that have come before it? This session focuses on the arts of Italy (ca.1300-1600) and considers how new technologies reveal alternative insights into objects, spaces, and the original experiences of users.
This panel invites contributions from scholars, artists, educators, and activists who work on crip time, in the pace they set for their work and/or as a framework for understanding artworks, creative and research practices, and normative ideals of “professional development.” Papers might consider, for example, (re)readings of time-based artworks, artist talks from makers whose practices are informed by disability or crip theory, curatorial projects that consider crip time in exhibition spaces, or presentations about confronting and subverting ableist timelines in art and educational institutions. Intersectional, non-Eurocentric perspectives are especially welcome.
- In the face of missing archives and historical erasures, what might constitute queer forms of historical evidence?
- Strategies artists use to circumvent or address the broader methodological challenges of researching and (re)presenting 2SLGBTQ+ histories.
- Artists taking on the role of archivists or historians.
- Artists engaging magical realism and/or speculative fiction as historical methodologies.
- Artworks that reactivate the past in the present.
How can the musculoskeletal health of artists be studied with information widely disseminated? How can we promote the integration of ergonomics and body mechanics into safety protocols within educational settings and studios?
We invite proposals for a roundtable discussion addressing this often neglected yet essential aspect of an artist’s life: their physical well-being. Please note: this is not a session to dispense “tips.” Those are incredibly valuable, but the focus of this conversation is to delve into ways to systematically gather information about artists’ challenges related to their musculoskeletal health and practice and how to share that information freely in a manner that is easy to find and use.
We encourage proposals from artists, health professionals, educators, and researchers with deep expertise in areas related to the physical well-being of artists. Your knowledge and insights are highly valued in this discussion.
This question, posed by historian Laura Isabel Serna in her 2020 essay, “Material Culture and the Affective Dimensions of Chicano/a History,” frames this session.
This session welcomes papers committed to more inclusive accounts of design and national history that explore how the decorative arts, adornments, and other everyday objects have empowered or encumbered the people’s pursuits of self-knowledge, community, and equality. The session understands “the people” as “the ordinary people in a country who do not have special power or privileges” (Merriam-Webster).
Potential paper topics include objects intentionally designed to support social movements or reimagined by users for the same; the role of objects in the “affective or emotional lives” of those “whose class status and marginal political position means that their archival record may resist conventional historical approaches” (Serna); and/or objects that did not belong to everyday people but, nonetheless, impacted their lived experiences. Regarding the latter, a paper might engage objects as maintained by domestic servants, for example.
Papers that ground their meditation in close formal and contextual analyses of a single object are especially encouraged.
This panel seeks papers that explore artistic practices that harness the essential role of community building in the act of making, whether to transform material and conceptual approaches to making art or to create independent platforms that challenge the status quo. We are interested in a long historical horizon of feminist and queer practices, and welcome papers that engage subjects from the 19th century to the present. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, creative expression through domestic crafts, illustrated and photo-collage albums, vernacular photography, art-making workshops aimed at building activist solidarity, and home-grown zines and experimental video. Above all, we welcome papers that attend to the bonds built through creative practices that are accessible, welcoming, and collectively-authored, while also attending to the dynamics of gender, race, and class that inform such practices.
While feminists have introduced important ways to engage with the global archive in recent years, we posit that many innovative approaches remain to be shared. This session will draw together useful new feminist methodologies and theoretical perspectives for employing collections of sources to recuperate women artists’ lives, practices, materials, and/or works.
We preliminarily define an archive as a corpus of information comprising texts, sketchbooks, maps, photographs, documentation of performances, and/or utilitarian objects, but we are open to expanded definitions. Are there bodies of sources not yet viewed as archives that contain untapped resources for illuminating women artists? Are there dissident ways of reading, interpreting, and analyzing the already known materials that can yield new insights? How can data-analysis techniques enrich this process? In what new ways can we queer the archive? What additional roles can contemporary artists play in bringing better understanding to old documents? How can we best locate women in the archives who belonged to marginalized groups, such as Indigenous or “Outsider” artists? How can we radically yet respectfully train these new lenses on records regarding women who did not identify as feminists? What challenges and concerns attend these various approaches?
Proposed by scholars of American art history, this panel seeks to de-center the discussion of media art away from NFTs, AI, and VR towards how marginalized artists within and outside the United States have used technologies to forge communities in a different image. Inversely, how might these communities inform new technologies that resist existing patterns of marginalization?
We invite proposals that take both speculative and historical approaches to these questions. We especially encourage proposals that look beyond the United States, and the use of telecommunications to other modes of techno-community formation.
Topics may include:
- Fashion photography’s many formats, including exhibition prints and illustrated periodicals
- The reception of historic fashion photographs
- Gender, desire, and queer theory in fashion photography
- Fashion photography’s construction of racial identities
- Rethinking authorship and researching collaborative practices
- Global, transnational, or decolonial histories of fashion photography
- The impact of current media platforms and image-making technology upon contemporary fashion photography
Taking a retrospective view on the exhibition, this panel invites papers that consider the shifting contours of the term "landscape" in and around New Topographics. How did this new form of landscape photography reframe the aesthetic category of landscape and set it to different kinds of ideological work? How did it both build upon and push back against previous representations of the "American" landscape? How did the documentary aesthetic and semiotics of objectivity shape the development of landscape photography? And how has landscape photography been taken up as a critical tool for shedding light on social, political, and environmental issues? We are especially interested in papers that situate landscape photography in relation to histories of architecture, urbanization, infrastructure, extraction, and capitalism.
Acknowledging the concerns about potentially romanticizing or trivializing mental health conditions in artistic expressions, which could detract from the actual challenges faced by vulnerable individuals and communities, the session frames madness as both a socio-cultural construct and first-person accounts communicated via art.
Contributions that research mental health portrayals in art, from historical to contemporary contexts, spanning various artistic movements and styles, and analyzing artworks created by individual artists and through community-led projects, are encouraged.
Key Topics:
- Representations of Madness Throughout Art History
- Decolonizing Madness in Art
- Art in Psychiatric Care Settings: From Historical Asylum Art Through Art Therapy to Psychiatry Survivors’ Narratives
- Mad Arts and Outsider Art
- Art Historical Methodologies in Studying Madness
- Neurodiversity and the Arts
- Feminist and Queer Art Theories and Criticism on Gender-Specific Mental Health Conditions
- Contemporary Arts and Explorations in Mental Health
- Curatorial and Exhibition Practices Regarding Mad Arts
- Responsibility and Artistic Freedom in Depictions of Mental Health
- Art as an Agent for Mental Health Understanding and Advocacy
Our session seeks to build on growing interest in this subject by exploring how (and why) Italian Renaissance art was reproduced in the long nineteenth century across different media, among them plaster casts, electrotypes, reproductive prints, photographic reproductions, ceramics, and painted copies. These reproductions were made for a variety of purposes, from tourists' albums intended for intimate domestic settings to full-scale replicas of sculpture displayed in public spaces around the world.
Speakers might explore the politics of reproducing Renaissance art both within Italy and beyond from the fall of Napoleon through the rise of Fascism; the role played by photographic reproductions of paintings and sculpture in debates about authenticity and indexicality; how reproductions of Renaissance art were deployed by increasingly professionalized—and increasingly globalized—art historians, museum curators, and art dealers; and the taste for replicas and reinterpretations of Renaissance art in a wide range of contexts.
There are an estimated 70,000 African objects at the Musee du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, 69,000 at the British Museum, 37,000 at the Welt Museum in Austria, and 75,000 at the Future Humboldt Forum in Germany, as well as 180,000 at the Musee Royal de l' Afrique Centrale in Belgium. However, very few are currently contested. The numerical disparity between contested and non-contested objects makes achieving ethical restitution through object return unrealistic, especially considering the goal of decolonizing museums. The continued presence of thousands of African material cultures in racist anthropological gazes will extend the debasement of African culture and history. Therefore, this panel calls for a broader examination of ethical restitution beyond repatriation, inviting contributions that engage museum decolonization in terms of taxonomy, curation, narration, and public engagement. It invites curators, art historians, and cultural experts to examine strategies for restitution that may include but extend beyond repatriation.
Most successful sculptors hired collaborators to help with the making of their works. However, this did not mean that collaborative work was valued as such: the (male) sculptor was generally considered as the only ‘real’ creator, while the specialists who helped with the various mechanical aspects of art making (such as the production of plaster moulds, the bronze casting and/or the rough cutting) were perceived as “mere assistants”, and their use was sometimes criticized.
Beyond specialist practitioners, this panel also wishes to highlight other forms of hidden labor. We invite papers that draw attention to the domestic, creative and/or technical work of pointers, carvers, moulders, students, models, domestic servants and family members in the sculptor’s studio and household. We will consider questions such as: who made the time-consuming labor of sculpture possible? Who cleaned up all the dust? How should we value the artistic contribution of sculptors’ collaborators? We aim to provoke discussion around the notion of individual authorship, the rethinking of the studio as a space of hybrid (class, gender and race) relations, and the importance of care work within artistic creation.
In contrast to this sense of boundlessness, marine interiors have been theorised in terms of the bourgeois domesticity of the shell (Benjamin 1938), commodity fetishism in the underwater grotto and submarine (Olalquiaga 1999) and hapticality in the slave ship hold (Harney & Moten 2013). Many Indigenous and diasporic communities maintain intimate relationships to the sea, yet European and settler-colonial traditions have viewed it as an unknowable Other. The sublime ‘open sea’ and its seemingly fathomless depths dominate Western art history and marine imagery. Conversely, this session explores the ways oceans have been domesticated, reimagined on a bodily scale and brought inside the dry air of the gallery, whether to be tamed, contained or better understood.
Expanding on the research project Curating the Sea (2017-present), we invite papers examining these themes in art and visual-material culture across eras and regions ahead of our exhibition Sea Inside (Sainsbury Centre, UK, 2025) and with the aim of publishing an anthology.
In today’s artistic production, concerns with anthropogenic climate change, mass migration, and interspecies entanglements are beginning to collide with the question of leaving Earth again. As renewed efforts to colonize the moon, then Mars, come into focus across multiple national and private interests, how do artists respond? Is their role to represent or translate, as NASA previously understood it, or are artists intervening into the environmental, ethical, social, and institutional questions that emerge with contemporary spaceflight? How do conditions of space travel inform art projects? This panel invites papers that elaborate the stakes of artistic engagement with contemporary space travel. Papers may analyze specific artworks or practices, consider art’s institutional role in or responsibility toward spaceflight, or theorize the shift of the relational milieu in which artistic production operates given an extra-planetary context.
This panel considers the utility of dress theory and fashion history to explore the iterative, enmeshed relationships between king and subject, human and animal, animate and inanimate, and to complicate the boundaries between such categories to consider questions such as: how can explorations of intersections between dress and the senses enliven our understanding of the making of Achaemenid art? In what ways does making, wearing, and reproducing ancient dress enable both understanding and re-interpretation of both Achaemenid art and Achaemenid history?
Understanding the ways in which the meanings of dress are socially and culturally dependent, the panel seeks papers that consider questions of dress, iconographies of dress, and their production, together with the social construction of bodies, from any region under the control of or in contact with the Achaemenid system in the period between 550-BCE-330 BCE, and in the preceding and subsequent periods, encompassing both influences upon the Achaemenid period and influences stemming from it. The session similarly welcomes papers exploring these concepts from the perspective of art history, archaeology, experimental archaeology, anthropology, and fashion history, to enable the exploration of productive overlaps between these disciplinary categories.
This lightning round session explores the diverse pedagogical approaches of art and design faculty to Generative AI. It endeavors to understand how Generative AI changed the way we teach and assess art and design students. Presentations must be no longer than 8-10 minutes. This session is open to all art history, fine art, and design faculty. Topics could include alternative assignments that are designed to circumvent Generative AI, assignments and projects that use Generative AI, teaching strategies and policies regarding Generative AI, and case studies of Generative AI use by art and design students.
The quest for objectivity in Western medicine has historically employed techniques that undermine phenomenological knowledge in favor of a mechanically enhanced gaze. Since optical devices contain within them prescriptions for the “right” way to see, professionals working with these images have been regarded as having more of a claim on truth than others. A culturally pervasive belief in technology’s superiority over human perception can account for the readiness with which medical images have been accepted as truthful and necessary. These claims rely on renderings of the human body—from X-rays to ultrasounds to fMRIs—that can be used as a means of policing normality. The scientific knowledge produced by such technologies is socially embedded, frequently replicating structural inequities present in society at large.
This session explores the intersection of medical imaging tools with contemporary art, focusing on how these technologies trouble the boundaries of the human body, claiming to reveal the invisible and represent truth—with personal and political consequences. How have artists encountered and countered the medical gaze in their work? How can we apply visual analysis to images made by medical imaging technologies—what biases are implicit, what perspectives are hidden? What questions can art pose about industrial images that may otherwise seem inscrutable?
This panel seeks to push beyond the traditional dichotomy that funerary art is limited to anticipating an inevitable afterlife or commemorating an absent deceased. Instead, we ask how ancient Mediterranean funerary art socio-materially transformed the dead into something "significantly other." The corpse presents a particular challenge to capacious notions of personhood and to distinctions between bodies and objects. Recently, the materiality of the corpse has emerged as a prime animating principle in treatments of Greek and Roman funerary art; in this panel we seek to further explore the corpse's apparently paradoxical dual status as both object of care and social agent, as dead yet vibrant matter. How can recognizing art's ability to construct non-human personhoods across the geographic, temporal, and cultural range of the ancient Mediterranean open new modes of understanding both broader artistic trends and the contingent, intertwined relationships between the human and the more-than-human world?
This session seeks to historicize, consider theoretical frameworks, and give space and appreciation to the artists willing to provide their own bodies as edifice to the treatment and oppression of marginalized people, asking the question: what does it mean to sacrifice one’s self physically, emotionally, and/or symbolically. We invite submissions that expand upon how artists shape, act upon, and action their own bodies as a form of artistic activism along with those exploring questions addressing the possible ramifications this type of artistic manifestation has on the artists themselves, artistic institutions, and/or canons. Proposals may consider the work of artists from any geographic region worldwide from 1950 to the present.
This session seeks papers that explore the role of the Biennial and the several Whitney Young America exhibits in the artistic careers of American women artists. Alice Forman, a member of the Young America 1960 show at the Whitney Museum, presented outstanding examples of Abstract Expressionism, but afterwards turned to representational art and floral still lifes. On the other hand, the Gullah artist, Verneda Lights, was part of the Occupy Museums Group exhibit of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and has used that exhibit as a launching pad for "Gullah Me," a collection of works of 21st century Gullah art that “pushes back and builds upon the historic aesthetic of Gullah visual art.” How did participation in a Whitney show affect an artist’s future work and success? How did/does the artist herself view her participation in the show? This session welcomes papers on all aspects of women artists’ experiences in the Whitney special exhibitions.
Possible questions are (but not limited to):
- How do styles’ meanings, market values, histories, significations and authority change when styles cross borders?
- What art events (exhibitions, biennales) stimulate styles’ mobility?
- When centers are provincialized, what happens to “universality” and “transcendence” ascribed to centers’ styles?
- Do new traits from places they traverse adhere to styles?
- Do reputations of artists associated with centers change when styles migrate?
- What agency do artworks have to transform styles when introduced into "centers" or “peripheries”?
- How can critical museums display and exhibit styles’ cultural exchange transformations?
- Do political events—colonialism, war, emigration—affect styles’ transmissions and transformations?
We welcome contributions from artists, activists, curators, cultural workers, educators, and scholars from diverse backgrounds who work across different geographical and cultural contexts. Whether it be through analyzing visual representations of protest, investigating the performing body in its potential for resistance, interrogating the challenges of artistic activism, or tracing the lineage of protest movements in the arts, participants are encouraged to approach the theme from a myriad of angles. This session aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary dialog that stimulates critical inquiry into the intersections between art, activism, and social change.
Potential topics may include but are not limited to:
- Contemporary art as a tool for social change
- Aesthetics of resistance and dissent
- Ethics of care and responsibility
- Solidarity and empathy in art-making and spectatorship
- Curatorial activism
- Challenges and limitations of activist art
- Digital protest platforms and networks
- Case studies of specific artists, works, or social movements
1 Katy Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” TIME Magazine, June 9, 2014.
2 David J. Getsy and Che Gossett, “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History,” Art Journal 80, no. 4 (October 2, 2021): 100–115, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2021.1947710.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- The use of ancestral imagery and symbolism in contemporary art
- Intersections between traditional and contemporary artistic practices in visualizing ancestors
- The role of memory, history, and storytelling in shaping artistic representations of ancestors
- Explorations of identity, belonging, and cultural heritage through visual art
- The influence of migration, diaspora, and globalization on artists' engagement with ancestral themes
- The use of technology and new media in visualizing ancestral connections
- The ethical and political implications of representing ancestors in contemporary art
- Comparative studies of artists from different cultural and geographical backgrounds in their approaches to visualizing ancestors.
We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives and encourage submissions from scholars, artists, curators, and cultural practitioners. Papers may address individual artists or artworks, thematic trends, theoretical frameworks, or methodological approaches relevant to the visualization of ancestors in contemporary art. Submissions should engage with critical discourse and contribute to advancing understanding in this growing field of inquiry.
The consequences of these platforms in the artistic practices of artists and the costs of entry have not been fully explored but include self-censorship to meet app store restrictions, licenses, development costs, approval processes, upkeep, risks of obsolescence, archival challenges, possible brigading and review bombing by malicious users, takedown requests by different countries in specific regions, and more.
For this reason, we are proposing to hold a roundtable and invite artists in the field of new media art to discuss the ways these platforms enable and/or hinder their workflow, how they navigate these obstacles, and possible workflows and approaches that minimize the risks inherent in their implementation. Through this, we aim to educate both artists and curators on the challenges and possible methods of navigating through this complex environment.
This session seeks to bring together scholars whose work addresses the epistolary as motif or form in works by women artists. Artists are also invited to contribute their perspective on this topic. We will discuss issues of class, gender and race in relation to these works. In bringing together current research from different geographical contexts and historical periods this session aims at uncovering the yet untold stories of woman and letters in the visual arts.